Founded in the fall of 1993, the neighbourhood newspaper, Place Publique was first published during January/February 1994. It was started by C1ement Schreiber and myself and was first circulated, door-to-door, in Montreal's downtown neighbourhood of Milton-Park. This neighbourhood was so named by the Milton-Park Citizens Committee because at the north-eastern corner of these two streets (Milton street and Park avenue) were to be found the offices of the real-estate speculators who wanted to demolish a six block area of solid Victorian-style housing to build a complex of apartments, condos, a hotel, office buildings and the like to make more profits. An additional reason was because the citizens had a sit-in occupation of these same offices in 1971 to dramatize their desire to save their neighbourhood. Some 63 citizens were arrested during this demonstration and jailed. Months later we were on trial before a jury, and everyone was found not guilty of disturbing the public peace and public mischief (an offence that can carry a jail term of up to five years).
Some ten years later, continuing the community grass-roots and political work throughout this period, the largest portion of this threatened neighbourhood was in fact saved, totally renovated and transformed into the largest cooperative housing project in North America, seated on a land trust where the land is owned in common to prevent all forms of speculation. It was a natural occurrence that the neighbourhood newspaper Place Publique was born in such a neighbourhood in 1994.
Place Publique was published every two months, gradually it became a monthly covering the entire municipal electoral district of Jeanne Mance. In September 1997 it began publishing as not simply a neighbourhood newspaper but as a community newspaper appearing every two weeks and also covering the municipal electoral district of Mile-End. By 1998/99 it covered the downtown core of the city as well, always being distributed door to door as well as in various stores. The purpose of the newspaper was to engage citizens to learn from experience, to become self-conscious about living in particular neighbourhoods and in a particular city, Montreal. The purpose was also to have everyone involved and the readers to look outward to the municipal, social and political environment as a whole. To inform and educate about civic public life, democratic citizenship and the politics of citizenship more then the politics of the established political institutions. To discuss the parameters of neighbourhood power, the decentralization of power from City Hall toward the neighbourhoods and thus to take the high road towards direct democracy. All this while developing our understanding of social and urban ecology and what needs to be done not only to have a democratic public life, a democratic city but an ecological or green city as well. Two sides of the same coin.
The penultimate purpose of Place Publique was to help create a public place or space were citizens can actually meet to discuss, debate, argue, and decide on questions that are the most important to them and to society. Thus the community newspaper organized a series of citizens' assemblies for this purpose. These meetings discussed issues that are rarely addressed elsewhere, and may one day become the routine agenda items of Montreal's neighbourhood councils. At the centre of a public place are politics, the essence of community. But what do we mean by politics?
Politics Versus Statecraft
At present local government depends on the delegation of power: the citizens delegate their theoretical sovereignty to elected representatives, and these representatives delegate a part of this power to the administrative apparatus. Any political system which functions mostly in this way removes power from the vast majority of its people. The tendency of political institutions to exist for their own sake, supported by technocratic structures and large electronic media, accentuates this confiscation. At the same time societies are becoming more complex, and each decision made can affect the present and future lives of everyone. Politics in contrast to Statecraft must take into account this contradiction between a 'representative' State and direct democracy, that is the necessity of direct citizen participation in the affairs of the community from neighbourhood to city. Politics means the sustaining of public places were citizens meet and discuss ways of transcending Statecraft by acting upon changes to existing State institutions and bureaucracies including political parties and increasing direct or participatory democracy at all levels, in ways as yet unimagined. Above all, when there are vibrant public places there is an ongoing fight to prevent politics becoming a profession for some. In a complex society a horizontal politics means that there will be different roles for different people. This need not imply that the elected person from a community to city council need make all the decisions and that being informed as to how decisions are made and improvements advanced makes for a profession, setting the elected apart from citizens.
What has to be fully restored is a community political life along with what now exists as community activities. These still remain alive in a rich variety of citizen associations in most neighbourhoods. This restoration, deeply rooted in the history of cities, includes citizen committees of all sorts, public fora, large or small for face-to-face civic debates and action. Central to this process is defining anew citizenship.
We should refuse to be referred to as "the population", or "the masses", or "clients and consumers of services", or "taxpayers". We should insist on being referred to as citizens of our city, with expanding rights and duties. Not only deep changes in political structures and social relations are needed, but in citizen consciousness as well. Indeed, the very character of the individual citizen must also be part of this process of change. Municipal democracy in our public places will remain hollow unless we place the highest values on our active, responsible participation in the management of our common affairs. Politics as defined here are too important to be left to professional politicians. Politics must become again the preoccupation of every citizen. The neighbourhood and the city is the arena of first choice. Every citizen is potentially competent to participate directly in public politics. There is a character structure to a participating citizen and thus to democratic politics which reflects personal strengths and civic virtues. At the citizens' assemblies in neighbourhoods, with a democratic political culture, in a city that has a similar drift, deliberations will be rational, decisions will be made peacefully in mutual respect for differences of opinion.
The Evolving Tradition of Citizenship and Community
Together with the evolving concept of civic society the raising and answering of questions related to the long tradition of community as a partnership of free citizens is at the core of our concern. It is this concern which must fill any public place. The debate around all the aspects of this concern is the flip side of the alienation and frustration found ever growing in contemporary liberal democracies.
The appeal for a renewal and deepening of the meaning of citizenship is therefore not surprising. Citizenship, as the legal and social framework for individual autonomy and political democracy, has been central to human history since the days when these debates first arose in the agora of Athens. This long bridge from the political and civic self-consciousness of the citizens of the ancient Greek cities through the Roman period, the French Revolutions and Enlightenment brought forward to our times, shows that citizenship was repeatedly redefined so that there are now many citizenship discourses. It is even a growing preoccupation of the contemporary Left as it adjusts its intellectual traditions to examining conflict, oppression and resistance in a new light.
From within liberal democracy, the theoretical renewal began with John Rawls's examination of liberal individualism (A Theory of Justice, 1971). The debates of the proper nature of citizenship extends into communitarian, social democratic, nationalist, feminist, multi-culturalist and anarchist critiques and alternative definitions.
Citizenship was, since the time of the ancient Greeks, and much more broadly today, a double process of emancipation. First, it was the liberation of a portion of humanity from tribal loyalties and its fusion into a voluntary civic community. Citizenship can become again the legal foundation and social glue for the renewal of community. It is founded on the notion that a human being is a creature naturally formed to live a political hence a community life, and that this is what it means to be a human being and a citizen. Second, it was and is a process that transcends the sphere of necessity in which we work to materially survive with our families and friends, and moves us into the sphere of freedom where the practice of democracy, as a social, rational and moral deliberation over our common future, is its own goal and reward. It is a process of liberation from the private sphere of our homes into the public place of community and political life. This process has value in itself, and so democratic citizenship in a community and city is not just a means of being freer, it is the way of being freer itself.
Community and Citizenship
In a community what is shared is an identity, originating in part from self-consciousness, common history, or language or continued occupation of a commonly defined space. Political solidarity may result from a shared identity, which in part is self-defined and chosen. The transfer is not automatic.
We express in our daily lives something about our roots, or about our cultural inheritance. Roots are experienced differently, and cultural inheritance is variously interpreted, we do not necessarily say anything about the commitment which a political identity involves as it is self-consciously recognized, acknowledged, and taken on. It is this choosing of a political identity that gives rise to the solidarity and cohesion of a political community. And it is as citizens in a participatory democracy that we have real choices in life.
However, we live in an economy that is tearing away at citizenship in the meaningful sense suggested here. There are economic forces today, not of our choosing, that undermine in direct and indirect ways any semblance of community. This is a large part of the difficulty we face in any attempt to make the practice of democratic and participatory citizenship in a political community meaningful in today's neo-liberal capitalist society. Yet, over the past two hundred years and more, many peoples -- through incremental changes, rebellions, revolutions, wars of liberation and independence movements -- sought to forge new identities, and to give political expression to identities that they advanced notwithstanding significant economic forces standing in their way. This is one of the subversive lessons of history for the project of a political community. Once the process of transcendence from the private place to the public place begins only circumstances and determination will decide when community will reach its fullest expression and maturation.
It is not politicians or political theorists that will help the growth of the practice of citizenship. It is also not a natural practice for people. It occurs through a long process of education in the broadest sense, an education that needs to be supported and reinforced by a series of practices conducive to sustaining the civic ideal. This means community newspapers, community radio stations, community TV stations, and community organizations that include the civic ideal of participatory citizenship in their objectives. The practice of citizenship means that much more of one's life is lived publicly than is now our experience. It is not that one has no private life, it is rather that to be a citizen is to be involved in your community and city. Political activity takes place in a public place.
Citizenship is not to be confused with humanitarian altruism. People may give blood, donate to worthy causes, help the many disadvantaged in our society. But citizenship is more than this basic humaneness, it is more about helping shape a community's common goals, choosing them and committing oneself to them. Citizens are involved in more than charity, they are involved in enlarging the sphere of social justice and freedom.
Community is not the sum total of discrete activities by individuals, but what consciously and intentionally citizens do as, a result of rational deliberation, notwithstanding the fact that they are all different and autonomous and may genuinely disagree. They have to hold each other in mutual respect. Political judgment, thus, is that capacity of individual citizens exercised by them as participants of a community. It is the constitutive tissue of community or the constitution of a community. Acting, citizens use their judgment in deliberating in matters of common interest. These judgments are often those that re-enforce a community's identity.
Recognizing the large difficulties before such a practice of citizenship is a necessity and basic realism. People lack the opportunities and they lack the appropriate attitudes of mind, that is motivation to get involved easily. The needed resources can be defined here as all those means of empowering individuals to be active participants in their community and a responsible and responsive local media is a beginning. Civil, political, legal and economic means are also needed. However without health, education, and a reasonable income which adds up to having some extra time outside work, individuals do not have the possibilities to practice citizenship. Such rights and resources have to be secured for all citizens, for democratic citizenship is an egalitarian practice. Such goals must be on the agenda of social movements, community organizations and urban reform Political organizations.
Merely to empower individuals in this way however is not enough to enhance the practice of citizenship. There have to be the arenas, agoras, community centres, the public places where potentially everyone can take part, where everyone can be equally involved and respected. However we know all too well that in our type of society this means the decentralization of political and economic power. Not everything can or needs to be decentralized, this question is a matter of analysis and debate, but for sure much more can be decentralized than is thought possible or is usually permitted. What is to be sought is the creation and widening of opportunities for responsible self-government of citizens. Self-government means those decisions which have an effect on every person within a community, and which is open to change by collective action on the part of its members. We cannot have an informal extra-legal arrangement for very long, it will collapse in short order under present circumstances. In due course it must be a legal part of a civic constitution. The public place must have its recognized community institutions, and these should be decision-making neighbourhood councils and citizens' assemblies across democratic and ecological cities.
Empowerment and opportunity together are not enough. What is also needed is a particular attitude of mind and form of character which prompts individuals to recognize what their duties and rights are as citizens, and which motivates them to apply them with rigor in a civil manner. One of the problems to overcome in a community is that of the parasite or 'free-rider'. The variety and diversity of persons which gives dynamism to the political community cannot be carried on so far that certain individuals who are not mentally or physically handicapped, or whether from inclination or eccentricity, renege on their duties as citizens, for this is destructive of the community's constitution. The solution is in part education. Citizens are students all their lives, and education in the sense of building the moral and political character of individuals for a willing engagement in the practice of citizenship in a democratic city never ceases.
No amount of political participation and economic democracy, no level of civic education will suffice for the practice of citizenship in a political community -- unless the external covenant becomes an internal one. For this dialectic to unfold a public place is needed and this must easily be found in the community and the city.
Thus Place Publique the community newspaper is guided by the philosophy and politics of social ecology which sees in this perspective the basis of a new politics, a politics which eschews reliance on the State in favour of the empowerment of urban communities. In social ecology, the municipality is theorized as the natural locus for social, political and environmental change and the neighbourhood, the city or town, are conceived as the base for a new democratic politics. We conclude with the insightful words of the founder of social ecology, Murray Bookchin who puts it thus:
"The municipality ... is the most immediate political arena of the individual, the world is literally a doorstep beyond the privacy of the family and the intimacy of persona; friendships. In that primary political arena, where politics should be conceived in the Hellenic sense of literally managing the polis or community, the individual can be transformed from a mere person into an active citizen, from a private being into a public being. Given this crucial arena that literally renders the citizen a functional being who can participate directly in the future of society, we are dealing with a level of human interaction that is more basic (apart from the family itself) than any level that is expressed in representative forms of governance, where collective power is literally transmuted into power embodied by one or a few individuals. The municipality is thus the most authentic arena of public life, however much it may have been distorted over the course of history."