Gentri-Fric-Acció, debates in Barcelona
Four days of debate in La Cinètika, a squatted social space in the neighborhood of Sant Andreu, Barcelona
A conference on urban research and activism in the US
From September 12 to 14 a conference on urban activism in Harvard will debate on the links between urban struggles and research activities.
Criminalization of the housing movement in Brazil
Last June 24th four activists for housing were arrested in São Paulo, Brasil, while seventeen others linked to the movement for squatting were put under arrest; fifteen more are threatened of detention. The arbitrariousness of the operation is another signal of the steady drift towards fascism of the state of Brazil, that is, the complete subjugation of public institutions to the interest of big landowners and investors.
The activists were members of housing movements that squatted and returned to the common huge buildings in central São Paulo; they were accused of criminal association and extortion, something that was also employed in other countries to criminalize squatting, but not yet in Brazil. For their defense, a new organization was created: the “Popular committee in defense of political prisoners and popular movements“, whose members are activists, worker union members, artists, journalists, lawyers and other people concerned by the criminalization of social struggles.
Given the previous cases of extreme repression perpetrated by Brazilian authorities against social movements, that include extrajudiciary killings such as Marielle Franco‘s death in March 2018, it is extremely important that all people concerned to the right to housing and to the city in all the world mobilize to denounce these arrests, to claim liberty for the prisoners, and the end of arbitrary persecutions against activists.
- Sign the petition for the liberation of the four activists arrested in Sao Paulo here
- Jornalistas Livres, “Prisão de lideranças do movimento da moradia é conluvio entre promotores e policiais“, June 28th
- Interview to one of the arrested activists, Preta Ferreira: video
- Letter of the “Comité en defensa de los presos políticos de los movimientos populares” (PDF)
Five years since the conflict in Gamonal
In 2014 some residents of Burgos fought a battle against the project of a boulevard planned to cut through their neighborhood. The conflict was so harsh that the City Council had to suspend the project.
New online seminar on the anthropology of urban conflict
From July 3rd to 19th, 2019, "Keys for the Analysis of Conflicts in Neoliberal Cities", organized by Antiarq and anthropopologists of OACU, GRACU, GRECS working groups of the University of Barcelona.
Evictions and citizenship in Casablanca
Thousands of residents of a self-built neighborhood have been evicted, their house demolished in few hours. They have been living there for almost a century; now they are camping near the ruins, and want to give up their Moroccan citizenship.
They died because they were poor
It was a scandal when the UK opposition proposed to take over empty buildings to house survivors of Grenfell fire. But in the past politicians already adopted this kind of measures to face the housing crisis; obviously, forced by the squatting movement...
Camping in September
Three interesting events this September: European Housing Action Camp in Lisbon from 21st to 25th, Right to the City Camp in Prague from 27th to 29th, Yimby festival in Boston from 20th to 23rd!
Auto-construction: for an autonomy of housing
John F. C. Turner (*1927) is an English architect known for its engagement with the study and practice of self-construction. He was influenced by Patrick Geddes and anarchism, he studied in London's Architectural Association, and very soon developed an interpretation of planning and architecture that does not overlook the relationship with its users
The second earthquake
"Emidio di Treviri" is a working group performing research action in the areas hit by the 2016-2017 earthquake in central Italy. They are showing how the political management of post-catastrophe housing, consumption, health, are increasing social inequalities to the point of creating a social earthquake, even worse than the real one.
All cities are possessed
“The aim is not to heal a sick space, but to free it from its evil condition: to save it. Urban space must be regenerated, its vices turned into virtues, its inhabitants redeemed from sin. The real enemy is not disorder, chaos, or poverty; the real enemy is the devil itself” (Manuel Delgado, “Todas las ciudades están poseídas”)
There is an intimate link between cities and the devil. All cities were born to contrast the terror of the wilderness, the dangers of the wasteland, and they are built around an axis mundi that protects its inhabitants from evil. Inevitably, they all betrayed this task. Inside them, other forces proliferate, more perverse than those of the wilderness. The bustle of the city, its promiscuous and uncontrolled intermingling of bodies, ideas, and actions, cause a moral panic far more terrifying than the dangers of nature.
All the recurring calls to regenerate and renovate the city, or at least the more disturbing parts of it, are always calls to expel the devil. The words that are used for it – culture, order, law – are apotropaic, like psalms or mantras that are pronounced in order to contrast the Evil by evoking its opposite, a ‘Good’ as imaginary and dreamlike as the other. Urban renewal is an exorcism: it aims to chase the demons away, to kill the unwanted and uninvited ‘others’, to purify the body of the city, and to return it clean and renovated to its legitimate owners – those imaginary and neutral ‘subjects’ to whom public space is thought to belong.
No violence is too much, to achieve this task. Whoever tries to oppose the sacred duty to chase away the Evil one, will be considered as dangerous as those who defended the witches, the sabbas, or heresy.
- Manuel DELGADO “Todas las ciudades están poseidas“, preface to Miquel Fernández’s book Matar al chino (Virus, 2016), on the demolition of Barcelona’s neighborhood of Raval (“Barrio chino”).
- Video of Manuel Delgado’s conference “Todas las ciudades están poseídas” at the conference Ciudadanía y espacio público en la ciudad neoliberal in México DF, november 2017.
- This documentary shows perfectly the demoniac imaginary projected on Barcelona’s city center, and especially on the Raval: “El carrer de la Cera“, 30 minuts, TV3, 1996.
- Many anthropologists underlined the political aspects of spirit possession, since Jean Rouch’s great classic Les maîtres fous (1955). A more modern example: Leslie A. Sharp (1996), The Possessed and the Dispossessed, on spirit mediums in Madagascar.
Other cities, other demons:
- Chiara ZANASI (2016) Demoni e metropoli, Manifestolibri, on the christian exorcist father Amorth, active in Rome until few years ago. A presentation of the book by Stefano Portelli, in a conference in the University of Rome.
- Federica DI GIACOMO (2016) “Liberami“, documentary on the exorcist father Cataldo, active in Palermo. Here’s a critique to the movie by another exorcist, father Dermine.
- Andrew Alan JOHNSON (2014), Ghosts of the New City, University of Hawaii Press. Ghosts pentrated into the imaginary of the old buildings in Chiang Mai (Thailand); but the new urbanization are not free from evil either.
- Michael HERZFELD (2016), Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok, University of Chicago Press. In Bangkok, however, residents of the ancient settlement of Pom Mahakan, under eviction, claim their right to stay, as the guardians of the shrines to the ancestors of the city. The spirits that protect the city would not agree with the demolition of the neighborhood.
- Ernesto DE MARTINO (2009 (1959)) Magic, A Theory From The South. HAU Books recently translated into English this classic of the great Italian ethnographer, whose original title was South and Magic. The complete text is available online! And here’s a review by Stefano Portelli in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2017 [PDF]. The book includes an extraordinary chapter on popular magic in Naples and on the ambivalence of Italian Enlightenment towards it. Another very important work is its posthumous book, incomplete: La fine del mondo (Einaudi, 1977).
Knowledge is in the neighborhoods
Neighborhoods are the collective ability of people to acknowledge the existence of the other. No surprise they are constantly under attack. With them, also the knowledge they represent are attacked, and the words and concepts that in neighborhoods are born and grow.
The city and the skin: public space and pudic space
The skin is the deepest thing there is. The fissures of the skin, the striate wrinkles of the flesh, reveal the word and the action. In the entrails of the streets, in the corners of the small alleys, urban life palpitates in revenge against urban planning.
New course in Architecture and Anthropology, organized by OACU
The Observatory of Anthropology of Urban Conflicts presents an online course on ethnography for the research in planning, that begins June, 20th.
To repopulate is not a crime!
All across Europe, hundreds of people are re-building self-sufficiency in lands that nation-states devote to huge infrastructures, often useless or harmful. Is the occupation of abandoned villages an anti-urban choice? In a system of production that sacrifices so much territory to the needs of the city, we should rather consider these places as urban peripheries.