The city is a battleground: everything is getting more pristine, surveilled, expensive. Global players, investors and real estate companies maximize profits and the state offers a hand. Capitalist gentrification upholds current power relations – it reproduces and cements patriarchal and colonial structures in society. These are direct attacks on the social conditions of the wage-dependent urban population, direct attacks on the already precarious livelihoods of many people in this city.

We have taken over the Kasernenwiese autonomously to show that another city is possible. In fact, it already exists: this weekend, in this place, where we can exchange revolutionary ideas from the heart, inform ourselves, organize and form alliances. We stay and we fight – against capitalist gentrification!

This area and the neighborhood in which it is located are exemplary of gentrification processes. There is an increasing displacement of many inhabitants from the city to its periphery. (Racist) police controls are omnipresent. Those who don’t have enough money and don’t fit into the picture have to go – out of the neighborhood, out of the city.

As old as the history of gentrification and displacement is, so is the history of the struggles against it. Resistance means kicking up from ‘below’ to ‘above’ – it has taken and continues to take many forms: from the bomb attacks in the eighties to occupations of houses and public squares, from demonstrations and parliamentary proposals to rent struggles; from the ‘Reclaim the Streets’ parade that went through the Europaallee as a smash protest in 2014 until today, when in recent months and years thousands of people have repeatedly taken to the streets against housing shortages and rent madness. This crisis, as we are experiencing it at the moment, does not have to be this way!

Since the origins of the housing crisis are identifiable, we can take action against it on multiple levels. We can build structures of solidarity. We can address how displacement undermines care networks – and ask ourselves how care and responsibility can be fairly distributed instead. Fighting against gentrification also means resisting increasing surveillance and (racist) police controls in our neighborhoods. A politics against rent madness also means advocating for the organization of housing and community in a way that makes a nice home and a good life possible for everyone.

• Not a day more under capitalism!
• No profit with land and rent – expropriate real estate companies!
• Living spaces for all – houses for those who live in them!
• For an empowered and collective development of the city!
• For a self-organized Zurich, free from surveillance, police and prisons!
• Stop the demolition frenzy, lower CO2 emissions – for climate friendly building and living!
• For a safe home and good life for everyone!