Boston, the city that hosts many of the most important universities in the world, and the headquarters of financial corporations that pull the strings of the world-economy, has today the highest income divide of the US: in Roxbury, Dorchester or East Boston, many miles from Harvard or MIT, thousands of latinos, afro-americans or caribbeans live in conditions of poverty not equalled in any city of Western Europe. Invariably, they are those who are hit by the evictions, the debt load, the expulsions. City Life / Vida Urbana since the 1970s keeps building a network of mutual support among those who suffer the consequences of these housing policies, also through the use of theater, rituals, symbols. Few know that Boston already suffered a great wave of evictions in the 1950s, with the complete demolition of the West End; today, in neighborhoods like Jamaica Plain or East Boston a battle is fought against real estate speculation, the same anti-social force that around 2007 foreclosed an american for each 20, and that keeps evicting people from the neighborhoods, both in the center and in the periphery.
- Stefano Portelli, “City Life: de afectados a activistas” [in spanish] , en Diagonal #266, march 17-30, 2016, p.16-17. [PDF][a video]
- City Life’s webpage and fbpage :: “Our stories“, of evictions and struggles :: City Life through theatre :: Just Cause Eviction Campaign :: http://weshallnotbemoved.net/ :: http://righttothecity.org/
- Histories of real estate speculation: 20 families from Salvador are evicted from East Boston by a landlord that omits maintainance on his building, CLVU organizes a march and pushes for a new law :: in Fenway the neighbors hold a funeral for the neighborhood, that suffers Berklee College of Music‘s greed for housing.
- On the destruction of the West End: Thomas H. O’Connor, Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950 to 1970. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.
- More stuff: Greg Jobin-Leeds, AgitAte, When We Fight We Win: Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World, The New Press, 2015 :: Isaac William Martin, Christopher Niedt, Foreclosed America, Stanford University Press, 2015 :: Prole.info,The Housing Monster, Oakland: PM Press, 2012.