#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #CANADA #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) Canada, Collectif Emma Goldman - Residents of the neighborhood, let's get back to our streets! (ca, de, it, fr, pt)[machine translation]

 Against the policy of infinite waiting, let us take charge of our living

environments one brushstroke at a time. ---- The latest IPCC report is
categorical: the consequences of climate change are imminent and radical changes
are required to ensure the survival of humanity. While experts are calling on the
world's major cities to invest in public transport, the "pedestrianization" of
city centers and the construction of bicycle lanes, Ville Saguenay is doing
precisely the opposite, despite the construction of a "Lab". -School "(1), a
multimillion-dollar project that will allegedly promote healthy lifestyles.
However, it would seem that the healthy lifestyles promoted by the future
establishment do not include walking to get around, at least in the opinion of
the multiple levels of government participating in the project. Indeed, not only
will a school specializing in "special cases" (2) be torn from the working-class
district and its users will be moved to a more affluent area where a school is
already within walking distance (3) (and all this "in the name of the student
safety to keep them away from University Boulevard "), but in addition, no
pedestrian corridor has been provided for downtown students. Clearly, this means
that the most vulnerable families will have to pay $ 360 per household per year
for school bus transportation, given that they reside within the 1.6 km radius
where students have to walk. They can also contribute to the problem by driving
their children home every morning. Once again, the poorest families have to foot
the bill for a city that doesn't not even ensure such a basic need as providing a
safe place where children can walk. But, it was not always so.
When it was founded, the streets of downtown Chicoutimi that we know today were
not made for cars. There was of course the movement of horses and carriages, but
the street was also (and above all) a meeting place. The children played there,
the neighborhood chatted, there was commerce and a host of other activities. Then
the car arrived. First as a toy of the bourgeoisie, perceived as a curiosity or a
hobby rather than a real transport. Its use was gradually democratized following
the First World War to become the norm at the end of the 1930s (it was also
during this interval that in 1927 the rue Sainte-Anne bridge was built at the
cost of severed foot of a worker ... a true model of safety at work for the
era!). The use of the streets then fundamentally changed. The auto and oil
lobbies have put immense pressure on our governments. Highways filled with
individual vehicles replaced the railroad used in common. City life, where the
street was a meeting place, has replaced life in the suburbs, where the street is
used to go to work. The merchant streets that were the pride of the workers who
built them and kept them alive, have been replaced by shopping malls filled with
a series of sanitized and soulless franchise businesses amid parking lots so vast
they make it all to themselves. the idea of going there on foot absurd.
Disproportionately wide boulevards in relation to the population have scarified
the city in the name of industrial transport,

The model of success of the time, which persists today, is to own a detached
house, fenced and surrounded by grass, far from the noise and turmoil of the
city. The city center remains a place of life for people who, for lack of
sufficient means, cannot escape noise, stress and pollution and remains a place
of work for many. As the city extends too much on the surface for cycling or
walking to be realistic options, as the public transport network is kept in an
austerity which makes its inefficiency appalling and that in any case these means
are perceived in the region like solutions for the poor or the desperate, only
self-solo remains. VS'

We, the residents of the neighborhood, have had enough! We are being taken from
our streets, we are destroying the homes from which we are being evicted, the
living environments that we pay for with our meager resources are destroyed to
allow better-off people to store their cars for free while we die stricken by
those same cars when trying to walk from one place to another. Here it is the
reign of residential streets wider than a Montreal boulevard. Pedestrians and
pedestrians? They are poor people! The cyclists? Pollution preventers in circles
who do not pay for plates! People with reduced mobility? Never heard of it! Wide
sidewalks? Protected cycle paths? Calming measures? School corridors as in all
cities? Do not know! No one will take our streets back for us. The local ruling
class, a small bourgeois elite of local lords, sad lords in the pay of big
capital, only have great projects, the enrichment of promoters and their own
maintenance in power. They don't care about the rapacious owners who exploit us,
our alienating jobs which struggle to pay the minimum to survive or our lives
which end under the wheels of the SUV of a hurried executive who cuts through the
neighborhood to save traffic. It is up to us to occupy the neighborhood, to help
each other in difficult times and to disrupt traffic by any means possible. We
are not serfs attached to the lordship which power may dispose of. The
neighborhood is ours and we will make our skin pay dearly.

1. The Lab-École Saguenay is under construction on the land of the former
Marguerite-D'Youville school on Boily Street in Chicoutimi. The opening is
scheduled for the start of the school year in 2022.

2. This is the Antoine de St-Exupéry primary school. With the relocation of this
educational institution, there will no longer be any primary school in the
southern part of downtown Chicoutimi (between Saguenay and University boulevards)!

3. L'Horizon primary school, located 550 meters from the new Lab-School.

by Collectif Emma Goldman

http://ucl-saguenay.blogspot.com/2021/11/habitants-et-habitantes-du-quartier.html
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