Free Spaces
Social centers provide a place to socialize in a bar, cafe or music venue. They also provide access to alternative, hard to access information through projects such as libraries, infoshops, film nights and talks.
The projects are usually run on an entirely voluntary basis by the people involved, who are neither charity workers nor social workers. The projects are run in the spirit of co-operation, solidarity and mutual aid. Other activities organized include events, meetings, exhibitions, classes and workshops on a range of topics.
Whilst every individual case is different, most centers are run on the basis of non-hierarchical consensus decision-making. Most centers lean to the left politically, including anarchist, autonomist or communist viewpoints. Centers tend to adopt an ethical vegan philosophy, whilst accepting that individuals involved may have differing personal lifestyles. Individual are often artivists.
Writer-activist Naomi Klein reports that many "Social centres are abandoned buildings - warehouses, factories, military forts, schools - that have been occupied by squatters and transformed into cultural and political hubs, explicitly free from both the market, and from state control."
Read more about this topic: Social Centres
Famous quotes containing the words free and/or spaces:
“Shall the Spring dawn, and she still clad in smiles,
And with an unscathed brow,
Rest in the strong arms of her palm-crowned isles,
As fair and free as now?
We know not; in the temple of the Fates
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—Henry Timrod (1828–1867)
“In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women.... The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: “the contemplation of ruins,” Erikson observes, “is a masculine specialty.””
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)