WORLD ASSEMBLY OF URBAN INHABITANTS

Make our voices heard
Rethinking the city from the grassroots

Mexico City, 2-6 October 2000

Call to Action

Superbarrio Gómez

We are the inhabitants of the world, the people who make the cities possible. The ones who struggle to conquer the future for all, excluding no one. Today our cities, sometimes dirty and uncombed, call on us to think how to make them beautiful, happy and for the people.

It is our vocation to transform. We have built grand monuments and sometimes we don't believe that we ourselves have opened the great avenues to justice, well-being, dignity and peace. When we come to understand that we are not the owners of anything, we will give everything for all.

We are the millions who have not waited for a divine or philanthropic will to solve our problems. We have come to the old Tenochtitlan (name of the city located here up to the Spanish colonialization) with the voice of our people. We have come from 35 countries of the world: 13 African, 12 Latin American and Caribbean, 5 European, 3 Asian and 2 North American countries, with our dreams, with our arms outstretched in brotherhood and sisterhood for solidarity, in hope and in struggle, to make this new millennium a world where all worlds have a place.

The owners of the money and the lies have wreaked havoc in our home. They have multiplied poverty with their economic models, they have attacked Mother Nature, they have submitted the weak governments to their interests. They have fomented the extermination of the men and women who they classify as disposable, as statistics of the millions who are leftovers in the world, who are in the way, who don't consume what they produce. They fear us when we come together, when we organize, when we fight together, when we are - as Benedetti says - many more than two.

In the neighborhoods, barrios, favelas, ghettos and other settlements, we build the city every day. We build it as we imagine it, respecting life, side-by-side and collectively. With those who with us want their piece of the city, to improve it, from the bottom up and including everyone. To nurture it, to dress it up for parties and enjoy it like we enjoy our children and our grandparents. A people that struggles is a free people. Our struggle is for a city of freedom, tolerant, alive, ours, everyone's.

Today we are quickening our step. We must take home good news: we will continue forward, we are more, we are from all parts of the world, we have come together to reaffirm that the path is correct, that there are still many obstacles but that we are stronger, more united, and this march forward will not stop.

We aren't the only ones. Urban inhabitants contribute what we know how to do: work. We join the laborers, the teachers, the human rights and environmental activists, the indigenous, the peasants, the gays and lesbians, the democratic local governments, the NGOs, the urbanists, all of us who want the city.

The globalizers of injustice and inequality have begun to understand that they will no longer have their party in peace. In Seattle and Washington, in Melbourne and Prague, the excluded are joining forces, and their voice is one: NO MORE.

In the neoliberal language, they call us globalphobics. They should also call us exclusionphobics, povertyphobics, corruptionphobics, and however else they want. We are the people.