In May Barcelona was shook by four days of rioting and protest against the eviction of an established social centre, Can Vies. Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza looks at the history of the building, and interviews the organisers currently fighting its eviction.
Tuesday, July 15 at 4pm Twitter Storm to help the rebuilding works of @SomCanVies SC, please read http://pastebin.com/t5BQQ8Cn
The rebuild begins.
Self organised social centre (Centre social autogestionat) Can Vies has been a space for radical politics and community organising for 17 years. It’s been a place where different generations of activists can meet and learn from each other, where hundreds of people have learnt to be a part of a community, participating in the assembly with consensus decision making and collective responsibility.
The CSA is also part of the Sants Neighbourhood Assembly (ABS) which coordinates political and social movements in the area, and several campaigns: against gentrification, migrant solidarity, worker’s struggles, and against state repression. Just having a look at their website you’ll find events from an alternative Pride to radical history, with the spirit of community organising always at its heart. Built in 1879, it was initially a storage space used during the construction of Barcelona’s underground tube system. When the Spanish Civil War broke out it was taken over by the CNT railway workers, who took it into common ownership. It continued to be a railway workers building during the Franco era and housed one of Franco’s class collaborationist ‘vertical unions’. In 1984, Metropolitan Transport for Barcelona (TMB) handed the building over to the CNT.
TMB and the council have been threatening the centre with eviction since 2006 in order to replace it with yuppie flats. The CNT, unsurprisingly, supports the squatters. On the 19th of March 2014 a local court (equivalent to Magistrates Court in the UK) ordered the eviction of Can Vies to take place between the 1st and 30th of April. An online call for solidarity was launched by the CSA against the eviction of the social centre. Several days of action were also called demanding the cancellation of the eviction order. On the 27th of March over a hundred local people from all walks of life went to the Sants-Montjuïc District Office to lodge their appeal against the eviction.
In April and May there were several actions at the nearest tube stations, and on the 20th of May twenty people in yellow t-shirts occupied the District Office. The district regent and the mayor promised to relocate the social centre (in most likelihood away from the area within which it currently resides) but the Can Vies made clear that they aren’t moving anywhere. The Catalan regional police (Mossos d’Esquadra) decided to go in by force on the 26th of May 2014 to evict the residents. The demolition itself triggered four nights of riots in Barcelona, with solidarity demos being called in almost all major cities. The destruction was only partial and in June the works began to rebuild the social centre. Crowd funded donations have so far amounted to a massive 20, 000€, but the appeal is still asking for another 50, 000€ to complete renovation work. You can donate here.
Can Vies Press was kind enough to give Freedom a short interview:
How is the rebuilding process going and how can we help from overseas?
The rebuilding process is going forward. After the more spectacular part of the conflict, with the mobilisations, assemblies and the bigger riots, we’ve began the more localised part, where commissions and working groups have to be consolidated, propose the project to refurbish the social centre and continue to carry out the social centre’s activities. Right now, we are focusing on the crowdfunding project in order to find the funds for the rebuilding of the physical space, and help cover the costs from the reprisals, legal costs… From outside you can help us fundraising, share the project and the conflict, and, most of all, build self-management and self-organisation in your local area. As the Zapatistas said, Chiapas is also your neighbourhood!
What is the current situation of squatting in Barcelona? Are there many spaces? Is there any legislation or state repression which affects you?
The squatting situation in Barcelona, with the resistance of Can Vies, has changed. We’ve managed to create a climate of tension which has stopped, temporarily, the eviction orders of Banc Expropiat (Gràcia), l’Ateneu de l’Eixample i el Distrito VII. Positively speaking, this has been very important because we were coming from a period where other emblematic spaces had been evicted, like La Carboneria or Can Piella, where despite having a high level of mobilisation and the neighbours’ support, the houses were eventually evicted. Following the resistance of Can Vies, other bank branches have been squatted to create social centres, like l’Ateneu Popular el Rec del Fort Pienc and l’Ateneu La Porka de Sant Antoni.
How has gentrification been in Barcelona, and specifically, in Sants? As well as the Can Vies resistance, are there other campaigns to fight against this phenomenon?
The AVE (high-speed rail) station, the Olympic mountain of Montjuïc and the Fair of Barcelona complex have been the big infrastructures in the district, which feeds the Big Barcelona to develop the project for a city centred in tourism and big international events. In the last 20 years, local government as well as national and regional have invested big sums of money and manpower in these equipments, leaving the needs and demands of the neighbours – like burying the railway tracks, refurbishing the local market place or the regeneration of the squares around the station- abandoned, cancelled or provisionally installed. In 1997 Can Vies social centre was squatted, in the middle of the expansion of the real estate business. As well as Can Vies, the neighbourhood has always had two fighting associations, the Sants Social Centre and La Bordeta Neighbours Association, which has resulted in a mix of different generations and traditions of struggle which have found a common ground for local action in the stand against gentrification, regeneration of the urban environment and the struggle to give the neighbourhood local and self-organising tools. As well as a series of struggles for the right to the city, Sants has a contradictory geography which is rich and diverse, a heterogenous and intergenerational network, which is materialised in physical references – self-organised social centres, el Casal Independentista, l’Ateneu Llibertari, cooperatives and alternative venues—, which are also spaces to socialise. There have been also many organising spaces created after the 15M. We defend the neighbourhood as a space for resistance, because we believe in the potential of the local community, the social ecosystem from which many projects come out of and are developed, and that with time we’ve learnt to diversify and cover more areas of life as we go along.
To know more about gentrification in Barcelona in general and how tourism is destroying the life of this great city, watch the documentary Bye Bye Barcelona English subtitles available