Articles by admin

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The forgotten mountain: everyday geopolitics in Sarajevo

29/03/2011 admin 0
“Do you know when was it the last time I climbed on Trebević? February 1992. I used to go there every weekend with my father. I never went again. From that mountain 22 grenades fell onto the roof of our house. Now I see it everyday from my window, and I just want it to disappear”. Bojan, 30-years-old Sarajevan.[br]The inhabitants of Sarejevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina) don't climb any more on Trebević mountain, even if the war ended 15 years ago; the restaurants and panoramic terraces are destroyed, the cable car that connected it with the city never worked again, and, most of all, there are parts of it where there still could be landmines. But it's not lack of money the main reason why the city administration is keeping Trebević in this state of "no man's land": the divided city is useful for both nationalisms, and an invisible barrer separating "us" from "them" undermines the postwar coexistence project and the dream of a city that could be universal again.
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The “Reconquista” of Alcoi (Valencia)

19/03/2011 admin 0
The transformation of the center of Alcoy, the most ancient industrial city in Spain, between Valencia and Alicante, entails great demolitions in the Partidor neighborhood, cradle of the spanish working class movement. The City Council is buying the buildings of the neighborhood one by one, then evicts its inhabitants, fostering deterioration and creating an excuse for their demolition. In the name of common good, and of the improval of urban life, all around Spain the historical places of the working class are under attack, like if history was only the history of the ruling classes; this process is even more dramatic where there were strong struggles and rebellions against the new-born capitalism. "The shame of having to attend to your own funeral", as sang by Alcoi's poet Ovidi Montllor, about the reconstruction of a steeple burned during the Civil War.
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Pedagogy of waters

01/03/2011 admin 0

"I will tell you something about stories - he said They aren't just entertaiment, don't be fooled They are all we have, you see all we have to fight off illness and death You don't have anything if you don't have the stories Their evil is mighty, but it can't stand up to our stories So they try to destroy the stories let the stories be confused or forgotten They would like that. They would be happy because we will be defenseless then". (Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, 1977)

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The “Bachillera” and the struggle against gentrification in Seville

20/02/2011 admin 0
Just as in Barcelona, gentrification arrived to Seville in the eighties, when the city began to prepare for Expo '92. But the struggles and mobilization against real estate speculation didn't begin until the decade of 2000. The Bachillera, a neighborhood of self-constructed houses in Macarena district, historically was in the outskirts of the city, but with the Expo entered in a "new central area". Residents own the houses, but the lands belongs to the Sevillan Charity Association, who wanted to demolish the entire neighborhood. The initial demolition plan was blocked through the collaboration of neighbors and activists/technicians, that managed to get involved in a rehabilitation project for the neighborhood. Neighborhood assemblies were held, then participative workshops, door-to-door enquiries, a consensual diagnosis of the neighborhood, and even a 15 days occupation in the headquarters of the Sevillan Charity Association.

We are not alone in the world: teachings from Paris’ “93”

10/02/2011 admin 0
Centre Georges Dévereux, founded by Nathan in Paris VIII University (department 93, Seine-Saint Denis), psychotherapists, philosophers of science, curanderos, babalaos, maîtres-des-secrets of uncountable origins and "affiliations" work together, united in the fascinating quest for a new "influence technique" to treat mental disease in a decolonized and non-ethnocentric fashion, in a world in which we know well, by now, that "we are not alone".
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Links on protests in Maghreb

30/01/2011 admin 0
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A competition of ideas against the demolition of a popular neighborhood

22/01/2011 admin 0
During the years 2009 and 2011, some members of our research group helped in the organization of Repensar BonpastorInternational Competition of Ideas promoted by a group of architects and urbanists from Barcelona with the collaboration of the International Alliance of Inhabitants. After various years of fieldwork (2004, 2009) in Bon Pastor's casas baratas, and helped by the stable relationships we entailed with a series of families of residents, we reached a conclusion: that in spite of the media and institution constantly repeating how this neighborhood is in need of "renewal" (the word they use to say "demolition"), other solutions are possible, for this group of social houses, "red" and popular, built by Barcelona's City Council in 1929: it could be possible to preserve the historical and social peculiarity that this neighborhood represents for its residents and for all the city. Cultures, habitus, techniques and languages developed during decades by the inhabitants of the 784 casas baratas, and deeply rooted in this particular style of housing, will not survive after the demolition of the neighborhood. Even many of its inhabitants, since "modernity" arrived to the neighborhood under the form of demolitions, had to leave the neighborhood or suffered violent evictions.
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The quality of life in Naples: between Pomigliano and Posillipo

14/01/2011 admin 0
[/caption] “An oasis of luxury in the capital of mafia" was the title chosen by a peruan newspaper in publishing this photo reportage about Naples' Circolo Posillipo. But in spite of many elements that might make us believe it, we can't pretend that Napols is just like a stereotype of a South American city, where the rich lock up in their golden bunkers, while in the streets the people shoot each other with guns. Partly because the members of Circolo Posillipo are not as rich as we could imagine; but mainly because Naples, as south american cities are, is a place far more complex than the unambiguous narrations we receive from the media, that now only see/sell the violent deaths, criminality, urbanistic and social chaos, while in the Nineties they only showed the monuments that were reopening, the dynamism of the new upper classes, and the rebirth of tourism. Even them the camorra controlled the neighborhoods, the peripheries were second-class places, the young people were beginning to assume crack and cocaine, hidden by the invisibility in which they were being kept. All these things, at that time, were not so fashionable as they are it now.
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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.
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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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December 2010: burning cars

22/12/2010 admin 0

Gentrification: cars burning (2010). “The BRENNENDE-AUTOS.DE webpage is dedicated to the memory of the cars burned in Berlin since 2007. […] During the last three years in Berlin more than 500 cars, mostly big engined, have been burned by night.  …

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Recipes to eliminate poverty in Buenos Aires

14/12/2010 admin 0
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.
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Barcelona: La Perona (1985-1989)

08/12/2010 admin 0

“Esteve Lucerón (Pobla de Segur, 1950), photographer, portrayed the gypsy settlement of La Perona for 10 years, from 1980 until its demolition. His photos are strongly influenced by the american reporters who worked on the Great Depression of 1929, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine, especially in the relationship towards the people he portrayed: empathy, self control, he never manipulates his subjects to stress the drama, never breaks the intimacy, doesn’t steal poverty. He doesn’t either have a sweetened merciful attitude: there’s social critique, it’s an anthropological document, historically valuable, since these settlements belong to a time of economical prosperity in Spain, when real estate speculation and conflicts among “lineages” or subgroups of gypsies burst, as the City Council decided to relocate – transfer/deport – some groups from an area to another with no regard except for the number of people. Lucerón gives a personal view of it, with a special attention towards children, and towards gypsy’s typical sense of humor, naughty and defiant“. Froum María José Furio‘s review on her blog. Some photos: [1][2]

  • Esteve Lucerón. La Perona (1985-1989). Agenda de la Imatge n. 56 (2010). Xavier Camino and Pili Díaz Giner wrote the text, and Jordi Gratacós, secretary of UPIFC, made the laboratory work on the photo negatives. [Exposition announced in UPIFC webpage]
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The dreams of architecture

03/12/2010 admin 0
"Secondigliano, Miano, Piscinola, all the northern periphery, and most of all Scampia, the youngest and most cursed neighborhood of Napols, have been covered with negative symbols, emblems of something dark and persistent, that by extension stains all the tens of thousands people that, in the peripheries, keep living a normal life". (Rossomando, 2007). For Scampia's "Le Vele", the enormous buildings erected in the 70s as a progressive and modernist project, and that now have become an internationally renown scenario of crime and marginality, the City Council is looking again for an architectural solution: to demolish or to preserve? The utopia is the "tabula rasa", i.e. solving social problems by tearing down and start again, or emptying and convert into a monument. "The complexity of places is poorly reduced to the choice between demolition and capitalization, both easy and spectacular solutions based on an attack on inhabitants' history" (Nocera 2010). Different are the utopias that follow all the people who struggle every day supporting the gypsies of Scampia's Rom community, the inhabitants of "Le Vele", the families suffering the consequences of so many years of corruption and crime. Will all this also end up into a "tabula rasa"?
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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.