Sustainable Urbanism and Direct Action

Benjamin Heim Shepard is Professor of Human Services at New York City College of Technology. For the last two decades, he has worked on campaigns for public space, including community gardens, bike lanes, and public welfare issues ranging from education to AIDS services. To this end, he has done organizing work with the Professional Staff Congress, ACT UP, SexPanic!, Reclaim the Streets, Times UP, CitiWide Harm Reduction, Housing Works, and More Gardens!. He is currently the president of the Mid Atlantic Consortium of Human Services. He is also the author of the books: Illuminations on Market Street, bel Friendships,Community Projects as Social Activism: From Direct Action to Direct Services, White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic and Queer Political Performance and Protest. Part two of this study is Play, Creativity, and Social Movements. Along with Greg Smithsimon, he is co-author of The Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York’s Public Spaces. He is the co-editor of the book From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization which was a non-fiction finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in 2002.

• 1. Cities as DIY Spaces: On Dialectical Activism and the Future of Cities2. Eco-Activism Increase / Reduce, Growth / Degrowth: From Seed Bombs to Community Gardens and Bike Lanes to Sustainable Urbanism3. Public Spaces and Urban Vistas: From Gardens to Urban Libraries and a Struggle Against the Negative4. Community Gardens, Creative Community Organizing, and Environmental Activism5. Dialectical Times: On the Movement for Non-polluting Transportation and Sustainable Urbanism in New York City6. Gardens Are Homes, Gardens Rising 7. Primitive Accumulation and a Movement for a Home in a Neoliberal City8. Contested Urban Space, Union Square, and Dispatches on Voluntary and Involuntary Arrests in New York City9. From Emma Goldman to Riot Grrrl, Sex Work, Autonomy and the Transformation of Streets: Reproductive Autonomy, Public Space and Social Movements10. Between ADHD and the Desert of the Real: Confessions of a Teenage Ritalin Junkie11. Bridging the Divide between Queer Theory and Anarchism12

In our current moment, filled with peril and possibility, Sustainable Urbanism and Direct Action is a welcome and timely intervention that casts a needed spotlight on effective ways to be actively engaged in forging a collective future that is more just, meaningful, and sustainable.