In this breathtaking moment, those who have been heir to most of the harm have been offering both the most incisive critiques and the most potent antidotes, and they are often speaking a spatial language that inhabits the urban stage. Communities that rely on presence, proximity, and entanglement have special powers to provide some relief from or reparations for the environmental violence of dispossession, gentrification, policing, and climate catastrophes. And as communities consider collective forms for occupying land, they are also a reality check to the folly and hubris that humans can own the crust of the earth.
...The spatial apparatus of community is not something that necessarily replaces capital with a superior system, thus reproducing the same old longing for singular evils and singular solutions. Instead it comes from a different dimension to overwhelm capital with its own multiple forms of productivity. Releasing the incalculable productivity of organizations that are alive, communities redouble values of all kinds. Capital is so stupid. It thinks that productivity cannot exist without sneaky financial instruments that artificially create compounding values for a few. But community economies make something out of exchanges that benefit everyone—like one seed or tuber that, when planted, produces ten. It is not magic. It just makes no logical sense to a world made of math. The misinvestments of capital have often only been in the business of obstructing this productivity in ways that usually fail. And they can never adequately address the also incalculable need for reparations.