12th Annual Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space Film Festival —- September 19-22, 2024
Every Little Thing Adds Up
Featured films highlight urban grassroots environmental activism—revealing how community organizing, direct action and education have led to a more sustainable city and helped to combat climate change.
New York City has always been known as a town built on business and capitalism, from its beginnings as a strategic port city to the modern-day Wall Street. Showing that New York City can also be a livable, sustainable city has been an uphill climb. Yet community grassroots efforts have won significant victories, despite the city government’s resistance to change. These success stories provide a model of how we can create livable cities with clean air, clean water, and sustainable urban design. We can learn from this history to build a city with more green space and ecologically sound transportation systems, including greenways, bicycle lanes, electric buses, and expanded rail networks.
This path towards sustainability really began in one neighborhood—the Lower East Side, where, in the financial crisis of the 1970s, local residents reclaimed vacant lots and abandoned buildings and began rebuilding their community in a sustainable way. This led to grassroots initiatives for affordable housing, community gardens, and composting and recycling programs. Many of these initiatives were later taken up by the city authorities. These community members and activists helped transform abandoned lots into vibrant, sustainable community gardens. In fact, New York City has one of the largest amounts of community gardens in an urban setting.
The 12th Annual Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space Film Festival: Every Little Thing Adds Up will highlight these small but significant changes that affected New York City and provide an example for the rest of the planet. We will especially highlight the work of such early community groups as the Village Green Recycling Team—which started recycling in New York City, the Lower East Side Ecology Center—which started recycling, composting, and e-waste systems, Time’s Up! environmental organization—which helped start New York City’s pedal cab business and came up with strategies using group bike rides to increase cycling and put pressure on the city to create the sustainable urban design that we enjoy today.
The screening will be held outdoors in Lower East Side community gardens from September 19th to September 22nd in collaboration with La Plaza Cultural, Green Oasis Community Garden, and 6&B Garden. In the event of rain, the screenings will be moved indoors to 155 Avenue C. Up to date programming information is available at https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/every-little-thing-adds-up-3596759
A shortened version of the schedule and program is below.
Thursday, September 19th, 7pm at La Plaza Cultural (9th St and Ave C)
featuring films about bicycle activism and sustainable transportation infrastructure.
Friday, September 20th, 7pm at Green Oasis Community Garden (8th St between Ave C and D)
featuring films about community gardens in the Lower East Side.
Saturday, September 21st, 7pm at Tompkins Square Park
the Emma Goldman Film Festival follows the Anarchist Book Fair in La Plaza.
Sunday, September 22nd, 7pm at 6&B Community Garden (6th St and Ave B)
featuring shorts about how recycling, composting, and more began in New York City.
