#9 We demand an

SHOW US THE BUDGET

Words like "world class," "innovative," and "resilient" are often used to sell the future of the city. But they do not describe how people live, they describe a product that can be insured, packaged, and sold.

Once a neighborhood, building, or way of life gets pulled into this system, it starts being defined by money: shared spaces get divided up, things that were once maintained get replaced instead, and things like care, labour, and memory - including Esch's genuine history as a steel town - lose their value, simply because they can't be predicted or turned into profit.
This way of building cities is driven by finance - one that sells off the future and neglects the present. The urban development of Esch is a performance, with Luxembourg as its backdrop: a perfect storm of geopolitics and ultra-financialization, condensed into one very small glass - a spectacle of quiet insanity. The existing city of Esch becomes a non-playable character in a rigged game, where the former steelworks in transformation are nothing but spreadsheets wearing the costume of neighborhoods.

You can see it clearly at Belval, the former Arbed and later ArcelorMittal steelworks that once made this city a centre of labour and industry. Two old blast furnaces still stand there as props, next to high end office buildings, mass produced housing, education facilities (not a campus), a concert hall and a shopping centre. Private developers are now turning this land into a new district designed around business and innovation rather than around the everyday life of the city.

The real negotiations take place behind smokescreens or off-stage. The true ambitions - and the potential to transform these spacesinto assets for the local community - lie within budgets and financial projections that resemble black holes: appearing empty and infinite, yet teeming with mechanisms that are impossible for citizens to grapple with.

The following demands set out what needs to change:

We demand that the site of Esch itself, precisely in its frictions and contradictions between industrial past and financialized future, be recognized and resourced as a site of possibility, and that all inquiry into how value is constituted, by whom, and to what ends, be conducted so as to keep open the possibility of imagining the city otherwise

1. Recognition of the city as a collective project.
   We demand governance structures that formally recognize Esch-sur-Alzette, and Belval in particular, as a shared undertaking among its inhabitants. We demand an end to the extraction of capital into distant shareholder returns, and its replacement with mechanisms of local reinvestment - revolving funds that recirculate development gains back into the wider city's own housing, workshops, and public spaces, so that value created by the expanding community stays rooted in the community.

2. New instruments of valuation.
   Critique alone is an insufficient remedy. We demand the formal creation and institutional adoption of alternative valuation frameworks, applicable to sites such as Belval, that account for commons, social networks, and the intangible fabric of collective life, rather than market price alone.

3. Full disclosure and audit of existing metrics.
   We demand mandatory transparency regarding the construction of current urban and economic metrics applied to Esch-sur-Alzette's redevelopment projects, including independent audit of the valuation models used by developers and public partners, so that their arbitrariness and susceptibility to manipulation may be established as a matter of record. We demand a system that is not so layered that no participant can see the whole, nor so invisible that no citizen can contest it.

4. A halt to the pre-leasing of the future.
   We demand that planning and investment processes governing the remaining phases of Belval, and adjacent sites such as Rout Lëns and Schifflange, be enjoined from foreclosing the future through speculative claims made prior to residents' opportunity to shape or inhabit it.

5. Institutional commitment to alternative inquiry.
   We demand the establishment of formal mechanisms, deliberative, participatory, and evidentiary, for identifying grounded, situated, and collective methods of assigning value in Esch.