THE PEOPLE’S TEN POINT PROGRAM FOR PHILLY
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1. We Want The Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Communities Through Revolutionary Intercommunalism.
We believe that true freedom is only possible when people directly govern themselves through free assemblies and planning forums, particularly neighborhood assemblies, residential communes, planning forums and production councils (1)(2). We seek to replace the centralized nation-state—which functions as an instrument of empire—with a global “commune of communes,” where decision-making is horizontal, face-to-face, and coordinated through confederal councils to ensure power remains with the people (1)(3). This vision transitions from empire which dominates all communities, to Revolutionary Intercommunalism, where wealth and technology are seized from the ruling capitalist class and distributed equitably among all communities (3).
Neighborhood Assemblies: The primary site of direct democracy where citizens manage local neighborhood affairs and vote on policy. (1)
People’s Assemblies (Jackson-Kush Model): Instruments of "dual power" that counter the domination of capital and the state while executing autonomous social projects. (4)
Mid-Atlantic Production Coordination Hub: A data-processing center using algae-based AI to tabulate needs and coordinate communication between millions of worker-owned firms. (2)
2. We Want Global Decolonization And The Immediate Return Of Stolen Land (Land Back).
We demand the rematriation of Indigenous lives and land, acknowledging that all the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific is Indigenous land (5)(6). We demand the literal ceding of land to Indigenous Nations to restore their rightful role as stewards of life. (2)(8)(6). We support the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) in its struggle for independence and statehood. Through a decolonial alliance against US imperialism, Black and Indigenous liberation movements will pool sovereignty, recognizing each other's right to self-determination, self-governance, and cultural preservation within their territories (25).
Indigenous Land Trusts: Social and legal structures that facilitate the return of territory to its original caretakers. (6)
Treaty Rights Enforcement Commissions: Independent bodies dedicated to upholding Indigenous authority over all historical and future agreements. (6)
Honor Tax Initiatives: Community programs where residents pay for the use of Indigenous land, with funds supporting tribal restoration and sovereignty. (6)
Republic of New Afrika (RNA) Consulates: Urban hubs that organize "Free the Land" campaigns and coordinate New Afrikan citizenship and reparations. (7)
3. We Want a Municipalized Cooperative Economy Based on Human Need (Ujamaa), Not Profit.
We believe the means of production must be taken from capitalists and municipalized, placing every enterprise under the purview of the local assembly (1)(9). We strive for a communal economy where technology, automation, and shared resources reduce serve the people, expanding time for care, study, creativity, rest, repair, and democratic participation, and ensure that production is organized around human and ecological need rather than profit. (1)(10)(7)
Cooperation Jackson Network: A federation of local worker cooperatives and cooperative banks building material self-sufficiency. (4)
Solidarity Economy Incubators: Centers that educate and train working people to start and self-manage sustainable cooperative enterprises. (4)
Community Tool Libraries: Neighborhood hubs that provide shared access to technology, repair equipment, and upcycling facilities. (11)
4. We Want Decent Housing and Infrastructure that Heals the Land.
We believe housing is a fundamental human right and demand the end of private ownership in favor of collective living and permanently affordable cooperatives (9)(5)(6). Our infrastructure must be carbon-neutral, zero-waste, and energetically efficient, retrofitted to heal the planet through ecotechnologies like solar, wind, and methane (8)(11)(4).
Eco-Village Housing Cooperatives: Green residential complexes that generate their own power and manage waste through closed-loop systems. (4)
Solar-Retrofitting and Home Repair Collectives: Worker-led and neighborhood-governed programs that install renewable energy systems, weatherization, accessibility improvements, and thermally efficient materials on existing buildings.(8)(11)
Algae-Based AI Infrastructure: Sustainable computational systems used for democratic planning and regional data management. (2)
5. We Want Alternative Free Education that Teaches Truth and Knowledge of Self.
We believe compulsory schooling is a form of imprisonment and demand its replacement with unschooling and self-directed education (12)(13). We want a system that teaches Indigenous history and practical skills, rooted in the urban tissue and open to all ages. (9)(13)(11)
Universidad de la Tierra: A de-professionalized space for co-learning where students follow their curiosity through community interaction. (14)(12)
Mississippi Freedom Schools: Grassroots education centers providing political literacy and revolutionary skills. (15)(4)
Abrome Self-Directed Education Community: An institution that prioritizes learner autonomy over their own bodies, minds, and time. (12)
6. We Want Total Abolition of the Prison-Industrial Complex and Transformative Justice.
We demand an end to the policing and caging of our people and the release of all political prisoners (9)(6)(13). We replace carceral retaliation with Transformative Justice (TJ) and restorative circles that address the root causes of harm and prioritize healing (16)(15).
Community Peace Rooms: Neighborhood spaces staffed by volunteers to address interpersonal harm and prevent violence (15).
The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective: A center dedicated to community-based responses to harm and building safety for children (16)(15).
Peace-Holder Circles: Community-selected mediators who facilitate conflict resolution and maintain collective safety without weapons (15).
7. We Want Anti-Ableist Collective Care and the Dismantling of the Medical Industrial Complex.
We believe health is a political condition and demand a society that centers disabled/“crip” bodies and neurodivergent minds (16)(17). We seek to blend ancestral and traditional medicine with liberatory clinical models that reject the commodification of wellness (16)(11).
Casa de Salud: Blended-model clinics providing high-quality Western medicine alongside traditional Indigenous healing (16).
Sins Invalid Performance Project: A movement-building space that asserts the beauty and dignity of People of Color with disabilities (16).
Neighborhood Gestation Centers: Community-run facilities that coordinate gestation care, counseling, and social support for new generations (2).
8. We Want Food Sovereignty through Urban Agroecology and Indigenous Stewardship.
We demand the restoration of Indigenous agriculture and seed sovereignty to end dependence on colonial food systems (6). We seek to transform cities into food forests and "living cities" where food is hyperlocally and sustainably raised (11)(8)(4).
Philly Peace Park Ecology Campus: An intergenerational neighborhood-managed park championing food sovereignty and agricultural education (18).
Freedom Farms Urban Farming Cooperative: A network of plots producing organic food and sustainable jobs in working-class neighborhoods (19)(4).
Indigenous Seed Exchanges: Networks that protect and distribute traditional seeds to restore non-capitalist ancestral trade networks. (16)(8)
Communal Canteens/Kitchens: Neighborhood facilities where food is distributed and meals are eaten together, effectively replacing the private family kitchen and the grocery store. (2)
Anthony T. Fiscella, Forgotten pioneers in degrowth: John Africa and the MOVE Organization (2022)
Alexander Khost and Yoni Kallai, The Two Tales of Starting One play:ground (2017)
Red Nation, Red Deal Part 1 Heal Our Bodies (2019)
Jason W. Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (2016)
Luke Martell, Building utopia from the bottom up (2023)
Justine Norton-Kertson, No Borders, No Barriers: Imagining Freedom of Movement in a Solarpunk Future, in Demand Utopia: A Solarpunk Podcast Season 5, Episode 8 (2025)
Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika, The Code of Umoja / Black Constitution (1988)
9. We Want Youth Liberation and the Creation of Autonomous Spaces for Play.
We demand an end to adult chauvinism and adult supremacy, recognizing children as full human beings with the right to self-determination (13)(12). We seek to abolish the nuclear family as the sole unit of property and replace it with communal families and crèches (13)(12)(2).
The Purple Thistle Centre: A youth-run social center for arts and activism that provides autonomous space for young people (12).
Adventure and Junk Playgrounds (Emdrup/play:groundNYC): Spaces where children use spare building materials to build dens and play structures with minimal adult intervention (20).
Flying Squads: Neighborhood-based youth groups that facilitate the reoccupation of public space and challenge illegitimate authority. (12)
Footnotes
10. We Want Freedom of Movement and aWorld Beyond Borders, Extraction, and Ecological Harm.
We believe movement is a right and demand the abolition of all imperial borders (6)(13)(21). We support South-South sub-global internationalist solidarity and strive for an “Ecozoic Era” where technology serves the flourishing of all life (22)(23)(10).
Solar-Powered Wind Clippers and Barges: Low-carbon, long-distance transport systems that facilitate international travel and solidarity (2).
Solar Planes and Dirigibles: Solarpunk designers propose dirigibles that use 80% less fuel than jets to traverse landlocked areas. (2)(8)
Multi-Species Green Corridors: Bioregional zones that protect the migration routes of both human and non-human relatives (animals and plants), across former national borders (24).
Murray Bookchin, Social Ecology and Communalism (2006).
M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, Everything for Everyone (2022).
Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Intercommunalism (1970).
Kali Akuno, Casting Shadows (2015).
Red Nation, Red Deal Part 2 Heal Our Bodies (2019).
Red Nation, Red Deal Part 3 Heal Our Planet (2019).
Edward Onaci, Free the Land (2020).
Brontë Christopher Wieland, Building toward Autonomy: Ways of Reclaiming the Present and the Future, in Almanac for the Anthropocene A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures (2022).
Black Panther Party, Ten-Point Program (1966)
People's Accords and International Treaties: Multilateral agreements between social movements (e.g., the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba) to upend imperialism and capitalist domination over the Global South (1)(6).
Care Nodes and Welcome Centers: Community-run facilities that offer orientation, housing leads, childcare, medical help, and translation for newcomers, replacing refugee camps and detention centers (24)
The Space Elevator in Quito: A communal infrastructure project aimed at making space travel accessible to all humanity (2).
Community-Governed Mobility Corridors: Low-carbon networks of trains, buses, ferries, bike infrastructure, pedestrian routes, and care-based welcome centers that support movement without detention, border violence, or fossil-fuel dependence.
William Joseph Gillam, A Solarpunk Manifesto: Turning Imaginary into Reality (2023)
Commando Jugendstil, Solarpunk Cities: Notes for a Manifesto | Reckoning (2022)
Carla Bergman, Trust Kids! Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Supremacy (2022)
Youth Liberation of Ann Arbor, Youth Liberation Program (1972)
Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, Radical Interdependence, and the Making of Worlds (2018)
Mariame Kaba, We Do This Til We Free Us (2021)
Cara Page and Erica Woodland, Healing Justice Lineages (2023)
Laurence Parent, 33 actions for an anti-ableist Montréal (2021)
Philadelphia Peace Park, Homepage, https://www.phillypeacepark.org/ (2023)
The sequence of events in this shared history was assembled from the People’s Archive and traces a contested movement from the racial Capitalocene toward more reparative, communal, and ecologically accountable forms of life. We present here for the first time a historical timeline of all that transpired in Philadelphia from 2026 to 2076.
A Shared History of Philly at 2076
Phase I: The Years of Refusal and Rehearsal, 2026–2031
This period is marked by the cultivation of dual power within the cracks of a failing system and by the slower work of building trust, shared language, and neighborhood capacity inside institutions that had not yet changed.
In 2026, the first A People’s Philly installations appeared in storefront windows along Market Street, presenting neighborhood futures as if they were already lived. The project’s own design language collapsed time: archival image, present-day documentation, and speculative vision layered together so pedestrians could feel how the future was already being rehearsed in the present.
That same year, neighborhood study groups formed around the exhibition materials. Some met in classrooms, some in gardens, some in church basements, some in rec centers, some under tents in vacant lots. They read about abolition, coloniality, land, public health, housing, climate justice, and community governance.
By 2027, those study groups began calling themselves “rehearsal assemblies.” They had no legal standing. They did not control budgets. But they practiced the habits that later became ordinary: listening before voting, mapping harm before proposing repair, feeding people before asking for testimony, translating theory into neighborhood language, and refusing the idea that institutionally recognized “experts” alone should decide the future. Instead, they valued lived experience, personal knowledge, historical memory, spiritual practice, youth imagination, and neighborhood care work as equally valuable and necessary forms of expertise.
Widespread community-led planning processes started to emerge. Neighborhoods began inventorying their resources—sun and share exposure, roof conditions, water lines, vacant lots, soil health, repair skills, and informal care networks—in order to design forms of local resilience and interdependence. These inventories were more than technical. They also produced social maps of who knew how to fix a boiler, which groups checked on elders in
heat waves, which places held special memories, which intersections felt unsafe, and where youth gathered to imagine alternative futures.
New Afrikans and Indigenous communities in the Philadelphia region developed practices of political education, historical memory, and collective responsibility. Drawing from the Code of Umoja, the Red Nation’s Red Deal, and other traditions of Black and Indigenous self-determination, communities began organizing circles on land, sovereignty, racial capitalism, colonial history, and the responsibilities of self governance. These gatherings did not assume a single identity or political path. Rather, they opened up difficult conversations about Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, land return, repair, and the different histories of belonging and dispossession that shaped Philadelphia.
The earliest rehearsal assemblies were strongest in North Philadelphia, West Philadelphia, Kensington, and Grays Ferry. Each place carried different urgencies. North Philadelphia organizers focused on public land, gardens, schools, housing, and food sovereignty. Kensington groups centered harm reduction, public health, conflict resolution through transformative justice, and alternatives to policing. West Philadelphia residents carried forward a long history of struggle from the Black Bottom to the UC Townhomes, connecting anti-displacement organizing to demands for land repair, housing justice, institutional accountability, and reparative resource-sharing. Grays Ferry residents organized around refinery legacies, public health, flooding, heat, river repair, and climate accountability.
In 2028, youth councils emerged from public school workshops and after-school design circles. Students began producing “oral futures”: interviews with elders about what had been lost, paired with drawings of what could still be built. This method drew from Rasheedah Phillip’s Black Quantum Futurist[RN1] approaches to time, space, housing, memory, and community futures, especially the use of workshops and “oral futures” interviews to understand community dynamics, temporalities, histories, and shared futures. The youth councils did not treat the future as an abstract design exercise. They treated it as a public record of what had been stolen, delayed, protected, repaired, and still owed.
In 2030, after a wave of speculative rent increases and displacement notices, tenants across multiple neighborhoods began coordinated rent assemblies. These were not yet the citywide rent strike, but they built the trust and legal-defense infrastructure that made it possible.
The years 2026–2031 were later called the Years of Refusal and Rehearsal because people were not yet governing the city differently, but they were practicing as if they could. They were learning how to practice power differently: not as command from above, but as the patient work of meeting, remembering, feeding, debating, repairing, and remaining accountable to one another.
Phase II: The Rent Strike and the First People’s Assembly, 2032–2038
The 2032 citywide rent strike did not begin everywhere at once. It began with tenants who had already survived court dates, informal evictions, repair neglect, subsidy expirations, rent hikes, and the long temporal punishment of eviction records. West Philadelphia brought the memory of UC Townhomes and Black Bottom. Kensington brought care workers who understood that housing instability intensified overdose risk, family separation, and street violence. Grays Ferry brought residents who had seen environmental burdens and housing burdens land on the same blocks.
North Philadelphia brought the Peace Park.
By then, the North Philly Peace Park had already become more than a garden or a neighborhood project. It was remembered as one of the city’s living rehearsals for land-based self-determination: a place where food sovereignty, youth education, collective care, direct democracy, and land stewardship were practiced together before they were recognized as citywide infrastructure.
So when the rent strike spread, North Philadelphia did not only bring decades of organizing around public housing, vacant land, and community land trusts. It brought a constitution of practice: feed people, teach children, hold land in common, settle conflict without prisons, build assemblies before crisis, and treat the neighborhood as a place of governance rather than a site of abandonment. In the strike kitchens, Peace Park elders and youth helped turn vacant lots into meeting grounds, seed-distribution sites, childcare spaces, outdoor classrooms, and food hubs. Their contribution was not symbolic. They showed the strike how to become livable: how to keep people housed, fed, organized, and in relation while the city argued over who had the right to decide the future of land.
The strike’s first demand was simple: no rent without repair, no displacement without community review, no public subsidy without permanent affordability. But the movement quickly grew beyond rent. It became a fight over land, time, care, and governance.
This turning point grew from pre-2026 housing struggles. UC Townhomes residents and organizers fought to defend subsidized housing in West Philadelphia, with residents emphasizing access to transportation, libraries, medical care, markets, local stores, and the “organic security” of community life. Philadelphia Housing Action’s 2020 encampments and housing takeovers resulted in an agreement to transfer 50 vacant publicly owned houses to a community land trust. These struggles taught organizers that housing was never only a private shelter question. It was about neighborhood continuity, public land, social infrastructure, racial repair, and the right to remain in relation.
In 2034, tenant unions, garden stewards, unhoused organizers, disability justice groups, youth councils, and neighborhood study circles convened the first People’s Assembly in North Philadelphia. Neighborhood assemblies were the primary sites of direct democracy with People’s Assemblies serving as instruments of dual power capable of countering capital and the state while carrying out autonomous social projects. The 2034 assembly did not replace city government. But it created a parallel civic authority rooted in participation, presence, care, and the trust built through years of organizing.
By the mid-to-late 2030s, overlapping housing, public finance, climate, and health crises strained systems at every scale. Public services became more uneven. Markets became more predatory. Philanthropic and nonprofit institutions tried to manage crisis without surrendering control. City agencies negotiated with assemblies when they had to and ignored them when they could. The state did not disappear, but its failures became harder to defend.
By 2036, the assembly network had negotiated the first Public Land Transfer Compact, moving vacant lots, abandoned buildings, and tax-delinquent parcels into neighborhood commons and community land trusts. Years of public land research had already shown that Philadelphia’s vacant land was not scarce; what was scarce was political will. The Compact did not end property speculation, but it created a new political expectation: land held by the public, neglected by the state, or extracted from Black and working-class neighborhoods could not be treated as disposable inventory.
In that tension, Philadelphia’s assemblies began to connect with organizers elsewhere: tenants’ unions, Indigenous land defenders, climate justice networks, migrant justice groups, abolitionist organizers, food sovereignty projects, and mutual aid formations across the region and beyond. These relationships did not create a single global movement or a clean break from existing systems. They created a practical intercommunal question that remained unresolved: how could communities coordinate across difference without reproducing the hierarchies, racial narratives, borders, and extractive habits they were trying to undo?
By 2038, the assemblies had become difficult to ignore. They still had no single leader, no central office, and no one voice that could speak for the whole city. That was the point.
Phase III: The Heat Emergency and the Care Infrastructure Turn, 2039–2045
Ecological and social crises forced a partial but profound reorganization of care, transforming what had long been treated as charity, family obligation, or informal survival work into public infrastructure.
The heat emergency of 2039 changed the city’s sense of time. It was not the first heat wave, and it was not the last. But it was the one that made people understand that climate vulnerability was not only about weather. Autonomous mutual-aid survival networks in Philadelphia had to address questions of housing, trees, asthma, disability, age, isolation, utility debt, asphalt, policing, language access, food, and who had a neighbor with a key. They also had to confront why those vulnerabilities were distributed so unevenly: why some blocks had shade and others had heat-trapping asphalt, why some homes had working cooling and others had shutoff notices, why some residents were treated as patients and others as risks, why some neighborhoods received resilience investment while others received surveillance.
Grays Ferry and Eastwick were places where air and soil contamination, extreme heat, recurrent flooding, housing conditions, and public health intersected to produce uneven climate vulnerability. The 2039 emergency forced that analysis into practice. In both places, climate justice could not be separated from racial justice, housing justice, disability justice, environmental repair, and the long history of deciding which communities were expected to absorb harm.
Neighborhood assemblies converted schools, churches, mosques, libraries, recreation centers, union halls, and university buildings into cooling commons. Public canteens stayed open overnight. Youth councils mapped elders’ homes, medication needs, shade routes, and working water fountains. Tool libraries became repair depots for fans, filters, window shades, and solar battery carts. Healing justice clinics sent care teams door to door.
A key part of this care infrastructure was the network of a wave of worker-led campaigns inside and around hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and public health agencies. Some involved occupations and service refusals. Others involved union pressure, public-health mutual aid, debt resistance, cooperative clinics, mobile care teams, and neighborhood health boards. These efforts did not abolish the private healthcare system, but they carved out durable zones of free and low-cost care while forcing larger institutions to negotiate with neighborhood health assemblies.
The language of “care infrastructure” became common after 2040. It meant that care was not charity. It was not an emergency supplement to broken systems. It was infrastructure: planned, staffed, maintained, funded, debated, and accountable. It also meant that the labor of care—so often racialized, feminized, underpaid, unpaid, or treated as naturally available—had to be named, resourced, and governed collectively rather than quietly extracted from the same people over and over again.
Healing justice frameworks helped shape this turn. Healing justice was rooted in abolition and anti-capitalism, with transformative justice, disability justice, reproductive justice, environmental justice, and harm reduction serving as core pillars for collective care and safety praxis. In Kensington, this meant refusing the old division between public health and public safety. In North Philadelphia, it meant connecting food, land, youth work, and grief support. In Grays Ferry and Eastwick, it meant treating environmental repair as a form of care. In West Philadelphia, it meant insisting that institutional resources be opened to the neighborhoods whose labor and land had long sustained them.
By 2043, each district had a public cooling network. By 2045, heat response had become year-round climate care: tree stewardship, roof retrofits, food distribution, stormwater repair, home repair, and public health accompaniment. The networks were uneven and often overburdened, but they changed what residents expected from public life. Cooling was no longer a private appliance problem. Health was no longer only a clinical encounter. Care was no longer something that appeared only after disaster.
People later said the heat taught the city that survival could not be individualized.
Phase IV: The River, the Refinery Lands, and the Wetlands Transition, 2046–2054
This phase marked a deeper struggle over food, land, water, and public infrastructure. The nation-state did not fall away, and the city did not make an immediate leap into communalist relations. Instead, assemblies, neighborhood groups, workers, land stewards, and climate justice organizers forced public agencies, markets, and private landholders into new forms of negotiation. What emerged was not a clean transfer of power, but a series of contested experiments in shared governance, ecological repair, food sovereignty, and community accountability.
After repeated disruptions in food distribution, price spikes, heat-related crop failures, and labor actions by warehouse and delivery workers, public canteens, worker cooperatives, farmers, and neighborhood assemblies pressured major food distributors into a new emergency food governance framework. In Philadelphia, this led to the Produce Market Accords, which required surplus sharing, public canteen access, worker protections, transparent distribution data, and assembly oversight during climate and supply emergencies. Organizers described the shift not as charity, but as a claim that food is life before it is property.
In Philadelphia, residents of Grays Ferry and the lower Schuylkill, working with Philly Thrive organizers, former refinery workers, public health advocates, watershed groups, and land stewards, coordinated a refinery-to-wetlands transition. The process restored portions of the lower Schuylkill into a living laboratory, climate buffer, memorial landscape, and public commons while keeping open difficult debates about remediation, access, labor, health, and ecological repair.
Public trust in policing continued to erode as residents organized against surveillance, environmental abandonment, overdose criminalization, and violence prevention systems that treated communities as problems to be managed. Abolitionist organizers, youth workers, healers, block captains, violence interrupters, disability justice groups, and survivor advocates expanded non-police emergency response and conflict transformation networks. These systems did not definitively defeat police power, but they reduced reliance on policing in many everyday crises and created new expectations for care, accountability, and prevention.
In the late 2040s, Grays Ferry and lower Schuylkill residents pushed the city to stop treating former industrial land as a development puzzle and start treating it as a public health, climate, and reparative land question. Philly Thrive organizers helped lead and sustain the struggle to repair the lower Schuylkill as a living laboratory, regenerative agriculture hub and climate buffer. The work drew on years of organizing around refinery pollution, public health, environmental racism, energy transition, and the right of fenceline communities to shape what repair would mean.
They formed the 2047 River Repair Assembly, which rejected three proposals: a luxury resilience district, a fenced research zone, and a corporate “green innovation campus.” The assembly’s counter-proposal was slower and more difficult: a refinery-to-wetlands transition governed by residents, workers, land stewards, public health advocates, and watershed councils. The proposal insisted that remediation not become another form of displacement, that scientific expertise had to be accountable to lived experience, and that repair had to include memory, labor, health, access, and long-term stewardship.
Former refinery workers became central to the transition. They knew the pipes, soil, risks, and maintenance needs better than consultants. Youth councils documented smells, symptoms, flood lines, bird return, and water temperature. Public health teams tracked asthma and heat illness. Artists painted tide marks on warehouse walls. Elders insisted that river access should include benches, shade, bathrooms, fishing platforms, memorials, and places to be quiet.
By 2050, the first wetland cells opened. By 2054, the lower Schuylkill River Repair District had become a public space, a living laboratory, a climate buffer, a memorial landscape, and a site of ongoing argument. Some residents wanted faster remediation. Some workers worried about job transitions. Some environmental groups wanted stricter ecological controls than assemblies would accept. Some developers never stopped trying to rebrand the river. Some agencies praised the project while resisting the transfer of decision-making power. Some people wanted measurable outcomes without valuing the slower work of trust, maintenance, and governance.
The wetland transition did not heal everything. But it changed the city’s imagination of infrastructure. Water was no longer only a hazard to be managed. It became relative, archive, teacher, and public space.
Phase V: Rematriation, the Cooperative Charter, and the De-Enclosure of Institutions, 2055–2064
With neighborhood institutions now strong enough to contest municipal, market, university, and philanthropic power, A People’s Philly entered a period of deeper struggle over land, sovereignty, cooperative economics, and institutional accountability.
By the mid-2050s, the assemblies faced a contradiction they could no longer postpone. They had created community land trusts, neighborhood commons, public canteens, care circles, and cooperative economies on land that was still partitioned under a colonial property regime. If land justice meant more than affordability, the city had to confront sovereignty and the colonial-capitalist treatment of land as a commodity. Some organizers called for the abolition of property as a governing logic. Others worked through land trusts, easements, public compacts, rematriation agreements, legal strategies, and municipal reforms that remain entangled with existing property law. The contradiction did not disappear; it became one of the central political questions of the decade.
The transition was grounded in Land Back, rematriation, Indigenous land trusts, treaty rights enforcement, honor tax initiatives, and the literal ceding of land to Indigenous Nations. Rematriation was treated not as metaphor, not as inclusion, and not as “community control” in general, but as a specific transformation in land relation, governance, and accountability. It also required non-Indigenous residents and organizations to confront the limits of their own claims to place, even when those claims had been forged through generations of displacement, defense, and care.
In 2057, after years of study, conflict, and public negotiation, the first Lenape Stewardship Accord was ratified. It created land-return processes, shared stewardship obligations, honor tax mechanisms, water protection responsibilities, and protocols for education, ceremony, and public use. Not everyone agreed. Some residents feared losing access to commons they had defended. Some officials tried to reduce rematriation to symbolic acknowledgment. Some nonprofits wanted to manage the process for grant purposes. Some neighborhood organizations struggled with the tension between Black land repair, immigrant belonging, and Indigenous sovereignty.Lenape representatives and allied organizers insisted: no more land acknowledgments without land relations.
In 2059, Philadelphia replaced its Home Rule Charter with the Municipal Cooperative Charter. This charter expanded worker-owned production councils, neighborhood procurement systems, repair cooperatives, free public canteens, and tool libraries. It drew from the Ten-Point Program’s call for a municipalized cooperative economy based on human need rather than profit, with enterprises under local assembly oversight, solidarity economy incubators, and community tool libraries. The Charter did not abolish markets, wage labor, or public bureaucracy, but it gave cooperative and commons-based institutions new legal standing, procurement power, and public legitimacy. It also created new conflicts over scale, accountability, labor, race, and who had access to the time and resources required to participate in cooperative governance.
This period also transformed the role of universities. By the 2050s, they could no longer maintain the same hard boundaries between campus and city. Under pressure from neighborhood assemblies, student-worker coalitions, community memory keepers, housing justice organizers, land trusts, public school partnerships, and public funding campaigns, portions of university infrastructure were de-enclosed and reorganized as public learning commons and reparative resource trusts.
In West Philadelphia, the same period brought the de-enclosure of university resources. The transformation did not happen because universities suddenly became benevolent. It happened through decades of organizing, litigation, strikes, student-worker alliances, public pressure, budget fights, land campaigns, and neighborhood refusal from housing justice organizers, Black Bottom memory keepers, youth councils, worker unions, neighborhood assemblies, and public funding campaigns.
By 2064, portions of what had once been called University City—including libraries, labs, clinics, kitchens, archives, gardens, classrooms, and fabrication spaces—were governed through reparative community-university resource trusts. These trusts did not erase the university, but they changed what it could claim as private, exclusive, or self-governing. The former campus became more porous, a knowledge infrastructure woven into Black Bottom memory, West Philadelphia land struggles, public school curricula, neighborhood repair projects, youth research, and cooperative production. Knowledge production was not simply “given back” to the community. It was made accountable to community governance, public access, and the people whose land, labor, histories, and taxes had long sustained institutional life.
Phase VI: The Data Crisis and the Community AI Accords, 2065–2070
The crisis began with convenience. Public agencies, hospitals, schools, and private vendors promised “care coordination” through predictive systems. The systems mapped attendance, housing instability, energy use, medical records, transit patterns, and public benefits. They claimed to prevent harm. But in Kensington and North Philadelphia, residents noticed that the same families were being flagged, visited, denied services, monitored, and disciplined. The pattern was not random. It followed older racial geographies of suspicion: the same blocks, families, shelters, clinics, schools, and public housing sites that had long been treated as problems to be managed rather than communities to be resourced.
In 2066, youth archivists uncovered that several “wellness optimization” systems were sharing data with law enforcement contractors and insurance entities. The exposure became known as the Lantern Leak because the first public teach-in happened under the lanterns of a converted corner store archive in Kensington. At the teach-in, harm reduction workers, parents, elders, disabled residents, youth researchers, and former case managers compared stories and saw the pattern clearly: care had been translated into risk scoring, and risk scoring had become another language for surveillance.
The response did not reject technology altogether. It rejected extraction. Community technologists, harm reduction workers, disability justice advocates, archivists, assembly delegates, and youth councils drafted the Community AI Accords of 2068. The Ten-Point Program had imagined algae-based AI infrastructure as sustainable computation for democratic planning and regional data management. The Accords narrowed that ambition: AI would be modest, transparent, consent-based, locally governed, auditable, and subordinate to human assemblies. They also insisted that no system could claim to “know” a community through data alone. Testimony, refusal, memory, context, and lived experience had to remain forms of public knowledge that no model could override.
By 2070, AI/algae/data coordination hubs helped communities tabulate needs, coordinate cooperative production, preserve archives, translate public knowledge, support accessibility, and track resource flows. But every hub had a shutdown protocol. Every dataset had a consent ledger. Every algorithmic recommendation had to be explainable in plain language at an assembly meeting. Every audit had to ask not only whether the system worked, but whom it made visible, whom it made vulnerable, whose labor it depended on, and which racial narratives it might quietly reproduce.
The slogan from Kensington spread citywide: “If it learns from us, it answers to us.”
Phase VII: The City Still Becoming, 2071–2076
By 2076, Philadelphia was not a utopia. It was a city with strong autonomous neighborhood institutions operating inside, beside, and sometimes against existing municipal, state, and federal systems. Police and prisons had not vanished everywhere in the same way, but many neighborhoods had built restorative and transformative justice networks that reduced reliance on institutional policing. Land had not all been returned. Housing was not universally secure. Assemblies still argued over scale, speed, jurisdiction, and accountability. Racial narratives had not disappeared. Anti-Blackness, settler colonial habits, ableism, patriarchy, adult supremacy, professional elitism, and property thinking continued to surface in old and new forms.
But the city had changed.
The 2076 stage of A People’s Philly was not defined by arrival, perfection, or escape from history. It was defined by maintenance and perpetual becoming. Across Philadelphia, neighborhood assemblies, land trusts, care networks, public canteens, youth councils, cooperative infrastructures, and community technology hubs had created other centers of authority. These did not replace the old systems completely. They interrupted them, negotiated with them, refused them, and sometimes depended on them in uncomfortable ways.
Children learned city history through neighborhood archives and river walks. Public canteens were as ordinary as libraries. Tool libraries smelled of sawdust, oil, and basil from the garden next door. Conflict transformation circles met in rec centers, courtyards, mosques, schools, and rowhouse living rooms. Universities shared labs, libraries, clinics, archives, classrooms, and fabrication spaces through reparative community governance agreements, even as residents continued to contest the terms of access and accountability. West Philadelphia youth could walk from a land trust courtyard to a fabrication lab without crossing the same social border their grandparents had known. Kensington healing clinics practiced harm reduction without shame. North Philadelphia assemblies planned forests, food systems, and housing together. Grays Ferry residents sat along a repaired river and remembered when the fence was taller than the trees.
Revolutionary intercommunalism functioned less as a completed political system than as a practice of coordination: a way for communities to share resources, compare strategies, build solidarity, and confront the risk of reproducing hierarchy across difference. The period was shaped by a set of recurring questions:
Commoning and De-Enclosure: Many forms of land, infrastructure, knowledge, food, and care once governed primarily through private property were partially reclaimed as commons, trusts, public goods, or shared obligations. Universities labs, libraries, clinics, archives, classrooms, gardens, and fabrication spaces became porous civic resources governed through reparative community agreements. The process remained uneven, contested, and legally entangled.
Rematriation as Sovereignty: Decolonization moved beyond metaphor through land return, Indigenous land trusts, water protection responsibilities, honor tax mechanisms, and shared stewardship obligations. These accords created ongoing jurisdictional, ethical, and political obligations that required non-Indigenous residents, institutions, and assemblies to remain accountable to Lenape sovereignty and land relations.
Abolitionist Social Infrastructure: Many neighborhoods built restorative and transformative justice councils, survivor support teams, violence interruption networks, conflict transformation circles, and community peace rooms. These systems addressed many forms of harm without defaulting to prisons, but they also faced hard questions about survivor safety, accountability, gendered violence, disability access, burnout, and the limits of community capacity.
Subordinate Technology: Algae-based AI and community data systems were used for democratic planning, accessibility, translation, resource coordination, and public memory. But these systems remained modest, transparent, auditable, consent-based, and subordinate to human assemblies through shutdown protocols and consent ledgers. Every generation had to ask again what the machines were learning, whom they made vulnerable, and which racial narratives they might quietly reproduce.
Governance through Conflict and Dialogue: This society did not overcome conflict. It built practices for staying with conflict without surrendering to domination. Dialogue, public study, memory work, and repair became democratic practices, not because they produced agreement, but because they made disagreement accountable.Ongoing Argument: Assemblies are sites of "ongoing argument" where residents still debate scale, jurisdiction, and accountability, expertise, labor, language access, disability access, and who had time to participate.
Challenging Hierarchy: The weakening of capitalist, carceral, and colonial institutions did not produce "aboriginal innocence" but rather a painful and creative "labor of childbirth"—a constant praxis of reflection and action to keep new bureaucracies from hardening. Assemblies could become exclusionary. Cooperatives could reproduce gendered labor. Land trusts could become bureaucratic. Care work could become invisible again. Youth councils could be celebrated while still ignored. The work required constant reflection, correction, and repair to keep new forms from hardening into old patterns.
Demystifying Power: Social roles, professional expertise, institutional rituals, and technical knowledge were regularly opened to public questioning. No individual, discipline, or institution could claim private ownership over knowledge or power without challenge.
Systems of Life and Resistance to Supremacy: The overarching goal of this experimental society was the preservation of life systems and the active resistance to every form of supremacy—human over non-human, adult over child, expert over resident, owner over tenant, one neighborhood over the other, one race over another.
Ethics of Complementarity: Communities increasingly understood themselves as participants in living systems rather than masters over them. River repair, tree stewardship, food sovereignty, heat response, and multispecies habitat work taught residents that infrastructure could support natural evolution rather than dominate it.
Youth Power and Intergenerational Care: The nuclear family was no longer treated as the only legitimate site of care. Communal childcare, youth councils, public schools, neighborhood archives, after-school design circles, and intergenerational care networks thrived. Youth were increasingly recognized as autonomous beings with the right to self-determination and greater decision-making power.
Multispecies Solidarity: Borders remained contested, but Philadelphia’s assemblies built sanctuary infrastructures, ecological corridors, river repair networks, seed exchanges, and migrant justice alliances that connected freedom of movement with the movement of water, plants, animals, seeds, stories, and people.
Sufficiency and Redistribution: The economy did not fully escape growth, scarcity, or accumulation, but cooperative institutions, public canteens, tool libraries, repair networks, community land trusts, and procurement systems shifted many daily practices toward sufficiency, redistribution, repair, and shared use. The question was no longer only how to produce more, but how to decide what was enough, who had too much, and what kinds of abundance did not require extraction.
The future had not arrived. It was being maintained, argued over, repaired, and taught again. The people were aware of how far they had come, but a central question remained. What are we still reproducing that we promised to abolish?