Readers of this blog up to now might note that whilst it has been undoubtedly urban, its examples of subversion have been quite subtle and discrete. So, to redress the balance, and because I’m heading back to Zagreb this weekend, I present to you Pravo na Grad – Zagreb’s Right to the City Movement, which is one of the most explicitly subversive examples of urban activism you could ever wish to find.

It will become apparent very quickly that I absolutely love this campaign and have enormous admiration for the people who have organised and participated in it over the last 5 years or so. Indeed in many ways it sets the standard for what I mean by subversive urbanism. The key ingredients are that Pravo na Grad:

# Was concerned with protecting public space against commercial and political incursion.

# Transformed righteous anger into cool, effective action.

# Employed wit, humour, originality and creativity in its methods.

# Avoided aggression or direct confrontation with the forces of oppression.

# Successfully scaled-up its constituency from a hard core of committed actors to a mass movement.

# Appealed on different levels to a broad cross section of people.

# Had real impact and led to real change.

Pravo na Grad (PNG) grew out of the concern of people in Zagreb, and other parts of Croatia, that they could no longer trust their politicians to act in the interests of the public good, in the management of important pieces of urban and rural land and infrastructure. Most Croatians were prepared to cynically accept this, shrug their shoulders, keep their heads down and get on with living their lives. What else could they do? The wonderful thing about PNG is that it didn’t just point out all the things that were bad about Croatia and complain about them. It’s not even that they managed to turn some of these negatives around, although they did. It’s wonderful because it put into the hands and heads of a mass of people both hope and the power to change not just the political figureheads but the system. Over a period of five years they succeeded in changing the public mood, the political climate and, ultimately the law in Croatia, but it started from very humble beginnings and could at any stage have gone horribly wrong.

It started with a collection of grungy Croatian underground music venues and youth clubs in the early 2000s, which eventually came to be known as the Clubture network. There was a growing frustration in Zagreb with the lack of facilities for young people to find creative outlets and space for expression. The city had no shortage of empty and run-down factories and warehouses but they couldn’t get legal access to any of them, and when they tried other means they were often brutally removed by the police. The reason soon became apparent. Politicians – led by the populist mayor Milan Bandic – and their property development acquaintances - had grand designs on these sites, for commercial use. Not that there was anything wrong in principle with anyone wanting to redevelop the rotting hulks of Zagreb’s industrial past, but what aroused suspicion was the secrecy and the top-down approach, excluding young people, or anyone else, from having a voice in what might happen in large swathes of the city. Furthermore, prior to the mayoral elections all the candidates, including the winner, Bandic, had signed a pledge to provide the city with youth facilities, and now he was trying to play dumb over the issue.

Then, one day unannounced, a series of billboard adverts went up around the city with images of Bandic himself with his face crossed out. The Mayor’s office put it about town that there was a terrorist campaign against him and, when this was laughed out of court, they claimed a new super-rich political party was being launched to attack him. Then a second mystery campaign followed showing some of the most familiar empty buildings with Totalna rasprodaja (clearance sale) pasted across them. Townspeople looked at each other in puzzlement.

Finally the two instigators of the campaign called national TV and made an on-screen confession that it had been them and, that unless politicians started to abide by some of their pledges, there would be more to come. The two were Teo Celakoski, a cultural activist and co-founder of Clubture and Tomislav Tomašević, the co-ordinator of Croatian Green Action/Friends of the Earth. They’d been introduced by Emina Višnić, director of POGON – Zagreb’s Center for Independent Culture and Youth. This three way connection of youth, culture and environmental activism was crucial, bringing together a creative mix of people with different but complementary skills, networks and methods, which was to prove so perplexing to the establishment.

Green Action was concerned about the carving up of large tracts of protected land by property developers whilst the authorities seemed to stand impotently or collusively by. This included a bizarre act of parliament which allowed golf course developers to abuse and even side step environmental regulations, threatening much of the unspoiled and vulnerable Dalmatian coast. They also worried about the number of wealthy people who seemed to flout planning restriction to build themselves mansions in environmentally sensitive areas.

The chance to put their new alliance of talents to the test came when a local oligarch, Ivica Todoric, flagrantly ignored planning regulations on the edge of Zagreb to build himself a family mansion called Kulmer Castle. By declaring the place a hotel rather than a home he’d found a loophole in the law meaning the authorities couldn’t touch him – even if they had wanted to. PNG had other ideas though, and one morning they gathered a small crowd, a bunch of suitcases and a bus and they drove up to the mansion. Standing outside the palatial gates they rang the bell and asked to be allowed to check in – after all, this was supposed to be a hotel wasn’t it? The owner kept his head down and expected them to go away, but they didn’t. They kept coming back until they drove him mad. The stunt grew in momentum attracting media attention and public sympathy, because it echoed the concerns many had silently held, and that people found it hilariously funny to see the powerful lampooned in such a way.

Buoyed by this success PNG set out a strategy to take on the whole system. They needed a cause célèbre and found it in the form of Varsavska Street. Set in the heart of Zagreb, this street had been pedestrianized for many years and was part of trend which had seen the motor car gradually edged out of the city centre. Implausibly, a private developer had proposed to create a high class shopping mall, with an underground parking garage, and to create access to it by digging up most of Varsavska Street. Implausible too, because this private garage would not only blast a hole in years of municipal policy but would also undermine revenues to the Council’s own car parks on the edge of the inner city. It seemed like the only possible reason mayor Bandic was allowing this development to proceed was that he and other politicians had their own commercial fingers in the pie.

From the outset, Teo told me, they never thought they had a realistic chance of winning the campaign on this issue. It was too close to the mayor’s heart and would be politically too damaging for him to back down on it. Nevertheless, they chose this particular issue because they knew it would arouse enormous public interest – and they were right. They began a petition and held a series of public events to drum up signatures. They amazed themselves by getting 55,000 people to say they opposed the development. From this they drew up a five layered plan of activism:

# 55000 said they were opposed, of which

# 3000 were prepared to attend public rallies, of which

# 500 would turn up to special actions at a day’s notice, of which

# 150 would turn up immediately on receiving an SMS, of which

# 10 were full time campaign co-ordinators.

Moving rapidly from a tight-knit action group to a popular mass movement brings its own problems with it. What do you do if people support your cause, but for the wrong reasons? For example they got the backing of certain people, particularly the Dynamo Zagreb football ultras, who opposed the mayor less on political grounds and more because he was of Hercegovinan rather than Croatian background. This was potentially dangerous stuff but they managed it by strictly controlling the way in which protest were held. They knew any suggestion that this was becoming a xenophobic rabble might turn the balance of public sympathy back towards Milan Bandic, so at the slightest hint of a dodgy banner or chant emerging at a rally, Teo would snuff them out.

Teo and Tomislav used tactics which ran rings around the security forces. Learning from the violent but largely futile anti-capitalist campaigns of the ‘90s, they chose never to engage in direct confrontation whatever the provocation might be. Learning also from successful Green activism, they employed effective methods, like chaining themselves together and encasing their joined hands in plastic tubing, which required long painstaking efforts with chain saws by the police to separate them.

Some methods made great use of symbolism combining the skills of artists and advertising creative within their membership. At one rally everyone arrived wielding toilet plungers, sending a clear message of what they thought Mayor Bandic was doing to Croatian democratic institutions. Another time they manufactured their own brand of bottled water called Mutna (or muddy) and filled it with a foul and filthy liquid which once again hinted at the murky dealings within city hall. And in a guerrilla action at the offices of the municipal planning department, they surrounded and sealed-off the building with police-issue ‘crime scene’ tape.

Other tactics employed were, frankly surreal – like the 5 by 7 meter Trojan Horse. For several weeks in a courtyard overlooked directly by the Ministry of Finance, they built an enormous wooden horse, without ever attracting the curiosity of the authorities. It then took 50 people to wheel it down the street at 4 in the morning to position it in Warsavska, whilst the hapless security guards were looking the other way. The presence of the horse became a rallying point for the final struggle to prevent the excavations and captured the imagination of thousands. The symbolic message here was that Bandic had promised to work for residents ‘like a horse’ but in fact had behaved more like a modern Trojan horse, smuggling his own private commercial interests into city hall (see video here).

As the protests became more and more effective – and embarrassing to the mayor – the authorities upped the stakes. Police snatch squads were formed with the intention of taking the key organisers of the street and into the cells. At this point Teo and Tomislav displayed the skills of a field marshal. As the squads approached they ordered members of the protesting crowd to offer themselves up for arrest, in ranks of ten at a time. They were duly arrested, thrown into police vans and whisked off to police cells. But as the ranks of 10 continued to come forward the chief of police made a quick calculation and realised that there simply weren’t enough police cells in the whole of Zagreb to accommodate them all. He had to send his prisoners to 15 police stations across the whole region and still it wasn’t enough. Finally the chief took a decision to put some into a criminal prison, which was actually an illegal act. All along there was also a battle of the airwaves with PNG putting messages out on the radio to encourage supporters to come into town to get themselves arrested, whilst the police put out counter messages telling people to stay home.

This final night of mass civil disobedience was relayed throughout Croatia and affected a lot of people. Although PNG didn’t prevent the eventual construction and opening of the car park, they had let the genie out of the bottle. The prevailing attitude of resigned acceptance to political corruption was challenged, and copycat PNG groups began to form around the country.

Initially these groups looked to Zagreb for help but Teo and Tomislav again showed remarkable wisdom. They refused requests to become a kind of guerrilla flying squad who would move into hotspots around the country and repeat their Zagreb tactics. Rather than give a man a fish, they preferred to teach him how to fish. So in the DjelujteSami (Act Alone!) section of the PNG website they have created a ‘self-help toolkit’ for anyone wishing to stand up to corporate and political malpractice. This ranges from making people aware of their rights under the law to tactics in peaceful urban subversion.

For a while the combined forced of the municipality and of the property developer Tomislav Horvatincic, prepared to crush PNG by any means possible. Horvatincic took out a lawsuit with the aim of hitting PNG with such a large fine that it would be sunk. In tragic circumstances, it turned out to be the property tycoon that sank. Whilst taking his speed boat along the Dalmatian coast, accompanied by a young woman, he clearly had other things on his mind because he failed to notice a sailing boat in his path. He hit the boat head on killing its two Italian owners instantly. He was jailed, which has not surprisingly taken his mind off trying to crush PNG.

There is justice after all. The struggle continues.