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Antropología en la periferia
¿Cómo cambia la ciudad? ¿cómo reaccionamos los habitantes a las transformaciones de nuestro entorno? El Grup de Treball de Perifèries Urbanes de l'Institut Català d'Antropologia, pretende buscar formas de abordar las dinámicas de modificación del paisaje humano que acompañan las transformaciones del paisaje urbano, es decir, las ciudades. Estando allí, en las periferias, es decir lejos de los centros de poder; creando vínculos nuevos con sus habitantes; intentando comprender, explicar, describir, siempre en dirección de una aplicación práctica y pública del conocimiento.Una mención prestigiosa
El proyecto Repensar Bonpastor y nuestro grupo de trabajo han sido reseñados por Denise Lawrence-Zuniga en American Anthropologist vol.114, sept.2012, pp.526-527. Bajar PDF del artículo
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Category Archives: America
Tijuana’s Flowers of the Rancho
“Don’t be fooled por el mito y la leyenda: neither Sin City, nor the happiest place on earth [...] Tijuana never stops [...] this is why it’s so hard to capture it, and so easy to put labels on it”. Rafa Saavedra, Tijuana makes me happy, 2002.
Our friend Anna BOSCH had been giving a workshop in participatory photography at Rancho Las Flores, a spontaneous settlement in Tijuana: shanties and self-made houses less than 1km from the most frequently crossed international border in the world. Participatory photography (in which Barcelona’s Ruidophoto and CFD had been experimenting since many years) is the experience of teaching photography and providing cameras to people not acquainted with this media; In this way, photography becomes a mirror and a window, as the women (“las Flores”, the flowers) of Tijuana’s Rancho produce images that are both tools for their own collective reflection, and means to communicate their lives and points of view to the outside. Continue reading
Shift Happens! Critical Mass at 20
The Critical Mass is an “organised coincidence” of cyclists that periodically celebrate a collective bike ride in the streets; its purpose is to show to the society the great advantages that bicycles could provide to urban mobility. In the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the first Critical Mass in San Francisco, one of its pioneers, Chris Carlsson, together with other contributors, edited the book Shift Happens. Critical Mass at 20, a collection of experiences and essays from some of the over 300 cities of the world in which the event reached an autonomous life, after that first bicycle ride. This is the meaning of the expression critical mass – the number of participants needed for phenomenon to start moving and growing by itself. The Critical Mass does’nt ask, it builds, giving form to a livable city through its own praxis. The presentation of the book in Madrid – where every last thursday of the month a Bicicrítica is held through the center of the city, while ten more happen in other neighborhoods and municipalities (like Fuenlabrada, Tres Cantos, Alcalá de Henares, Moratalaz, Ciudad Lineal) – was the occasion for a radio debate in “Carne Cruda”, RN3, for the participation of the book’s editors in a bicicrítica (read here Carlsson’s impressions) and for the presentation of another book of his “Nowtopia, How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclist and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today“, in Traficantes de Sueños bookshop (here the audio of the event). Shift Happens‘s chapter on Madrid is the summary of an ethnografic article on bicycle repair workshops inside the occupied social centers of Madrid, that can be downloaded entirely from the link below.
- Elisabeth LORENZI (2010) “Centro social en movimiento. Los talleres de auto-reparación de bicicletas en espacios autogestionados” in Mario Domínguez, Miguel Ángel Martínez, Elísabeth Lorenzi, Okupaciones en Movimiento. derivas, estrategias y políticas. Madrid: Tierradenadie [ENLACE]
- Web of Bicios@s collective in Barcelona, and of bicitaller of “edificio 15O”
- web of the Critical Mass in Madrid: Bicicrítica
- The final presentation of “Shift Happens” in a bookshop in San Francisco will be on september 26th, the day of the anniversary, and will be part of a series of activities that will attract to the city cyclists from different places.
Posted in America, Europe, Madrid, Spain, United States
Tagged events, popular celebrations, resistance, social movements
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Memory of Reclaimed Urban Space in New York
Lower East Side, the small, enigmatic and still resistant neighborhood in Manhattan, (NYC), still keeps the marks of a long history of squatting and counterculture, evidenced by many spaces such as housing projects, social centers and community gardens. The neighborhood is undergoing a strong gentirification process in which squatting has played a special role through recuperation of spaces and local social life. One of these spots provides accomodation for an interesting project of retrieval of the historical live heritage of the neighborhood. MORUS, or Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, is a small but dynamic museum meant to present squatting and its influence on the neighborhood in an innovatory form, at the same time underlining its live traces. Its promoters intend to show how community and grassroot organizations in East Village helped to transform abandoned buildings and empty lots in spaces for a vibrant community as well as contagious for those who visit it from outside. Continue reading
Posted in America, United States
Tagged real estate speculation, resistance, social movements
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The Pinheirinho massacre
In the morning of january 22nd, 2012, 2000 military police broke into the Pinheirinho settlement in Sao Paulo (Brasil) with helicopters, tanks, horses, tear gases, and began the eviction. Almost 10.000 people had been living there for about 8 yeras; they had just regularized their housing titles. But the eviction was promoted by a company whose director fled the country in 1990 for finantial crimes, and that now needs the land to speculate, keeping them empty. In preparation of 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games, some 170.000 people are under eviction all around Brasil. Residents of Pinheirinho strenuously resisted the eviction, that ended with 7 dead, and tens of wounded and arrested. Public houses had been promised to the evicted, now stacked in churches or gyms; but “those in charge of building social houses are part of the same bloodthirsty, prejudiced and deceitful elites as the governants…”
- Video documentary: “Pinheirinho: a verdade nao mora ao lado“, by Coletivo de Comunicadores Populares; and a reflection on the role of independent journalism.
- Brigadas Populares, Justiça Global, Comunidades e Movimentos contra a violência, “Pinheirinho: a first narrative of institutional violence” [PDF]
- More news: Eviction of Pinheirinho settlement [vídeo] :: “Who gained with the massacre?” [article in Brasil Indymedia] :: Ten lies about Pinheirinho [article in OutrasMídias] :: A week after the massacre [artículo] :: Right, state and terror in the case of Pinheirinho [artículo en A arma da crítica] :: Communiqué of Comitês populares de Copa :: A week before the eviction [text Alliance of Inhabitants]
- Dossier: “Big events and human rights violations in Brazil” [download PDF]
- See also the Grupo de Geografía Crítica Radical (GESP)‘s webpage, from University of Sao Paulo
Posted in America, Brazil
Tagged big events, evictions, media violence, police violence, real estate speculation, resistance, visual anthropology
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“Negros” of the periphery of Barcelona: young Dominicans’ stigma and resistance
“…blacks always worked like ‘niggers’; blacks are the ones who work hardest, because they want to live like whites do…” Simón, 16 years old, living in L’Hospitalet (BCN) from age 9
Los Kitasellos is the name of one of the youth groups in the outskirts of Barcelona with which anthropologist Luca Giliberti (University of Lleida – FPU-ME researcher) is doing his fieldwork. Freeing themselves from the mark (“quitarse el sello”) of being different, means for many young Dominicans in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat resisting against the stigma with which they are labelled, even by the institutions – in political campaigns, constant police raids, newspapers always in search of Hispanic gangs – and convert this discrimination in an emblem of black identity. Continue reading
Posted in America, Barcelona, Catalonia, Europe, Spain
Tagged education, ghetto, immigration, media violence, racism, social fragmentation, social policies, visual anthropology
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Recipes to eliminate poverty in Buenos Aires
On december 8th, 2010, the Metropolitan and Federal Police attacked the 200 families who had settled in Parque Iberoamericano (Buenos Aires), as if it was an enemy army: the operation ended with two deaths and many injured. Then, the local gobernment and mass media promoted xenophobia, presenting the abandoned park as “squatted” by bolivians and paraguayans linked with drug dealing: so racist groups from the neighborhoods, together with violent hooligans – patotas de barrabravas , close and often directly hired by the local government- continued the job, killing two more of the settlers. Continue reading
Posted in America, Argentina
Tagged immigration, police violence, racism, resistance, slums
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Favelas: the essential is invisible to the eye.
We often have a wrong image of Brazil’s favelas, due to distortions from stereotypes and movies. Often poverty does not appear in the form of poor hygenic conditions or lack of basic infrastructures. The fact that many organizations, which had been in the opposition during the dictatorship, were recognized publicly and institutionalized in recent times, turned assistentialism into a system; these groups, now as NGOs, had been carrying out a continuous and financed work during the last decades, that improved many visible aspects of life in poor neighborhoods; but at a price paid in terms of autonomy and strength of self-organization. Communities turn dependent, exposed and unable to defend themselves.
In Sao Paulo’s Monte Azul, studied by Fabiana Valdoski, a group of German anthroposophists founded the Associação Comunitária Monte Azul, an NGO that monopolized all of the improvement and development of the “favela”. When organized crime began to penetrate Monte Azul, since 2008, the inhabitants were no longer able to prevent it, and the NGO could do nothing about it. Continue reading
A dialogue through brazilian urban geography
The Grupo de Estudo sobre Sao Paulo GESP – Laboratorio de Geografía Urbana LABUR studies the growth of Sao Paulo metropolis, within the Department of Geography of the University of Sao Paulo (the webpage is very interesting). Some of its members will be in Barcelona on friday october 29th, 2010, and will held a seminary on Problems in brasilian urbanization: new strategies for production of the space. Time: 10:00, Room 505, 2nd floor, Faculty of Geografía y historia. Calle Montalegre 6, Raval, Barcelona. Hablan: Marcela Nascimiento, Fabiana Valdoski Ribeiro, Danilo Volochko. Modera: Rosa Tello. Continue reading
