COD.001/ZAZ/08
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The project grew out of an extraordinary opportunity: the chance to reappropriate and re-use public housing assets - in this case, housing units ceded by the Municipal Society for Urban Rehabilitation of the city council of Zaragoza.
It so happened that Juan Rubio del Val from the Municipal Society mentioned to me that they were dismantling a housing project and that 14 of the 42 square-meter units would be left vacant.
Those housing units, each built out of three prefabricated modules, served as provisional lodging for a population of ethnic gypsies that had been relocated to official public housing.
Beginning on March 1, 2007, we undertook a mailing and phoning campaign from Recetas Urbanas, offering to give the various units away for free as residential spaces and/or work centers to various assemblies, cooperatives, collectives and associations.
On May 4, 2007, the last unit was sent to Seville. It took two months for the units to arrive at their various destinations.
The groups who had taken on the responsibility of using these units were in charge of their transport and installation, as well as the procurement of necessary licenses and permits. Recetas Urbanas provided advisory oversight and helped with making the units habitable. We offered technical advice, installation designs, and permit documentation.
This project, or rather group of projects, offered us the opportunity to explore various models of management, financing, and means of occupation of plots of land and buildings. We also learned about operational techniques employed by collectives, associations, and cooperatives.
These experiences include widely different situations, from those tied to alternative education - such as "La Fundició" and the youth collective "Spaider3," which ended when the housing units were taken away by the Espulgas police, to the addition located in the historic center of the city of Girona, which was built under the auspices of the new Art Center but has been under political assault since its installation.
All of these experiences - some in rural areas (Straddle3, Nautarquía, Algie), other in urban areas (Proyecta, Arable Soup, A place for Creation); some of more lasting duration; some well-coordinated and some less so; some undertaken with the collaboration of city administrations and others rejected and even attacked - will be brought together this spring for a conference similar to the one we organized in Córdoba in September of 2007.
At that time, we will discuss questions and challenges relating to management, politics, financing, and so forth. We will look at the questions people had a year ago about these projects and how they have responded to them since then. In this way, we will put together a broad catalog of the options available for collectivized work, one that can offer examples and incentives for groups of city residents interested in participating jointly in the cultural and social management of their cities.
While the re-use of housing units has involved exactly 13 collectives participating in part through the mechanism of self-help, we have collaborated with a far greater number of groups throughout the last eighteen months of intense activity. This demonstrates the vital importance of self-management in processes that undertake social and political work within a framework outside that of state power, which is always trying to control every facet of grassroots activity.
If any of the readers of this document belongs to a collective and wants to contribute to this project, you are welcome to send your responses to sc@recetasurbanas.net, where they can be assessed by all users.
Collectives and member groups:
Córdoba Solidaria, Poliposeidas y Barbiana (Córdoba)
Platonic, Cooperativa Sostre Cívic, Nautarquía (Barcelona)
Asociación PROYECTA (Castelló)
Agoras (Valladolid)
Asociación Aula Abierta (Granada)
Asociación Trincharte, La casa Invisible, Rizoma (Málaga)
Colectivo ALGA (Pontevedra)
V de Vivienda, La Prospe audivisual, ASA, Patio Maravillas, Cooperativa Covijo (Madrid )
Vecinos del Cerrillo (Badajoz)
Cooperativa CIT-Arte, En un Lugar de Creación, A Contramano (Sevilla)
Arquitectura se mueve (Valencia)
Tercer Asalto (Zaragoza)
Caldo de Cultivo (Tarragona)
