From Ballymun to Los Angeles - public housing residents meet at the Project Arts Theatre

Peripheral Vision: Community at the Urban Margins.
Saturday, 28 June 2003 2 – 4 p.m.
Project, 39 East Essex Street, Temple Bar

This forum tomorrow is one of a series of collective reflections that will take place in Dublin and Los Angeles between June and October 2003.

The purpose of this project is to foster a dialogue between public housing residents in Ballymun, Dublin and Pico Aliso, Los Angeles. Residents from the Ballymun Women’s Resource Centre and LA’s Union de Vecinos will share experiences and histories, focusing on urban geography and the impact of grass-roots leadership on urban regeneration.

On the global front, institutions like the IMF, World Bank and WTO enforce a variety of economic and social regimes – structural adjustment programs, austerity measures, and debt servicing – on the underdeveloped world. Meanwhile, in the overdeveloped world, governments enforce public sector austerity, privatization and budget cuts in an effort to shift public money to increasing corporate monopolization and militarism.

The situation in Dublin at Ballymun is no doubt equally bound up with global developments. The rise of the maquiladora economy (the myth of the “Celtic Tiger”) in Ireland has created conditions of public financing not seen before. While there have been many benefits of this new economic boom in Ireland, the costs have been equally dramatic. At the center of the development in Ballymun is the notion that residents are finally seeing promises made real. The regeneration is very much the result of forty years of activism and organizing in the Ballymun community.

Come along tomorrow (Saturday) at 2pm to the Project Arts Theatre to listen and contribute to this forum.