/PEOPLES’ UNITED NATIONS/DEVELOPMENT: Two Cities, Same Style

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

PERUGIA, Italy, Oct 9 2003 (IPS) - It must be coincidence of course that the streets of Porto Allegre feel so much like the streets of Mumbai. That could hardly have been the reason to move the World Social Forum from one city to the other.

That similarity is a lot more than some third world commonality; the developing world has after all far more diversity than the so-called developed world.

If you step foot in both cities, the continual buzz of the bazaars in Porto Allegre, Brazil, and Mumbai in India on the other side of the globe, is unmistakable. The two cities share street style without the usual wealth to back it, an energy that overrides organisation, their crowds and their colour, and who knows, even the sights and smells of a life that towers over colonial edifices.

But somewhere the similarities must stop. And the World Social Forum (WSF) moves to Mumbai next year after three years in Porto Allegre because it is also so different.

"The World Social Forum needs to be global, we cannot remain only in Porto Allegre," Candido Grzybowski, among the leading organisers of the WSF in Porto Allegre told IPS. "Asia is half of humanity, we need to be there and be in tune with the people there, their needs and their demands."

The agenda being worked out for the WSF in Mumbai is itself a pointer to how different a world it is to Porto Allegre beneath the surface. "They see problems there we don’t have," Grzybowski says. "And so the WSF in Mumbai will be looking at issues such as casteism and religious fundamentalism that we do not face a lot."

Given the diverging difficulties in society between one port and another, the WSF of all movements needs to be portable. This is the forum that hopes to give a voice to people around the world.

The principle of the move from one city to the other is clear, but logistics could present a problem. More than 100,000 people attended the WSF in Porto Allegre in January this year. Mumbai has capacity to take in all 75,000, Grzybowski says.

Moving the WSF to Mumbai "will be like a laboratory," Grzybowski says. "It is a risk, but it is important for the WSF to take that risk."

Indian organisers see no risk. But for all the ideological commonality of views around the WSF, some rivalry has inevitably surfaced between the organisers at Mumbai and organisers of the WSF at Porto Allegre.

Indian organisers say they can more than handle the event. The WSF will be held at a disused factory spread over 40 acres in Goregaon, a suburb about a 90-minute train ride from the centre of Mumbai.

"Our biggest hall can take about 8,000," Kamal Chenoy from the Indian Organising Committee of the WSF told IPS. "We will also have an open air theatre that can take about 20,000, about as much as the Gigantino." Public meetings and the opening plenary session January 16 will be held at this site.

The closing ceremony January 21 will be held on the popular Chowpatty beach in the city area of Mumbai. It will be a colourful event – an hour of speeches with Nelson Mandela expected as the main speaker – and several hours of cultural programmes.

The facilities at Goregaon will have all the room the WSF needs, Chenoy says. The main hall will be the site for two conferences a day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. There will additionally be facilities for 200 workshops a day, in rooms with a capacity of between 50 and 1,000 people. There will also be large facilities available for four panel discussions a day.

About 75,000 delegates are expected at the WSF in Mumbai, including up to 10,000 coming from abroad, Chenoy says. More than a hundred food stalls should keep them well fed.

But the Porto Allegre organisers are not necessarily expecting more of the same. The principle of taking the movement around the world physically means the event can be held one day in Africa, Grzybowski says. The only African country that could handle such a conference s South Africa, "and this will be a big challenge for us," he says.

Few delegates at the WSF expect perfection of organisational details, though. There is a fair degree of indulgence over arrangements that are a good deal less than perfect. Delegates are anticipating the realities of the developing world as they talk about them.

Activists working to promote the WSF say it is vital to keep up a momentum that takes the movement forward. To that end, the location of the meeting is only a small part of the movement.

The WSF is looking for more than a symbolic move from one city to another. "The World Social Forum is not an event, but a process," Moema Miranda from the secretariat of the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre told IPS. "The global movement of citizenship meets once a year, but there are different initiatives through the year."

The WSF is working principally with two strategies: with regional forums in places like Europe, Asia and Africa, and through thematic forums that focus on particular issues. Thematic forums have been held to discuss peace in Palestine, the issue of violence, drugs and human rights in Colombia, and in Argentina to discuss the debt issue.

After Mumbai the WSF will return to Porto Allegre. But it is not too early for many to be asking the question already: where do we go from there?