Protesters say they plan to air their opposition to “the undemocratic way in which the G20 operates and the decisions the group makes, which affect the more than six billion inhabitants of this planet.”
World leaders gather in this once rough-and-tumble US steel town on Thursday and Friday, and while most of the protests are expected to be peaceful, 29-year-old mayor Luke Ravenstahl is taking no chances.
He wants Pittsburgh to show off its new clothes. Once known for smog and smelters, the southwest Pennsylvania city on the Ohio river has undergone a rebirth to emerge as a haven for green business and young professionals.
The fear in the minds of residents, officials and security forces is that violent demonstrations such as those seen in 1999 in Seattle — where protesters and riot police faced off for days, disrupting a meeting of the World Trade Organization — will mar this week’s G20 summit.
“I hope they’ll keep the protesters under control so Seattle doesn’t repeat itself,” said resident Nancy Provil.
Ravenstahl has said protesters will be allowed to exercise their constitutional freedom of speech and assembly “within sight and sound” of the summit venue.
It turns out this will be in a strictly delineated area outside of the downtown cultural area where the likes of US President Barack Obama and China’s Hu Jintao will be sitting down with other world leaders.
Ravenstahl has also called in 4,000 highly trained federal police officers to back up local security forces during the summit.
“We know that there will be some individuals who will seek to do harm to our city,” said Pittsburgh director of public safety Michael Huss.
The bill for ensuring security during the summit is expected to be in the region of 18 million dollars, but the two-day meeting of the world’s top developing and developed nations is likely to bring more than that into the city’s coffers.
While the authorities were busy gearing up for the summit, the protesters were, too.
The Pittsburgh Organizing Group held a “Mass Action 101″ workshop for students last week, and will conduct a similar training session on Sunday.
“It’s less about advocating doing one thing or another and more of ‘how-to’ participate in a mobilization,” Patrick Young of POG, an anarchist group, told AFP.
“These are questions you want to ask yourself about what you want to participate in and where you want to put yourself and what kind of preparations you want to make before coming to a major demonstration.”
Activist groups around Pittsburgh have been trying to organize housing for the thousands of demonstrators from around the world who are expected to stream into the city for the summit.
The Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project (PGRP) has created accounts on the micro-blogging platform Twitter and a website where activists can find information on everything from where to get a meal to how many people have been arrested.
At least four major marches and rallies have been scheduled in Pittsburgh in the build-up to and during the summit. The first is a “March for Jobs” on Sunday, which is expected to draw several thousand people.
On the eve of the summit on Wednesday, workers and environmentalist movements will be holding a concert, which 10,000 people are expected to attend, according to Young.
The following day around 1,000 people are expected to march towards the summit venue in a protest organized by the Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project (PGRP).
“They have not applied for a permit, nor have they pre-emptively been offered one,” said Young.
And on Friday, as the summit winds down, protesters have been called to take part in the main event: a mass march on “institutions that pepper the landscape where the G-20’s worldview manifests… the places that symbolize the kind of world the G-20 works to protect and sustain,” according to the PGRP website.
