The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Foundation invited the PAH to participate in the World Social Forum in Montreal in 2016, which was held in August, covering all transportation and accommodation expenses during the stay in Montreal,
The World Social Forum aims to bring together tens of thousands of people from civil society groups, organizations and social movements who want to build a sustainable and inclusive world where each person and each people has their place and can make their voices heard. The WSF of 2016 was the first forum held in the Northern Hemisphere.
The PAH participated in a roundtable discussion on urban housing, displacement and gentrification in the framework of the right to the city that took place on Friday, August 12 in a room with capacity for 200 people. The panel was named “The Fight for the Life of the Global City”.
The panel lasted 2 hours and 30 minutes, where 60 minutes were spent for presentations, 20 minutes each presenter. After the presentation, there was a discussion of questions and answers.
In content that Rosa Luxemburg asked us to cover in our presentation:
How are activists and policy makers creatively using Right to the City frameworks to enhance political participation, develop quality housing and public spaces, increase cultural diversity, and develop inclusive citizenship? Questions to include in the presentation are:
• How are you using the Right to the City Frames in your local work?
• How does our work increase citizen participation? How does our work bridge the urban-rural divide?
• What specific challenges to the Right to the City that we face in our local work?
• How are we working or fighting against local and national institutions in advancing a Right to the City agenda?
• How do we see international organizations and conferences as platforms to promote a Framework for the Right to the City?
We also participated in the convergence assemblies for the right to housing, where housing groups from 5 continents attended, and which took place on Wednesday and Thursday from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., thus learning from the problematic In terms of housing that other countries have and how they face it, exchanging experiences and international contacts.
In addition we not only participated during the convergence assemblies but also in the meetings of organization of the same contributing ideas that would be debated during the said assemblies of. This invitation was extended to us as part of the European Coalition which was invited by Novox and Frapru, the local movements for the right to housing in Montreal, who were the driving force behind these assemblies.
One of the proposals made by the PAH in these convergence assemblies was to build a network of social networks on Twitter and Facebook at the international level of the different movements in the fight for the right to housing to support campaigns that are carried out in different countries . This proposal is very well accepted.
