Articles by admin

First International Conference on Anarchist Geographies

05/01/2017 admin 0
The choice of doing the first conference in an Italian small town like Reggio Emilia, where an established local anarchist movement already promoted events and publications on anarchist geographers is instrumental to the capital tasks of continuing a discussion among scholars and militants from different linguistic and cultural areas, and ensuring discussions involve grassroots movements and militant situations outside the academy.

War and gentrification in Kurdistan

17/10/2016 admin 0
War and urban renewal mingle in south-eastern Turkey, where the government wages its war against the kurdish movement also through the demolition of traditional neighborhoods and the displacement of residents in huge public-housing blocks.

More about Barcelona’s Vila Olímpica

15/09/2016 admin 0
The Vila Olímpica is the biggest planned intervention of Barcelona in the 20th century. Its construction required the demolition of the old buildings and the eviction of its residents, as in the hygienist urban planning of the 19th century. However, some exiled memories survived the destruction, and come back to life whenever one of the evicted returns in his/her former neighborhood.

Crossing the capital of culture: summer in Marseille

26/08/2016 admin 0
What happened with the Euromediterranée, an ambitious project that costed over 3,5 billion euros, and that transformed 480 hectars? Can we get rid of it by simply calling it gentrification? A commentary by two Italian planners, R. Marchini & A. Sotgia.

Same old story in Milan: The destruction of Isola

07/08/2016 admin 0
In crossing the Isola neighborhood in Milan, whoever knows Barcelona suffers a kind of déja vu. The same buildings, the same companies, the same destruction as in Poblenou in 2004. Nouvel is replaced by Boeri, and the Universal Forum of Cultures with the Expo 2015.

The Idroscalo, a self-grown neighborhood on the coast of Rome

02/05/2016 admin 0
Few people know that Rome has a coastal line. Where the Tiber river meets the sea, lies the last self-built neighborhood of the Italian capital: Idroscalo, where Pasolini died, and where 500 families have been fighting during half a century against the threat of urban renewal.

Repensar Bonpastor: finally, the book!

25/04/2016 admin 0
It is a pleasure to announce that finally we managed to publish the book Repensar Bonpastor: Tejiendo historias de Barcelona desde el umbral de las casas baratas, a collective work that is the product and testimony of the Competition of ideas for the neighborhood of Bon Pastor, on which we had been working for many years.

City Life Vida Urbana: How evicted turn into activists

23/03/2016 admin 0
Boston has today the highest income divide of the US: evictions invariably hit latinos or afroamerican neighborhoods. City Life / Vida Urbana since the 1970s keeps building a network of mutual aid among those who suffer the consequences of these housing policies, also through the use of theater, rituals, symbols.

Group photo in Montjuic

09/03/2016 admin 0
Pierpaolo Pasolini, Juan Goytisolo and Salvador Clotas in front of Barcelona's old slum of Can Tunis, that were demolished in 2004. A photo taken in 1968, from a post on Oriol Nel·lo's blog about "language, popular culture, and the revolutionary subject" (in catalan).
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Call for papers: The culture of the urban peripheries

03/11/2015 admin 0

Before november 8th (sunday) you can still send your papers to the call for The culture of the urban peripheries: Historical memory, urban struggles and social change on the fringes of the neoliberal city. It is an interdisciplinary conference that will be held on december 1oth and 11th, 2015 at the University of Barcelona. The panels will deal with the following issues: Central culture and peripheral cultures; Heritage and touristization; The elitary subjugation of ‘popular culture’; Social conflicts as a source of  unity.

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Life in the ruins of old Nanjing

30/10/2015 admin 0
The anthropologist Ye LIN invites us to look at the demolition of a neighborhood in Nanjing - very near to the spot in where the Youth Olympic Games were held in 2014. Ye studies the impact on the residents of the whole process, also highlighting how our idea of "community" influences the way we judge this kind of interventions.

The discreet urbanism of the bourgeoisie

05/10/2015 admin 0
As José Mansilla writes, in focusing on the rising, the growth and evolution of the middle class we understand how the so-called "progressive" urbanism in Barcelona took this turn to real estate speculation and privatizations. Will this process continue, or will we have the chance to see some change?