Recht auf Stadt Forum 2020

What is the Right to the City Forum?

Debates about the “city for everyone” and the Right to the City need to be held intersectionally. Through an exchange with activists from all over the German-speaking area (and beyond) we want to strengthen the local struggles while attempting to intensify the pressure on the nationwide housing politics through sub-regional cooperation.

Who are we?

We are a group of people that are connected with Weimar in various ways. We are located in social emancipatory movements and understand the Right to the City intersectionally. A majority of us is organized in the Kollektiv Raumstation. When we talk about a “we”, we also mean a growing urban political movement, that we invited to Weimar in May 2020. Due to the Coronavirus situation, we decided to hold the forum decentralized and online (see statement).

The Right to the City Forum 2020

City for everybody instead of rent insanity and suppression: With this request we were able to produce high visibility and political pressure as Right to the City movement in the last yeas. Reasonable political adaptations happened through our intervention – through demonstrations, occupation, negotiations full of effort, referendums and much more. But the struggle for housing is not over yet: This is why the 6th nationwide Right to the City Forum offers a platform for the exchange of experience between the urban political activists. This year’s forum ties in with well-tried topics while widening the debate about the Right to the City simultaneously through with further perspectives:

Because the Right to the City is much more. It is the Right to the City independent from origin, skin color or religion. Especially with an eye on the power relations in Thüringen it is obvious: the Right to the City must be anti-Fascist and unlimited. It is the right to a city, that is not located on a deserted planet, but a city with an ecological sustainable relation to the rural, where sustainable ways of life are possible and environmental justice applies to everybody. The Right to the City is a right to a feminist city, where care work is appreciated and equally distributed, where social relations are not dominated by utilitarian logic.

An anti-racist, queer-feminist and carbon neutral city is only possible, when city and urbanity do not offer the possibility and the compulsion to earn money with it. We want to continue the debate about forward-looking strategies of a Right to the City for everybody and propose the question of the system.