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Istanbul, a city without limits. Documentary movie

15/11/2011 admin 0
"In Istanbul, we crossed the ecological limits, crossed the population limits, crossed the ecological limits. If you ask me where it is all going to lead, I will quote from Doğan Kuban: chaos" Mücella Yapıcı, chamber of architecture of Istanbul.
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“Negros” of the periphery of Barcelona: young Dominicans’ stigma and resistance

26/10/2011 admin 0
…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.
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Racism in “Santako”

07/08/2011 admin 0
Six cities around Barcelona - Hospitalet, Badalona, Terrassa, Sabadell, Mataró, Santa Coloma de Gramenet - are among the ten most populated in Catalonia. But only Hospitalet and Santa Coloma have a higher density than Barcelona, compact city par excellence. The urbanistic chaos that characterises Santa Coloma de Gramanet is the direct result of real estate speculation and political corruption: persistent racism among some sectors of its population is the other side of overcrowding and impressive diversity of origins that defines the people of Santako. But if in the beginning of the 20th century, those who rejected the immigrants from southern Spain settled in the casas baratas at least could hold to their local origins and catalan speech, in the 21th century those who promote boycott to arabics, chinese, latinamericans, romans of the city, are themselves - for the most part - second generation immigrants. The video Mézquita no! (2005) describes the conflict around the opening of a mosque in the Singuerlin neighborhood.

Sulukule: the first gypsy neighborhood in Europe

21/07/2011 admin 0
The Roma that arrived to Istanbul in the year 1000 settled here: the city still was called Costantinopolis. After a thousand years of cohabitation, the neighborhood of Sulukule was the first victim of the ferocious wave of gentrification that is at once globalizing and turkeyzing the city.
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Larache in the summer time

16/07/2011 admin 0

On summer nights, in the center of Larache (a port on the Atlantic, 80km south of Tanger) stroll all moroccans that came back from Europe on vacations. New cars, european clothes, overconfident attitudes: almost every family of the city has some relative in Spain, England, Belgium, France, Netherlands. In Larache, fish abounds, vegetables are cheap, and housing is affordable. It was here that the first experience of public housing in Morocco took place in the 20s: the neighborhood of Kalleto (Hay Jadid, New neighborhood), built for slum dwellers and migrants from aroubía, rural areas. For its inhabitants, each fight, every bad night, is felt as a shame, for it reminds them they are not in Europe, where everything is perfect: as the shikis (stuck up) of the center seem to assert, parading their pretended wealth.

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History and its distortions in the center of Barcelona

29/12/2010 admin 0
To understand the recent urban and social transformations in Barcelona's Barrio Chino, historical center of the town (that now, after gentrification and demolitions, we have to call "Raval") often the attention goes towards the subproletarians living and smuggling in the neighborhood: "an underworld of immoral behaviour" (1943). But it would be more useful to study another kind of commerces, much darker and of greater scale, than those of the underworld. The catalan bourgeoisie had been trying to transform and demolish Barcelona's city center during more than a century: this project had to wait during the dictatorship, but in the eighties the old dream came back to life. "These 200 families that had been holding power during 150 years, invested in purchasing blocks of flats in central Barcelona, so they would make lots of money when these neighborhoods would have been demolished and rebuilt". Read Adolf Castaños' Memory and its distortions (inedited, 2010) in English (pending revision). (original Spanish)
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Favelas: the essential is invisible to the eye.

27/11/2010 admin 0
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.
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Ethnicity and gender in a murder in the periphery of Rome

21/10/2010 admin 0

On october 15th, 2010, the 32-years-old romanian nurse Maricica Haiaianu, died after being hit by an italian young man in the Anagnina metro station in Rome. About this fact (racism? sexism? the two of them? or a complex system of symbolic interactions?), and about the context that produced it, writes the italian anthropologist Pietro Vereni. This is the translation of his article into spanish; you can read the original version in italian in his blog.

Lo siento, pero la cuestión es justamente étnica y de género. El asesinato por parte de Alessio Bertone de la enfermera Maricica Hahaianu en la estación de metro Anagnina de Roma, ha recibido mucha atención por parte de los periódicos, de la radio, de la televisión y de todos los medios de comunicación. La historia es esencialmente dramática en su banalidad (una nueva versión de la banalidad del mal, podríamos decir) y parecería una de esas trágicas “fatalidades” debida a la anomía de la vida urbana, a un sistema de relaciones sociales totalmente vacío de contactos personales y por lo tanto reducido a puro intercambio económico. Aunque no podamos pasar por encima de estos aspectos, y no hay duda que la vida en las metrópolis se caracteriza por un aumento de violencia aparentemente gratuita, pero creo que en este caso específico tenemos que investigar también su componente “étnica”, que no es absolutamente marginal como parecen suponer muchos periodistas y políticos: que han hablado de un caso de violencia que no hay que explicar absolutamente en términos de racismo o de tensión étnica.