New Internationalist Issue 276
The material that follows has been provided by New
Internationalist
From this month's editor
There is a fresh spirit of international solidarity abroad, and it's rising from the
grassroots.
The street-paper movement, one of the brightest new publishing ventures in recent years,
has had an international perspective from its inception, trading ideas and inspiration
across national boundaries and oceans with astonishing ease. Even small activist
organizations are bridging the gap between continents: two groups mentioned in this
magazine - The People's Dialogue on Land and Shelter in South Africa and SPARC in Bombay -
have worked closely together at a local level for several years. Their international
exchanges have not been of abstract resolutions in cosy conference centres, but of
immediate practical value. We can only hope that the UN 'City Summit' which takes place in
Istanbul in June will be half as useful.
The
slum dwellers of Cape Town and Bombay have little difficulty in making the best use of
each other's hard-won experience. This kind of response to the much-vaunted globalization
of the world's power structures has been a long time in coming. It is ironic - though
instructive - that those who are usually thought of as the clearest losers, the third of
the world's people without decent homes, are now leading the way.
So it is only fitting that the NI and The Big Issue, Europe's leading
street paper, have formed an alliance to produce this magazine on homelessness around the
world (you can find out more about the international street-paper movement from "World Exclusive").
A great many writers, photographers and activists have
contributed to this magazine for little or no material reward, but we owe an exceptional
debt of gratitude to Diana Mitlin and David Satterthwaite at the International Institute
for Environment and Development (IIED), for giving us access to their fund of knowledge
and for their patient help and advice.
Co-operation can, in theory, produce more than the sum of its parts - what big business
likes to call 'synergy'. What big business aims for, however, is a synergy of greed; what
we're after here is a synergy of solidarity.
There is an urgent need for this. It is clear to us that, contrary to what the dominant
channels of communication usually suggest, there is a sickness of human destitution
spreading through the world. The only known antidote is the determination of its intended
victims, in alliance with everyone of good will, to resist and work for something better.
We would like to think that the alliance between the NI and The Big Issue
marks the beginning of a grand international alliance against homelessness and the
conditions that produce it. This may sound more like a grand dream than a grand alliance,
but greater things have come from weaker vessels. The power of an international voice that
fights for the interests of homeless people could be a power to be reckoned with.
 A.John Bird Editor-in-chief The Big Issue |
 David Ransom for the New Internationalist Co-operative |
©Copyright: New Internationalist 1996
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