Europe

Horizontal anthropology in the margins of Barcelona

30/03/2015 admin 0
Stefano Portelli's La ciudad horizontal (Bellaterra, 2015), a research on Bon Pastor's 'casas baratas': a neighborhood where no serious fieldwork can be led without getting involved, without challenging the existing barriers, without revealing clearly the aims behind the research itself. In this case, those are to influence urban planning, to stop the demolition of the neighborhood, and to demand an active role for the residents in the transformations of their territories.

Heygate Was Home!

14/03/2015 admin 0
The Heygate Was Home Digital Archive collects the testimony of several former residents of Heygate, social housing estate in Elephant & Castle, London - they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The fall of the Roman Empire

26/12/2014 admin 0
A criminal network based on the allocation of public contracts linked together public employees, politicians from all the political spectrum, left-wing social cooperatives, neo-fascist groups, journalists, and the infamous mafia clan known as the "banda della Magliana".

To resist is to win: 10 years in the Forat

23/06/2014 admin 0
It has been ten years from that memorable night in which, after many months suffering the insolence of the city council, the continuous police harassment, and the arrogance of real estate investors, finally we returned them the blow. When various hundreds of inhabitants and sympathizers demolished the wall with which mayor Joan Clos ordered to encapsulate the Forat de la Vergonya, we understood that revolt is nothing more than the ultimate possible rational act against a governmental order based on the dispossession of the commons.

The Rumba of Barcelona (the “Can Vies effect”)

26/05/2014 admin 0
Requested by the metropolitan transportation authority TMB, catalan autonomic police evicted the historical Can Vies squat in Sants neighbourhood (Barcelona). But the eviction caused a wave of popular uprisings that lasted five days and five nights, and that ended with an attempt to collectively reconstruct the social centre.

There is life in the lagoon

26/04/2014 admin 0
We normally consider Venice as a dead city. Its destiny seems such an inescapable fact that so little is done and even thought to imagine a different future. But something is moving in the lagoon.

Two cities in the same Lisbon

27/08/2013 admin 0
Two Lisbons live together in the same place, and represent two different urban imaginaries: the Marchas dos Santos populars is an effort to bring back to life the impossible memory, of the organic unity lost in some faraway past, before the 'Pombaline Split', when all Lisbon was bairrista.
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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.

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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More on Barcelona’s city center: “The Melody of Raval”, by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

09/01/2011 admin 0
"Here we were all born in leftover neighborhoods, rounded by leftovers, waiting to grow up, to get old, or better said, to deconstruct ourselves; so we can receive all your sociologists, all your social psychologists, your substitute mayor, your worst dressed politician, the sons of your good neighborhoods that will give us examples on how to use abilities and efforts to help us out of the leftover neighborhoods; this is, you give us your leftover social science, your leftover psychology, your leftover mayor, your leftover solidarity, even your leftover fear, for sometimes you think that you yourselves could have been born in the leftover neighborhoods, that you could be leftovers yourselves; this is why you come down here to look at us playing the part of the assisted classes, useless even for production because robotics replaced us, and because our condition of leftovers can't compete anymore with leftovers from even more impoverished parts of the planet.

Istanbul: living in voluntary and involuntary exclusion

19/09/2010 admin 0
During 2005-2010 there have been about 1 million evictions in Istanbul. The residents of gecekondus are evicted to enormous public housing estates in the extreme periphery, where they are hit by intents to "civilize" and normalize the population - almost always Kurdish, Roma, Armenians or low-class Turkish.

“El Bon Pastón”

18/08/2010 admin 0

This short video documentary was made in 2004 by Núria Sánchez Armengol and Luciano Literas, starting from a series of recordings taken in the neighborhood of Bon Pastor in Barcelona. The popular casas baratas, 784 one storey “low-income” houses built in 1929 for immigrant workers, were undergoing the polemic “Urban renewal Plan” that entails the complete demolition of the neighborhood. In this documentary you can listen to neighbors’ voices, some agree, other disagree with the demolitions; while a special highlight is given to the resistance of “Avis del Barri” association: elder inhabitants of the “casas baratas” who struggle against the City Council’s Urban Renewal Plan. The same year, a few km further, the same City Council was building the “Forum 2004” and the residential estate “Diagonal Mar”. The video presents a critical reflection on these processes and on the impact of real estate speculation and urban renewal on Barcelona’s residents who are involved in it.

http://dvactivisme.blip.tv/file/493383/

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Des del Ressentiment (Barcelona, 2006)

14/08/2010 admin 0

Short documentary film we realized in 2006 on the factory of Can Ricart (Barcelona), under the effects of the “22@” urban renewal plan. All the industries and organizations that used the XVIIIth century stucture had to leave, as well as most of the inhabitants of the surrounding buildings. …