Articles by admin

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Around the world, around the world: INURA, EASA, AAG, IPSA

09/09/2015 admin 0

At the beginning of September in Athens there was the 25th congress of INURA, International Network of Urban Research in Action , about “Transformative urban politics”.

In Noviembre in Lubljana there will be the Congress of the Applied Anthropology Network of the EASA – European Association of Social Anthropologists, under the promising title of “Why the world needs anthropologists – burning issues of our hot planet”.

And to go even further, at the end of March in San Francisco there will be the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, where a panel will be on “Narrating displacement: lived experiences of urban social and spatial exclusions”. The call for papers will finish on October 15th.

While October 7th is the deadline to present communications at the panel “Contemporary struggles and revolt in Mediterranean cities” at the IPSA congress (International Political Science Association) – to be hold in July in Istanbul.

So, no excuses! Let’s work and present papers as much as we can, since we have to change this old academic paradigm: and the times are favorable.…

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Where is the new urban frontier?

24/07/2015 admin 0

An international conference on Global capitalism and urban regeneration, as an homage to the great marxist geographer Neil Smith, that left us some years ago. Where do they hold it? At the MACBA, the Museum of contemporary art built in the Raval in the beginning of the 1990s. Like Columbia in Harlem, like La Sapienza in San Lorenzo, like the Centre Pompidou in Les Halles, and like many other cultural institution in neighborhoods “in regeneration”, the MACBA represented the beginning of the new urban colonization in the heart of Barcelona. As to say: when space says more than words, when the container quarrels with the contents. But at the same time, calling for the need to transcend the pain and remember the history at the same time. As Miquel Martí i Pol says: vam girar full temps ha, i alguns s’entesten / en llegir encara la mateixa plana (1980) [we turned the page some time ago, and there’s people who keep reading the same old page].

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On with more dichotomies!

11/07/2015 admin 0

A brief note on a recent debate within the field of radical geography, which opposed Simon Springer, anarchist, and David Harvey, marxist. Each one defends his own position: Simon maintains that radical geography must be anarchist; David answers it’s not true, that it should be (or can be) marxist; Simon replies that Harvey didn’t get the point. The debate is interesting, up to a point, and shows how there are mortgages of the past for which not even the PAH will get forgiveness. Anyway, it highlights that critical geography is in an interesting moment, and that some debates that were important are reproducing themselves in the studies of space. We hope that the shifting grounds of the present will help to make possible what nobody managed to do in the past.

Taking the occasion, we point out that the Seventh Congress in Critical Geography will be held in Ramallah, Palestine, from July 25th to 30th (2015), under the title of “Precarious radicalism in shifting grounds: towards a politics of possibility”.

  • Simon Springer “Why a radical geography must be anarchist”, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2014, 4:249-270. (here for members, or on academia)
  • David Harvey “Listen Anarchist”, 2015 (on his blog)
  • Simon Springer “The limits to Marx: David Harvey and the condition of postfraternity” (on academia)
  • Katherine Gibson “Thinking around what a radical geography ‘must be'”, forthcoming in Dialogues in Human Geography (on communityeconomies)
  • Webpage of Ramallah’s International Congress on Critical Geography (ICCG)!
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El Haouma, that is, the neighborhood

09/06/2015 admin 0
What happened to these young men that were so celebrated in 2011, the main actors of the so-called 'arab springs'? In recent years we only hear news about politicians, leaders, terrorists... but what about normal people, where have they been? The answer is simple: in their neighborhoods. In Hay Hlil, in Oukacha, in Hezbet el Haggana, where there is the same anger and frustration that there was before the protests.

Three more presentations of ‘La ciudad horizontal’

17/04/2015 admin 0

– FRIDAY MAY 29, 7pm: Libreria La Ciutat Invisible, Carrer Riego 35-37 (Sants), with Pere López Sanchez, Stefano Portelli. Organization: La Ciudad Invisible

– SUNDAY MAY 31, 11am: Feria del Libro ‘Literal’, in the roundtable “The city as a battlefield”, with Manuel Delgado, José Mansilla, Stefano Portelli. Ateneu L’Harmonia, carrer Sant Adrià 20 (Sant Andreu) Organization: Editorial Bellaterra, Editorial Pol·len

– TUESDAY JUNE 2, 7pm: Ateneu Popular Julia Romera, Santa Coloma de Gramanet, with Juan José Gallardo, José Luís Oyón, Stefano Portelli. Organization: Biblioteca La Hoguera


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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.

How to put an end to gentrification

11/02/2015 admin 0
Those who want to study the city with a critical approach, can never leave aside the struggle in defence of the concept of gentrification, constantly under attack by capitalism and its thugs. The thesis that the substitution of the former inhabitants of the neighborhoods by wealthier sectors is not so bad, or not so common, it's found where you least expect it; we can never let down our guard, and we have to keep emphasizing the viable alternatives. We want to contribute to these reflections with three interesting links:
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A dead city

21/01/2015 admin 0

Like chinese boxes, this documentary not only brilliantly shows the institucional and political corruption behind the police-orchestrated hoax known as ‘4F’, which began on February 4th, 2006 in Barcelona’s calle Sant Pere Més Baix, but it also extends in a coil the understanding of horror to wider levels of society: from the police, to the judges, to the press, to social services, to the city council, to gentrification, in brief, to power in itself. Like before Joaquim Jordà’s De Nens (2003), now Ciutat Morta leads us from a particular history to the deep and terrifying comprehension of the general, of society, of the city. To the memory of Patricia Heras, the dead poet.

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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".

Sydney, a (post)colonial city

22/11/2014 admin 0
On the occasion of the opening of "Australian 'Ndrangheta", webpage of a UCL research group of which our friend Stephen BENNETTS is a member, we propose a series of interesting videos and texts from the other corner of the world, on topics such as the expulsions of Aboriginese from native lands and urban neighborhood as Sydney's Redfern.
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Second International Conference on Anthropology and Urban Conflict

13/08/2014 admin 0

After the success of the First International Conference on Anthropology and Urban Conflict in Barcelona in november 2012, the second conference is being hold now in Rio de Janeiro, and organized together by Barcelona-based OACU and Rio de Janeiro’s Laboratorio de Etnografia Metropolitana. As posted on the Conference’s webpage, “Just as the catalan experience of 1992 Olympic Games was frequently pointed as the source of inspiration for the current context in Rio, the academic production of brazilian and foreign researchers is allowing us to challenge the very construction of the “Barcelona model”, by showing its perverse social impacts which are the results of the processes of the internationalization and mercantilization of cities…”.

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We have always been a frontier: Icària neighbourhood, before becoming the Vila Olìmpica

17/07/2014 admin 0
How were the popular neighbourhoods of Barcelona in the Eighties? Those of us who weren't lucky enough to know Barcelona before the Olympic Games, now have few chances of catching something of that life before tourism, of that glory before fame. We had been looking for this document for years, and finally our comrade Gabriela Navas Perrone found it, nothing less than in Barcelona's Institute of Archeology (sic!): the study "Historia y vida cotidiana, el barrio de Icària, futura Vila Olímpica", youth work of the anthropologist Concha DONCEL, who in 1988, under a commission of Vila Olímpica 92 S.A. interviewed the inhabitants of the neighbourhood of Icària, now disappeared, taking witness of the existence of a cosy and familiar landscape in that area threatened by eviction since 1965's Plan de la Ribera.

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.