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Where is the place of grassroots in the city?
Levente Polyák

The issue of decentralized planning is gaining ground in the discourse on cities. Since the 1960’s, the theories and writings questioning the supremacy of the planner have increasingly been treating communal participation and civic engagement as fundamental for a smoothly operating city. NGOs and communal grassroots initiatives are essential to this kind of participatory practice and engagement. This chapter contains interviews with representatives of groups and organisations that endeavour to criticize, correct and counterbalance certain outcomes of large-scale urban restructuring, aware and in protection of local contexts.

The interviews often bring up issues of participation, communal media and organization. These dimensions are closely related. The development of communal media to provide information for the residents is a factor of special importance to urban movements and grassroots initiatives, which enforce the interests of groups and individuals who are devoid of direct power. A certain extent of organization is an essential condition for establishing communal media. This organization is, however, itself based on a formal or informal exchange of information as well as personal and professional relationships. These media complement one another, and as such, optimally reach diverse segments of the public.

The sustainability of urban movements and activist initiatives is a different problem. Since the life-span of these is closely connected to the duration of the problem they are supposed to fi x , nothing guarantees the sustainability of their movements and media, let alone their influence . Awareness of this fact has led the editors of this volume to echo the question: ‘Is there a place for grassroots in the city?’ Or rather: ‘Where is the place of grassroots in the city?’

Interview abstracts

1.Benedek Jávor
Benedek Jávor works at Védegylet Association, one of Hungary’s most prominent NGOs. This prominence is due to the organisation’s constant presence in public debates over issues of environment and urban development, its conscientious use of the media, and its commitment to active participation in protests against certain development plans, judged to serve particular economic interests rather than community purposes.

In this interview, Benedek Jávor talks about opportunities of the civic society to actively participate in urban development issues. He underlines that the Hungarian legal system prescribes certain obligations for municipalities to actively engage local communities. However, this obligation is most often taken as a bureaucratic obstacle to overcome: municipalities use a multiplicity of maneuvers to avoid listening to contesting ideas, aiming to bring their will about. It would be exaggerating to say that the NGO community is well established and works effi ciently in order to control development and emphasize local and community needs. There are certain segments of the NGO sphere that are well organised, such as the green movement, but they constitute a rather closed intellectual framework, which is not yet able to communicate with broader sections of the society.

In Jávor’s understanding, the city government in the last 17 years has not followed a welldefined , coherent development strategy. Initiatives were contradictory, thus causing more problems than benefi ts for the local communities. He describes the present governing paradigm as a belief in the ‘city-machine’, in contrast to the paradigm of the ‘living city’. The former seeks for technological solutions for professional dilemmas, while the latter seeks for compromises between a variety of values, lifestyles and needs.

2.Gabó Bartha
Gabó Bartha recently founded an activist group, or, to put it differently, a ‘group of residents’ as she calls it. The aim of the group ‘The Hunyadi Square Market – Our Treasure’ (KAP-HT) is to preserve the open-air market at Hunyadi Square from being shut down. The main problem is the lack of information concerning the development. One needs to make a considerable effort to get acquainted with the details of the municipality’s plan while they should have been distributed long before the beginning of the project, and be easily accessible for locals.

The KAP-HT works on raising public awareness to the issue of the disappearance of openair markets from the centre of the city. The group emphasizes in its materials the social and logistical importance of the open-air market: it is both a meeting place and a source of affordable, healthy food. Approaching the local community is not an obvious task: residents do not believe that they have a voice in decision-making; the heritage of decades of political totalitarianism is a general inability to express one’s interests and to exercise one’s rights.

Gabó explains in the interview her motivations to start searching for news about the planned changes. She met the members of the group through a fl exible , dynamic network of people interested in urban issues in general and market development in particular. The organisational tasks are shared between the activists: the structure of the group is developed according to skills and competences, not along hierarchies.

3. Knut Hildebrandt

Knut Hildebrandt is editor of the scheinschlag magazine, published monthly in Berlin. The magazine served as the voice of social movements in early 1990s East-Berlin. As a medium of the inseparable ‘off-culture’ and ‘off-politics’ of that period, scheinschlag was for long a perfect example for a sustainable, community-driven grassroots local newspaper.

The newspaper, like any movement, has changed signifi cantly throughout the years. The changes in the paper’s centre of attention corresponded to the shift in the communities’ interests . In the early years, urban development and restructuring were the main concerns, which directly affected large groups of people living in the Eastern districts. This focus of interest was followed by more social issues, related to tenement contracts, health service or unemployment benefi ts.

The newspaper was fi rst fi nanced by advertisements. Later the offi cial job centres paid the salaries of the editors, and when this possibility vanished, scheinschlag started to produce the municipalities’ information leafl ets on ‘Sanierungsgebiete’ (regeneration areas), which was able to support the rest of the newspaper. However, as urban regeneration is over its peak , and the ‘Sanierungsgebiete’ are disappearing, scheinschlag is forced to urgently look for new ways of backing its functioning, while temporarily halting its publication.

Conclusion

As seen in the interviews, informing the public by establishing urban community media, is a crucial factor in the success of urban movements and grassroots organisations. Nevertheless, as the life-cycles of movements are related to the evolution of the problems they are dealing with, their sustainability is not guaranteed by any power. This fact provokes this textbook to pose the question: ‘Is there a place for grassroots in the city?’ Or: ‘Where is the place of grassroots in the city?’