radicalxstitch:

What Else Could Go Here?

Ahoy me hearties! Land pirates straight ahead!

Oh to be a speculator.

It must be such a great life buying up blocks of land, sitting on them for a few years watching the community grow and the infrastructure develop, then when the time is right, flip them off for some easy capital gains. Even better when the land isn’t in your suburb so you can externalize the problems that vacant land creates like weeds, rubbish, vandalism and housing affordability pressures. Even better when the council has a rates system that charges on land and buildings so the blocks around yours with houses and businesses on them have to pay more than you do.

Well, just ’cause the council thinks it’s ok for all these pirates to be sailing around our hood, looting the bounty created by our communities, doesn’t mean the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle does.

We’re sick of looking at these blocks. We want a re-imagining of how we use land in Maribyrnong. We want to address housing, sprawl, waste, food security, transport, health, community gardening and play.  In our separate lives we work on these projects but are daily undermined by the pirates.  We want the people of Maribyrnong to join with us in starting the conversation about the blight on our suburbs that is vacant land and what the Council plans on doing about it.

Currently, they don’t see it as a problem.

So, we ask the question “What else could go here?”  We are surrounded in blank canvases and we call on all citizens to spend some time thinking about what better ways we can use this land. Let’s keep animals, let’s grow food, let’s grow trees, let’s build parks!

Have you an idea? Put it on your closest fence tonight! Or get some chalk and write your ideas on the footpath! Use your imagination people, our communities are in our hands.

Love + rage

MRCC