A great experience was had at the all to brief Colchester Radical Centre! We lasted a few weeks! (And it shall be reborn!)

As well as bringing a bunch of people together and creating a free space,- a cafe and meeting point, - it has also began to focus public attention on corporate property speculators who are buying up loads of local land and buildings to 're-develop'into luxury executive apartments.

This campaign could run and run, defending our towns old buildings, playing fields, woodlands and riverbanks from the corporate vandals. This can reach out to people, and help root a social centre in the community.

For a lot of people squatting a social centre was a new and exciting experience. This sort of thing rarely happens in small towns outside London. The good thing was to see young people initiate a project and grow in confidence and experience by doing it for themselves and know it can be done again!

This was a social centre to build up a local community of resistance, rooted in the daily life of our town.

It is important to keep decisions equal and collective.

This worked most of the time! Although we did have the arrival of a very experienced older "proffessional" squatter claiming to represent a radical social centre in London, and who was a little bit stubborn and domineering.

Often, younger people who were just finding their feet had their ideas stifled by his cries of "we do it like this in London!", and "were far more radical there!" etc. Fortunately, although a few were put off by this, most stayed involved and inspired, and our numbers grew.

Its important that everyone gets an equal say, and a sense of collective power and responsibility is nurtured. What to do with a particular individual such as this who wouldn't listen to the decisons of the local collective, and insisted on trying to impliment his own decisons about the building against everybody elses will? In general the young squatters responded with with patience, resolve and humour, and it was treated as useful learning experince in itself!

This sort of problem is excacerbated by the question of time committments. Most of the local collective have jobs and/or small children, and so could only make daily visits to the building for meetings, cooking meals, painting and rennovation duties, campaigning etc.

However, people are also needed to occupy the building full time. But if a person is a full time proffessional squatter or 'caretaker', they sometimes act like they should have more say, because they have stayed there all the time.

The project was to a certain extent inspired by the social centres in London, and also from visits to social centres in Italy. However, it important to let a social centre grow according to its local needs and conditions, and not to follow some pre-existing formula.

But by and large it has been an excellent experience.

A whole number of people have been inspired and motivated, and a few have referred to it as life changing. We also got positive coverage on the front page of the local papers. Everyone around here knows about it!

People have seen that in the centre of their town another way is possible, an alternative to the power of the corporations.

Lots more of this can happen, along with new things we haven't even thought of yet! Lets do it!

And in Argentina too - latest social centre news - 4th Sept 2002 - global inspiration!

Assemblies Okupas

From December we began to see a new form of political intervention, after the cacerolazos are born the assemblies, soon the inter-barrio assemblies, and now the phenomenon of the "assemblies okupas".

In the heat of economic and political crisis the search of collective solutions is urgent. Little by little the necessity was growing to create our own spaces and to solve the serious problem of housing.

The housing problem has been born with the development of the cities. Today this problem has reached unthinkable levels.

This is why the popular organizations have taken the initiative for the occupations, reclaiming inhabitable spaces in disuse.

Although this is a recurrent practice in some of the cities of the country, today we consider the occupation as a structural project, to develop a political culture and to guarantee the right to a roof, raising a radical questioning of private property.

The idea is to recover spaces and put them at the service of the community. In these spaces cultural experiences are developed alternative to the State and the private Institutions.

In Buenos Aires, with the growth of the inter-barrial assemblies the opportunity has grown to fortify this project. In these last three weeks they took more than fifteen places.

From that day in March when the neighbors of Villa Urquiza said "Corto, you don't know us" and recovered the public space in which the Corto supermarket chain tried to construct a parking lot, until today, the occupations folllowed one another.

The assemblies need physical spaces to develop activities
and projects and in all the districts there are abandoned spaces, rubbish dumps, rat holes. Always there is a lawyer at hand to help with legal questions. The rest is subject to collective decision..

When within a few hours (sometimes minutes) of the occupation, the police arrive and request to speak with the person in charge, the answer of twenty, thirty or fifty members of an assembly-okupas is invariable: "we are all people in charge".

The support which the assemblies offered in the attempts at evictions that took place during the week demonstrated that collectively they are prepared to defend the places which they won for people with housing problems, as they did with the occupied factories.

Occupation photos with Spanish texts