25 years of MIPIM is enough!
After 25 years, for the first time real estate managers, asset dealers and city sellers have not been alone at this year’s global property party “Mipim” in Cannes.
The European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City, together with protesters from the region, have also been there. At our “Anti Mipim Tribunal” we presented cases from 12 countries which showed some of the consequences of the business which was celebrated at the Mipim. We accused of concrete business actors and local authorities for violating the right to the city.
We stressed that these violations are not isolated cases but that they are necessary parts of a structural process of commodification, privatisation, financialisation and real estate speculation. We demonstrated why this profit-orientated business should be replaced urgently by alternatives that are orientated on the right of everybody to a have secure, adequate, guided by the everyone’s right to a healthy, non-segregating and affordable place to live. And we started to discuss HOW “Mipimism” – which is another word for the neoliberal ideology of real estate capitalism – really can be stopped and can effectively overcome.
This publication aims at presenting the different cases that were introduced by social movements and organizations at the European Action in the “Anti Mipim Tribunal” which was held in Cannes alongside the annual MIPIM event – the international market for real
estate professionals, which also calls itself the world’s property show…
These cases illustrate and are paradigmatic of what is happening to our homes and our cities, what is actually the type of business that is prepared and sold at MIPIM, whose mechanisms and social and economic consequences must be shown to and analysed by society, in its mechanisms, as well as social and economic consequences of it. In addition to the specific cases of the various European cities, the first chapter is the final statement that results from collective analysis of the movements of the European Alliance on Mipimism, its critique and alternatives.