Blogs

If you and your community were promised a park, and got excited about the effect some trees and shared space might have on your overcrowded low income area where clashes with police are common…

And then it turned out some deals had been done and your ‘park’ is now going to be a multi-storey concrete car ‘park’…

You’d be forgiven for being angry.

You’d be right to want to do something.

You’d be justified in taking action.

And because, we’re talking about Athens, in recent months, you might
not be surprised if it ended in violence.

But, it didn’t.

A few Saturdays ago, I walked into a park filled with people; Kids playing on handmade slides and see-saws, couples canoodling on makeshift benches, boys drinking beer making each other laugh, and people gardening, planting, painting, tending tenderly their own park.

A few Saturdays before, a community had marched into the site, with bolt cutters, to demand access they had been expecting to be granted.

When they learnt the site wasn’t to become a park for the people, instead, a building site for a business, they took matters into their own hands.

Over the weekend, the community stopped traffic, transporting plants from their homes on borrowed wheelbarrows (waved silently along by silently supportive police), arriving with sledgehammers to reach soil and seed planters to make a garden in Athens.

When the builders arrived (late) real people had a real park, a transformation took place, and with birds singing in trees and couples holding hands in the sun, the disappointed builders had to slope off begrudgingly dragging their pneumatic drills behind them.

How often are we promised a ‘park’, only to end up with a car park, and how often would we stand up for ourselves and take it back?

If developers had tried to build on Grange Park, when that was a space that mattered to me, we'd have stopped trying to get off with Debbie Castle and thrown our empty bottles of 20/20 at them. Vive la revolution!!

A report out from PriceWaterhouseCooper this week reveals that ONLY TWO of the worlds top 100 companies, believe reducing biodiversity (raping the planet for shareholder profit) is a ‘strategic threat to their business’ (a problem for them).

Another report published this week, by The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversityshows “on average one third of Earths habitat’s have been damaged by humans”, and warns that despite most  of us admitting our lives depend on the environment, “the destruction of nature will still continue on a large scale”

We’ve all been promised parks, we all deserve parks, in whatever form, but some people are always going to want to build car parks on them.

Whether you prefer a seed planter to a sledgehammer, whether you think its better to work within the system or against the system, pick your weapons, because one of these days it’s going to be a park near you.

“When they kick out your front door, How you gonna come? With your hands on your head, Or on the trigger of your gun?”
Guns Of Brixton, The Clash, 1979.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiQoq-wqZxg]

This blog also appears at http://samconniff.wordpress.com/