Author

The Laura Flanders Show is a TV and radio program that seeks to raise radical spirits by interviewing forward-thinking people who have real experience of shifting power, from the few to the many, in the worlds of arts, entrepreneurship and politics.

Amanda Huron is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C. Her research interests are in urban geography, city planning, housing, the urban commons, community mapping, and Washington, D.C. She has published on her research into D.C.'s limited-equity cooperatives and the urban commons in the journals Washington History (2014) and Antipode (2015), and has published a piece on relationships built between housing organizers in Washington, D.C. and Johannesburg in the edited volume Capital Dilemma: Growth and Inequality in Washington, D.C. (2015). Amanda is a native of Washington's Ward 1, and lives there today.

Synapse 1 is the first of a series of OMONOIA events or ‘synapses’ running over the next two years. The aim of Synapse 1 is to consider the common ground between groups of scholars, activists, self-managed organisations, cultural producers and other civic subjects involved in urban practices of commoning, solidarity, urban welfare and participatory democracy. Synapse 1 asks participants to imagine how these urban experiments developed in times of crisis may become permanent and sustainable alternatives to the dominant economic and political model. Synapse 1 also asks to imagine the grassroot economic and political practices developed in Greece and Europe’s South as new common ground for an alternative European project.

Video Production: Dimitris Diakoumopoulos
Graphics: Studio Christos Lialios
Video Editing: Georgia Nikologianni
#AB5to6 Documentation & Communication Teams

Michelle Camou researches imaginative approaches to economic development for a more just economy at the Imagined Economy Project, a new applied research and education nonprofit recently launched near Cleveland. She is the author of Cities Developing Worker Co-ops: Efforts in Ten Cities that is the basis for this article.

Abigail Savitch-Lew wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Abigail is a reporter based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in City Limits, Dissent Magazine, Jacobin, and The Nation.