This essay was part of a show curated by Alan Moore at ABC No Rio in New York. Part inquiry, part travelogue, part outburst, it looks at the situation for cultural defense and alternative housing in Spain a few years ago. Apart from a very few updates, untouched. Particulars have no doubt changed, elements of the equation not so much.
We live inside small nations that, frustrated by immense bureaucracies, nevertheless live on in dreams. photo /jg
A Roof Over One’s Head In This World
There is space all around us but there is never enough room. Man can make a crime out of almost anything.
Spain is in crisis. So is the world. To each country on the modern treadmill to that ever-distant peace and prosperity their own particular nervous breakdown.
The particulars of Spain´s present crisis include a largely agricultural economy; a millennial culture which predates and incorporates Christianity and everything after, which is pre- or anti-capitalist in its essential communal framework; a socialist government, paralyzed by financial crisis and looming austerity, desperately trying to figure out how to revive an economy driven by two restless demons: construction and tourism, both given to excess and illegality.
Spain, blessed with large amounts of open space – a rarity in the Old World – was, before the crisis, building feverishly, on the coasts especially but in the remote villages, too, and all around the cities, where the suburbs have pushed out into the plains and Spaniards have adopted the awful ritual known as the daily commute.
Meanwhile a brief stroll around any city, especially any southern city, reveals an awesome number of abandoned buildings, in and around the center, extending to the periphery. City Hall in the town where I live is bound on one side by an avenue of fashionable stores and on the other by a warren of narrow, medieval streets where every fourth or fifth building is either for sale, abandoned or wrapped in a kind of muslin that announces a possible reforma, now delayed if not outright canceled and forgotten.
The street leading to the Alhambra in Granada is a winding, three-block affair that goes up the red-dirt hill known as Sabika. Here is the hill that is the glory of Spain, or as the tourism experts like to say, one of the top three things to see. Look out from here to the rolling hills of the green Vega, prodigious of history (when Garcia Lorca was a child, a plowing farmer overturned a Roman statue a foot below ground), a plentiful basket of food, and let your eyes wander in one direction to the Sierra Nevada behind you and to the Mediterranean below. Wonderous. It must be fine now that you don’t have to dodge the tourist buses.
The last time I cimbed the hill I stopped counting at a dozen abandoned buildings, some of them okupas, urban occupations or squats. A popular grafitto asserts that there are three million abandoned buildings throughout Spain.
Where there is space, there must somehow be an applied scarcity. A magical scarcity that will cause people to rush off in one direction and not the other.
There is always space for people to live but never enough houses. Do we frame space so as to keep some people out? Of course we do. In the United States we like to build sprawling suburbs and prisons because we are afraid of space, the terrifying sense of inadequacy we feel when confronted by something we have no sense of how to use.
The Spaniard is a town dweller, a man or woman intimately identified with the place where they came from. But with modern practices come modern vices, and here in Granada, the Vega, the lovely rolling hills and rich farmland surrounding the city, is seen as so much surplus, a place to expand in, to build parks and factories and new villages. Immense amounts of space exist inside the city proper but it is ignored, forgotten. (The old train yards in the city, the abandoned huertas, the new “park” on the outskirts.) It does not matter how many people protest, progress rolls on. The Germans send their money to the EU, and it goes straight into the hands of the bureaucrats, who justify their time with grand projects and petty larceny.
The popular explanation is that after many years of extreme poverty, Spaniards wished to join Europe, and that meant new homes in new apartment buildings, essential modern conveniences like air conditioning and winter heating, with a shopping center nearby. Goodbye to all that they said to 2000 years of tradition. Easy money financed the boom, whose essential ingredient is that tightly knit band of thieves which includes the landowner, the banker, the constructor, and the mayor in city hall, along with their regional higher-ups. In Spain this web of connections is called enchufismo. Meanwhile the development on Spain´s sunny coasts has been such a whirlwind of corruption and ecological devastation that even the stolid European Parliament told Spain to knock it off or face sanctions. Gated communities, golf courses, German and English on the coast, the international jet set and Saudis in Marbella, hotels built in national parks.
Meanwhile, okupas everywhere, people young old or in-between, transients or long-time residents, anarchists or homeless, face the threat and often the reality of eviction at the behest of local officials in cahoots with developers who hope to claim a juicy piece of real estate at bargain prices. Simply kick out the squatters and wait for the local government to provide its free-of-cost rehabilitation. Then you either move in or you rent the place to the lucky foreigners who prospered in the New Economy.
The Casa del Aire is a large building sitting between the Cuesta de Beteta and Callejon Zenete in Granada´s Albayzin; at one time people were able to pass through the building as a shortcut on their way up the zigzagging streets of the Albayzin to the steep hills of Sacromonte and beyond. Del Aire was the common name for such houses. Casa del Aire has been squatted continuously since 1980 and has been fighting eviction since 2004.
The Albayzin, or “poor people´s barrio” in Arabic, was designated a Patrimony of Humanity by UNESCO in 1994. This much-sought-after title meant that large sums of money began to pour into the local government for "rehabilitation." Anything goes when you put it like that. And while UNESCO regularly complains about smooth stones in the walkways instead of the bloody authentic rough cobbles that give real, living older people such a hard time, Granada’s government wages one of those pointless campaigns against urban expressionism, aka grafitti. (Most grafitti is bad. It’s a fact. So, channel the energy. You have to speak to politicians as if they were children.) Both have turned a blind eye towards rampant development and destruction of the character of the neighborhood.
Spare a moment for Granada’s social topography. The whole world has heard of the Albambra, the fantastic "Moslem gazebo" (Gerald Brennan´s words), which functioned as the administrative and residential headquarters of Nazari rule in the kingdom of Granada. Immediately below the Alhambra sits the Realejo, at one time a largely Jewish district, with its numerous examples of Gothic architecture. Across the Darro River sits an equally imposing hill where the workers and poor people lived: the Albaycin. These three living monuments are why anyone comes here.
The Albaycin has always been a place apart: it adamantly maintained its character long after the Reconquest. What distinguised the place was its people and its homes, the famous carmens, small palaces built around walled gardens. (Carmen, from karm in Arabic.) The streets are tricky, winding affairs, unnamed for most of their existence. The people who live here still call themselves Albaycineros. They consider the trek down the hill to Granada "a trip into town."
The goldrush began with that UNESCO designation. The Albaycin, along with the Alhambra the purest example of Arab civilization in Europe, is under attack. Families and the elderly evicted, buildings changed to reflect the uniformity of tasteful modern living, roads widened, parking garages installed. Contracts for prize lots are handed out illegally, while other buildings are left to ruin to encourage people to leave. The locals protest and the squatters in the Casa del Aire hang on. Granada is a small town out of the spotlight. Meanwhile, to give everything the authentic touch, the old walls surrounding the ancient city are being restored. All that’s missing are high beams and surveillance cameras, plus an ever so convenient shopping center.
Unlike some of the okupas in the larger cities, the Casa del Aire is not a social center. Tenants, some resident since 1980, hold on and fight legal battles to keep the city at bay. The building has changed hands twice since the brothers who owned it sold out in 2004. Until that time, there were verbal contracts between the residents and the owners, the residents made their own repairs. 2004 was the beginning of the Golden Boom, and the residents of the Casa del Aire have been fighting for the space ever since. “The problem presented by the Casa del Aire is merely the tip of the iceberg in a urban conflict whose character is structural and social, involving real estate speculation that benefits businesses, banks, politicians.... Meanwhile the social fabric of neighborhoods disappears and the historic centers are inundated by luxury apartments, which stretch to the outer limits of the old neighborhoods.” So says their website, if it’s still up.
Granada is not so much provincial, that favorite word of the Madrileños, as it is smug. It is wealthy two times over, and being a laid back place graced by poets and painters and musicians over the centuries, tends not to put up a fight about anything. But the fabled city around them, the one Granadinos so profit from, disappears a little bit more each year.
La Casa Invisible is located in the historic center of Málaga, el casco antiguo, on a block that seems nearly abandoned at first glance. It is a large solar, with a four storied front building, a garden and a building in the rear. La Casa Invisible hosts a Free University, an Office of Social Rights, as well as theatre and lecture series.
When I visited Malaga in April, the lights were out – on the entire block. The building has generators, and had put on a concert the night before. It is large hulking edifice – plenty of room for conferences, kitchens, cafes, classrooms. And they are all there. La Casa Invisible seems to be the model or the prototype for the struggling urban occupation/social center, reminiscent of many of the abandoned schools occupied on New York’s Lower East Side. With one crucial difference.
They are organized, with prominent supporters. As they note in their literature, “The organizers of Casa Invisible began to negotiate with the city government, the legal owners, from the time the building was occupied, undertaking a process of investigation and experimentation unique in Spain. With the result that legal authorities, people who play a role in the life of the city, creators, cultural directors and urbanists in conjunction with the building’s governing body work together to insure that the building maintains its autonomy within the context of the legal system.”
They are on the road to legal status. The government in the south is so large – nearly 20% of the citizenry work for a branch of the local Ayuntamiento or Junta de Andalucia – that you can be in court battling one arm of the law while having another arm print up your deluxe brochures and accepting an offer to speak at your next urban strategies conference.
And yet the directors of Casa Invisible don’t forget to throw some wood on the fire: “La Casa Invisible is an experimental institution whose mere existence is a stark demonstration of the capacity of the citizens to manage their common interests and necessities. It is a common space not managed by the state. We don’t need the market to produce value, and we don’t need the State to manage everyday life. We don’t need permission to be free.”
One of the center’s directors handed me a volume entitled Malaga Solar de Paraiso published in the 90s. While the Moor’s castle in the center was being painstakingly rehabilitated, and the house where Picasso was born was being turned into a yet another museum, the bulldozers were at work, tearing down blocks and blocks of old buildings. The center of Malaga is a collection of faceless, tasteful modern apartment and office buildings. The “tear it all down” fury seemed to have abated, until I looked from the wooden plank where I was standing and realized another block had been quietly imploded to make way for a Thyssen Borneheiser Museum of 19th Century Landscapes. It is certainly needed that, we can never get enough of 19th Century landscapes or 19th Century trollopes. Let there be somewhere in Europe an enormous museum that can hold the entire “realistic” 19th Century in it, let it have Darwin’s head with Dostoevsky’s God-furrowed brow, Beaudelaire’s eyes and the moustache hiding Nietzsche’s lips and the entrails of everyone who died in the name of Progress in it, and let it be on wheels so that it may travel Europe constantly, an enormous box on six hundred wheels, let it travel and terrify children in every city it visits, reënacting the Paris Commune wherever it goes. And then there will be no need to destroy a lovely city to make way for dull museums no one will ever visit but which sit there, quietly getting fat off public monies.
It is terrifying, this enormous mouth, this museum on wheels. This mouth tells us the city must be torn down, those making a new life in the old, abandoned buildings and changing the city around them, all of that has to go. Because there is not enough room, ever, for what they want to do, without tearing down people’s past and their customs. But then, once most of it is torn down, it is valuable all over again, now it is the Historic Center, part of the Patrimony of this or Humanity of that. Now it must be preserved. And the mouth tells us that it is best preserved by putting up a Museum of 19th Century landscapes.
Still, like it or not, Old Europe, to steal a phrase, is one of the world’s engines of ideas. You could die waiting for a new idea from the States; real estate is one of their gods and would never let people occupy abandoned buildings for any length of time, much less years. But Europe, the new Europe, is always in danger of becoming an officially designated Cultural Center. The world depends on new ideas from its living cultures, for which no museum can be yet imagined.
The okupas are living poor and thinking out loud, sitting in the town centers, trying to find a way out of our impasse.
We had a fine lunch, Carlos and Ana and I, a peasant’s lunch of white fish with good white wine before we strolled past the fence and the plywood walls around the new museum and Carlos pointed out an old building on the corner. Substantial, not going to ruin, twenty or thirty apartments in it, enough for a hundred people or more, a small plaza out the window. I’d buy it if I had the money. There’s the wine talking. Carlos, agile as a cat and as curious, climbed in from the roof. He came back to us his arms full, with, among other prizes, an agenda from the early Seventies. The building, neither ugly nor faceless, 18th or 19th Century, had been empty for forty years in Malaga’s downtown. Forty years !
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https://fundaciondeloscomunes.net/en/
http://lainvisible.net/