38
I don't think those places are an antidote for extremism, they just help people find their allies.
I think they can help in a small way. If you're only ever meeting people online, you'll rarely face consequences for poor behavior or see people facing consequences for their behavior.
That being said, finding allies is probably a bigger aspect here. Where I live there's fairly few of those spaces, especially for non-electoral leftists but that also means the ones we have are always filled with different groups and individuals that might otherwise not have met. This leads to more cooperation and understanding.
Antifascist organizing is extremely difficult without spaces to organize in. So yeah, "just helping people find allies" is essential to make that happen. I say this as someone who spent the first several months of organizing against Trump just looking for places to have meetings.
The closing of public places is a real trend, and not just with the closing of 'bistro'. Many places people could freely gather publicly are vanishing. As mentioned in another comment already, and I agree: this weakens society dramatically.
I live in Paris and have been for decades, I've seen how the city has changed making it always harder to be outside in the city (it's also harder to 'be inside', to own a place to live in Paris, but that's not the point).
I mean, in a city we can go to many places, obviously. Say, we can to work and back to home, do errands, go to art gallery or to a doctor, and so on. As for Paris, It's also as touristic as it ever was, with many places to go visit and to take pictures of. But there is less and less places where people can just be together. Even public benches are less and less usable, making it less an option to use them to meet and/or to start chatting with other people. The street is turning into a mere mean of communication, to move from point A to point B, and quickly stops being the place where people used to live. It's even more obvious in Paris, which used to not be like that much.
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
38 points (100.0% liked)
Solarpunk Urbanism
3306 readers
72 users here now
A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
Checkout these related communities:
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS