We spoke with Tony Romano, organizing director of the Right to the City Alliance, to better understand how grassroots organizing around urban space and housing justice connects with the need to be build towards a next system that democratizes wealth and restores community control over land and housing.

Our conversation explored the dynamics of gentrification, the role of globalized finance capital and international resistance, and the ways systemic alternatives – like community land trusts – fit into broader strategies to fight displacement.

“For a long time, our groups were talking about gentrification and no one even understood the word. Now everyone is talking about it, which is a step forward, but it does not mean we all have the same understanding.”

Romano explains that for them, “fundamentally, gentrification is about capitalist profit-driven processes that dictate land use and development. White supremacy is deeply woven into that process, meaning that it is no accident that communities of color are targeted and hardest hit.”

To Romano, “gentrification is also about taking advantage of the absence of community control and further removing community control allowing corporations, private equity firms, hedge funds and other speculators seeking to maximize profit to come in and guide the process. Thus, human needs and community interests are not on the table except where the community fights like hell and forces speculators and gentrifiers to address it in order to gain concessions. That is how we understand gentrification.”

Also on TheNextSystem.org, Ruken Isik, a scholar of Kurdish women’s movements, explores what we can learn about ensuring gender equity in the next system from the struggles of women in the autonomous cantons of Rojava in Northern Syria to build a new society that challenges and undoes the norms of patriarchy while simultaneously fighting against ISIS for the survival of their communities.

Isik’s article — which is accompanied by two exclusive interviews with commanders in the YPJ (Women’s Protection Units) — goes beyond the superficial imagine of women armed in self-defense that most Western media coverage has focused on to explore a broader notion of “protection” that encompasses new systemic designs for political representation, community justice, and economic democracy.