We invite local, national, and international inhabitants’ organisations, networks, and citizens, who are involved in the livability of the city and are struggling for rights related to habitat, to participate in the second Urban Social Forum (USF) in Naples, Italy, September 3-7, 2012, which will be held as an alternative to UN-Habitat’s World Urban Forum (WUF) 6.

We launch this call, based on the shared principles of the World Social Forum (WSF), convinced on the necessity to continue to develop successful convergences at local, national and international levels, such as: the World Assembly of Inhabitants (Mexico City, 2000), World Social Forum 1 (Porto Alegre, 2001), Urban Social Forum 1 (Rio de Janeiro, 2010), World Assembly of Inhabitants and the Popular Neighbourhood Forum (Dakar, 2011), World Days for the Right to Habitat (October 2011), the People’s Summit (Rio de Janeiro, 2012), and the upcoming World Assembly of Inhabitants during the World Social Forum in 2013.

The second Urban Social Forum in Naples will be held in a beautiful territory rich with resources, however severly damaged, which is an additional reason to build this inclusive space together. Naples will represent another milestone in the consolidation of dialogue and alliances to reach a consensus on a platform and program for common action between urban and rural inhabitant movements and all those organizations, networks and institutions that fight for the rights to housing, land, common goods, and to the city. These rights can only be protected by building more just, democratic and sustainable territories and by defending inhabitants against attacks steming from the crisis caused by neoliberal globalization.

Read more and signe the call here

We need a different approach to tackle the crisis, and a different Europe

Spring 2012. Merkel and Sarkozy rush from summit meeting to summit meeting, in order to save the euro. The yellow press smears the people of Greece. The struggle over a solution to the crisis is intensifying dramatically: by early 2013, an authoritarian-neoliberal alliance of business lobby groups, the financial industry, the EU Commission, the German government, and other exporting countries, hopes to rush the ‛Fiscal Treaty that has just been concluded in Brussels through the national parliaments. The Fiscal Treaty prescribes an antisocial policy of cuts, and includes penalties for countries that oppose this policy. Thus the Fiscal Treaty restricts democratic self-determination even further. It is the momentary climax of an authoritarian trend in Europe.

We are fed up with these unsocial and antidemocratic policies, and with the racist slander campaign against the people of Greece. Instead, we should talk about the inhuman consequences of these policies. We should talk about Europe’s authoritarian turn, and low German wages as a cause of the crisis. We should talk about the untouched fortunes of the few, and the sufferings of the many. We should talk about our admiration for the resistance and solidarity among the Greek people. Let us demand what should go without saying: real democracy and a good life in dignity for everybody – in Europe and elsewhere.

Read and sign the call here

The financial crisis is a systemic crisis that emerges in the context of global crises (climate, food, energy, social…) and of a new balance of power. It results from 30 years of transfer of income from labour towards capital. This tendency should be reversed. This crisis is the consequence of a capitalist system of production based on laissez-faire and fed by short term accumulation of profits by a minority, unequal redistribution of wealth, an unfair trade system, the perpetration and accumulation of irresponsible, ecological and illegitimate debt, natural resource plunder and the privatization of public services. This crisis affects the whole humanity, first of all the most vulnerable (workers, jobless, farmers, migrants, women…) and Southern countries, which are the victims of a crisis for which they are not at all responsible.

• Call for the signature of NGOs, trade unions and social movements Belem, February the 1st of 2009 : http://www.choike.org/campaigns