urban policy by stealth
informal cities | madrid by will craig
At the beginning of the twentieth century there were over ten thousand registered ragpickers in Madrid, men and women combing wealthy neighbourhoods looking for things to salvage. 1 Objects which had lost their value in the bourgeois centres of the city were transported to the outskirts where they assumed new uses. The ragpickers are gone (replaced by large trucks, depositing materials in new state-of-the-art processing facilities) but their legacy of salvage remains. Just as the ragpickers moved through the city reclaiming underused objects, today there are people re-appropriating sections of the city, exploiting areas which have been overlooked and equipping them with social value. The outskirts of Madrid tell a familiar story. The 2008 economic downturn left a massive over-supply of land, intended for housing, at the margins of the city. As many as one million houses sat empty, many large scale projects were left unfinished, significant areas of land were scarred by unfinished infrastructure. Fuelled by speculation, the unleashed property boom left little but discarded dreams and stripped landscapes in its wake. As investors moved away, the local economy suffered. The urban plan had failed; a jobless (and in many cases, homeless) Madrileño contingent was left with few options. Those who remained sifted through the detritus to make some sense of the waste world that confronted them. Despite reckless over-development in the suburbs, Madrid’s city centre is, as it has always been, a noisy, political, active and lively place. There is something to be said for the resilience of historic city centres, where people continuously engage with their environment and manage to carve out and reclaim space as their own. In spite of economic desperation, the resulting hardship and the ravaging of the fringes, the spaces at the centre are continually reinvented. Space is made for culture and exchange — La Tabacalera, once a tobacco factory, was used for many years as public administration offices. When funding was cut and the building vacated, other people moved in. Once again, the vaulted chambers became places of production, this time for art, dance, skateboarding, music, circus performance; energy spills into hallways, staircases and out onto small surrounding patios. The planners of Madrid’s doomed suburban projects could learn a lot from the ingenuity and flexibility observed in the city core. Spontaneity and self-organisation is fundamental to the development of these spaces, administered by students, artists, performers, gardeners.
72
Will Craig
above: La Tabaclera, Madrid facing page: Esta Es Una Plaza (this is a place) is another example of ongoing spatial reclamation. As its name suggests, this space is nurtured and decorated as one would do in a house. It is a community garden with soul, cultivating philosophy and politics, adorned with graffiti of national traditions. Painstakingly, painted murals of the homeless, people, animals and the bull pay homage to the sacrifice and traditions of the Spanish working classes.
1 Parsons, Deborah L. A Cultural History of Madrid: Modernism and the Urban Spectacle . London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator