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Once we made news: the forgotten battles

21/06/2012 admin 0
It is been decades now that in Barcelona whole neighborhoods are demolished without the media even mentioning them any more. If someday these situations "made news", soon oblivion covers back their memory. A recent example was Can Tunis neighborhood, whose demolition was surrounded by silence in summer 2004; but in 1993, another neighborhood in the same Zona Franca district, the cases barates of Eduard Aunós fell leaving almost no trace in the city collective memory. The media were too busy celebrating the success of the Olympic Games, as well as years later they were covering the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures. A group of former inhabitants of Eduard Aunós have found this old reportage: it reminds us a forgotten battle, astonishingly similar to the one now taking place around the demolition of anouther group of cases barates: Bon Pastor. Someday, this one too will be forgotten.
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Barcelona, irregular borders

06/05/2012 admin 0
[caption id="attachment_3499" align="alignleft" width="670" caption="Del portfolio "Barcelona bordes irregulares" de Rosario Kuri (2012)."][/caption] An unordered series of texts, images, webpages, books, reportages, about the differents Barcelonas that we can find between the sea and the mountain, between the Besós and the Llobregat river. Barcelona bordes irregulares [see photos][read text] is a photoreportage by Rosario Kuri (2012) that draws a casual drift for the peripheries, breaking the image of Barcelona's postcards and expressing the diversity of landscapes and people that form the city. La Rabassada o l'utopia de l'oci burgués [webpage] is a book published by Turiscòpia (2012) about the bourgeois casino on the Tibidabo mountain, at the beginning of the XX century. Projecte Icària [webpage][album] is a blog about Poblenou and its industrial heritage, with lots of photos by Marta Domínguez Sensada of the parts of the neighborhood demolished in the 90s . Los intelectuales contra el Raval [post] is a brilliant text by Rodulfo Rufián Roto on the symbolic violence of the mainstream media, in the occasion of the inauguration of Raval's film library. Los jóvenes del barrio, a 1982 video about Canyelles neighborhood (Roquetas), in Youtube. And an article of New Left Review online, "The Spanish model" by Isidro López & Emmanuel Rodríguez [english][spanish], and an essential contribution on the building of the negative myth on the barrio Chino: Chris Ealham (2005) "An imagined geography. Ideology, urban space and protest in the creation of Barcelona's 'Chinatown'", IRSH vol.50, ideal continuation of the famous "Geography of Evil" by Gary MCDONOGH (1987).
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They keep calling them “baracche” (shanties)

09/02/2012 admin 0
Gentrification in Rome spreads in circles around the black hole of the historical center, attacking parts of town that we used to consider peripheral. In Tor Pignattara, the most densified and polyglot district of Rome, real estate speculators divide buildings in smaller units, and threaten the few little houses that are left: they keep calling them "baracche" (shanties) to legitimate their gradual demolition and substitution with palazzi. Organized crime and neofascism spread even in parts of town that used to be "red"; as politicians approve new urban plans that contain no urbanism except certifying any kind of old and new speculations. But resistance is also beginning to reorganize.
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To destroy and to construct: history of a factory

06/10/2011 admin 0
Friday october 7th, at 7.30pm, projection of Destruir y construir, video documentary about the factory of Can Ricart, in Barcelona's neighborhood of Poblenou. Can Ricart was a group of factories active in Barcelona since mid-19th century: in its construction had been involved important architects of catalan modernism. During the years of Barcelona's real estate euphoria (2000-2008), the City Council authorized the demolition of an important part of the premises, with no regard to the protests and the detailed studies who asked respect for the industrial heritage. Similar to what is happening in other parts of town, recently the administration admitted that it hasn't got enough money to build the "Museum of Languages" - the misterious, romantic and sustainable building that architect Benedetta Tagliabue was projecting for the part of Can Ricart spared from the demolitions.

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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Foreigner Rome (the uses of diversity)

23/04/2011 admin 0
[/caption] Zoning means that some parts of the city, for real estate or urbanistic reasons, are devoted to certain groups of population: if there are neighborhoods where immigrants live, it's obvious that the schools of these neighborhoods have to cope with much more children born from foreigners. Such is the situation in Torpignattara, in the east periphery of Rome: a primary school is undergoing a series of public debates abounding in words like "ghetto", "emergency", "alarm", "banlieue". While right and left-wing politicians declare themselves worried for the school's "italianity", its teachers are carrying out their work worthy of the best italian pedogogical tradition, using diversity as a resort to supply to the massive cuts and decadence of public education. Until when they will call them "foreigners"? Rome is changing, and while some use this transformation to boost war among the poor, others understood its potential to come through the cultural and political stagnation of the so-called "Italian society".
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Photos: Barcelona’s Montjuïc

11/04/2011 admin 0

Four photos of Montjuïc mountain, when there still were people living on it. Even if for history it was only “slums”, many of them remember houses, written records, roads and street numbers. These photos come from private collections of former residents of “Eduardo Aunós” neighborhood. The old slum dwellers, almost all of them from Murcia or Andalusia, had to leave their houses in the 1920s, because of the celebration of an Universal Exposition. They were relocated in the Casas Baratas, but then their sons and nephews were evicted again at the end of the century. The need for land hit again those immigrant families; and it doesn’t matter how many generation they had been living in their “welcoming land”.…