Anti‐eviction Mobilizations (Spain) - HAL-SHS - Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société
Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2022

Anti‐eviction Mobilizations (Spain)

Résumé

Forced evictions are increasingly becoming a global phenomenon (Soederberg 2018). This trend has been particularly dramatic in Spain, where 713,791 evictions took place between 2008 and 2020 (Spanish General Council of the Judiciary (Consejo General del Poder Judicial), https://www.poderjudicial.es/cgpj/es/Temas/Estadistica-Judicial/Estadistica-por-temas/ Datos-penales-civiles-y-laborales/Civil-y-laboral/Efecto-de-la-Crisis-en-los-organosjudiciales), and has affected both homeowners and tenants to the extent that it became one of the central sociopolitical issues of the 2010s (Ancelovici and Emperador Badimon 2019).

At the same time, anti-eviction protests and housing rights mobilizations also developed. Although the housing rights movement was active before the 2008 crisis (cf. Aguilar Fernández and Fernández Gibaja 2010), it grew rapidly in 2011 as new cohorts of activists joined in t h ew a k eo ft h e" I n d i g n a d o s "o rt h e1 5 M ,a si ti sk n o w ni nS p a i n .A sar e s u l t ,t h eP l a t f o r m of People Affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de afectados por la hipoteca, PAH), one of the main organizations denouncing evictions founded in 2009, started to attract new participants and, soon enough, its weekly assemblies were full of working-class and lower-middle-class Spaniards and immigrants about to lose their homes. In just a few years, the PAH grew from one chapter in Barcelona to more than 200 local chapters throughout Spain. Simultaneously, neighborhood-level collectives and networks focusing on evictions and housing rights, such as the Stop Evictions Platforms (Plataformas "Stop Desahucios") and housing commissions (comisiones de vivienda), were formed in all major Spanish cities. And a few years later, the new local tenants' union (Sindicato de inquilinos) emerged to denounce the growing eviction of tenants and defend the right to stay put. All these organizations are assembly-based, horizontal, weakly institutionalized (they have neither public funding nor employees), and bring together both people directly affected by evictions and activists (Ancelovici and Emperador Badimon 2019; Santos 2019).

Anti-eviction mobilizations rely on a rich and diversified repertoire of action characterized by different temporalities. Short-term tactics focus on specific evictions at a particular time and place, imply a sense of urgency, and can be used before, during, or after the eviction has taken place. Before the eviction -that is, in the time lapse between the reception of the eviction notice and the day of the actual eviction -activists try to negotiate directly with the landlord o rth eb a nkt og e tth eev i cti o ns u s pe n d eda n d ,i d ea ll y ,c a n c e lo rr e s tru ct u r eth ed e b t .I fth e l a n d l o r do rt h eb a n kr e f u s e st on e g o t i a t e ,a si so ft e nt h ec a s e ,a c t i v i s t se n g a g ei nd i s r u p t i v e tactics that operate as negative inducements. These tactics range from quiet actions, wherein, for example, activists pretend to be bank customers and ask for manifold time-consuming servicestha tp r even tdeskclerksfr o mca rryingo u tr o u tinetasks,toba nkoccu pa tio nstha tca n last for several hours, even a day, during which activists demand to meet with the branch manager to force a negotiation and sometimes hold press conferences (Ancelovici and Emperador Badimon 2021).

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Dates et versions

halshs-04695801 , version 1 (12-09-2024)

Identifiants

Citer

Marcos Ancelovici, Montserrat Emperador Badimon. Anti‐eviction Mobilizations (Spain). The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, pp.1 - 3, 2022, ⟨10.1002/9780470674871.wbespm510⟩. ⟨halshs-04695801⟩

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