MACAO/ LTBC
New cultural institutions/Old cities New movements devoted to depicting a new approach to art, social changes, politics and governance of the public good, have been born all around Europe, often through strong statements, like protesting, squatting and wide participation. However, the response of the old cities to the conflict, implicit consequence to the strong acts from which these new movements are born, has been different, from who have decided to oppose the development of the new and who decided to endorse it. In this essay, we analyze the main conflicts generated by the development of these new institutions trying to conclude what this reflects about the contemporary city. The two collectives we will analyze in this paper is MACAO, from Milan and LTBC, from Madrid. Two collectives that work on the generation of new means of production not focused on the money value but on the social and cultural value. To make this new model possible, both the collectives base their activities on some main principles, which are significative for the research mead in this paper: full autonomy for the organization and development of the initiative by its members, exploration of public management in terms of participatory democracy, promotion of low-cost cultural practices and free culture, a programming methodology distant from the classical practices of cul-tural management, an effort to level the various scales of social and cultural expression.
G18 Panchagnula,Krishna Dutt Gorsi,Jawad Hussain Hayat Casagrande Gabriele Elhan Zareri Contemporary Cities a.a. 2018/2019
index MACAO: history MACAO: history_places MACAO: history_places_Torre Galfa MACAO: history_places_Palazzo Citterio MACAO: history_places_Ex Borsa MACAO: history_actors MACAO: history_actors_Torre Galfa MACAO: history_actors_Ex Borsa MACAO: conflicts MACAO: conflicts_economical MACAO: conflicts_local MACAO: conflicts_political TABACALERA: history MACAO: history_places MACAO: history_actors MACAO/LTBC: conflicts_a comparison
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table of contents
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bibliography
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MACAO: history
Macao is a collective of citizens, artists and activists, born officially in 2012 after various meeting of different personalities discussing facets of art production and citizenship. Even if originally it had no direct link with any specific space, in the latest years it developed a strong connection with the building occupied, recognizing it self as an independent center for art, culture and research, using art production as a viable process for rethinking social change, elaborating independent political critique, and as a space for innovative governance and production models.
history_places Macao occupied three different spaces in its existance: Torre Galfa, Palazzo Citterio and Via Molise 68. The first two were more connected with a temporary usage of the space and event-protest: both spaces had an existing reusage plan, even if in stand-by for years, connecting in this way the occupation of space to the inefficiency of the municipality and the lack of the privates for the reuse of underused spaces, privileging speculation and new construction. The last one is an abandoned space, without any actual plan, focusing the activity of the collective more on the creation of a new bottom-up way to manage the common good in the city.
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history_places_Torre Galfa 5 May 2012 – 15 May 2012
One month after the institution of Macao in April, starts the occupation of Torre Galfa, an office building unused for 15 years. Here self-organized teams of citizens have started planning their classes, developing a space fruit of a political action. The police starts the dismantlement on May the 15th. After the squatting the building got attention, and got a private investment for a new development.
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history_places_Palazzo Citterio 19 May 2012 – 22 May 2012
Occupation of Palazzo Citterio, historical building in Brera district, unused for 10 years in an dismantled from the police without resistance (MACAO’s people was already outside and clapping at the arrival of the police) as requested from the ministry of culture. After the squatting, the project of renovation got new attention from the municiplity and from the state. Leading to its attuation
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history_places_Ex Borsa delle carni 16 June 2012 - now
Ex Borsa delle Carni (place where it was contracted the price of the meat inside of the complex of the ex-Slaughterhouse, built between 1912 and 1929 and completely dismissed between 1990 and 2005. Before the occupation the owner (SOGEMI, a partecipated of the municipality) provided absestos recovery, while after the squatting began, the collective reclaimed spaces, fixing doors and windows, insulation and creating labs, concert halls and studios.
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history_actors_Torre Guelfa The Galfa Tower was commissioned by the entrepreneur Attilio Monti as the headquarters of the company “S.A.R.O.M.â€?. (SocietĂ Anonima Raffinazione Oli Minerali), a well-known oil industry in Ravenna. Once built, the Tower also became the headquarters of the B.P. (British Petroleum), a company that later took both SAROM and the Tower. The objective of having a headquarters with a strongly representative impact and able to convey
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the dynamic image of the group merged with the imagination that in the fifties was associated with the city of Milan, as a business center in strong development. The economic and financial dimension of the city takes on such importance that the urban planning tools themselves acknowledge and feed the development as emerges from the final draft of the detailed plan drawn up on the basis of the general urban planning tool of 1953. The construction company called upon to carry out the work is the SOGENE. The completion of the Tower was completed in 1959 and 2.5 billion lire was spent on its construction. In 1984, Banca Popolare di Milano purchased the skyscraper for 30 billion lire, after which, in 2006 it was sold for 48 million euro to Immobiliare Lombarda, a company of the Fondiaria SAI S.p.A. group (an Italian insurance group based in Turin and controlled by the Ligresti family). To date, the building is completely empty and in a state of neglect. There is a project to renovate the tower, but it has never started. The complex is 102.5 metres high and consists of a tower with a total of 31 floors above ground and two underground. On May 5, 2012, the Galfa Tower is occupied. This is how Macao was born, the new centre for arts, culture and research in Milan, a place where artists and citizens can come together and invent a new system of rules for a shared, participatory management of spaces that, in total autonomy, redefines times and priorities of its work and experiments with
new common languages. On May 15, 2012, the police, urged by the Minister Chancellors, mother of Piergiorgio Peluso, (Director General of Fondiaria SAI), proceed to the eviction. The SAI Fondiaria Group has announced that it wishes to return to the availability of its skyscraper, to continue to leave it unused as has been the case for 15 years now. Rightly the Ligresti group, whose president agreed 2 years and 4 months in the Tangentopoli investigations, invokes the law and asks without any mediation and with great speed to leave the tower. The action behind the occupation has the will to create a constructive conflict with the municipality, on the issues of the art production, the art spaces and especially in this case on the speculation politics of the municipality, as well as the abandon of central portions of the city.
history_actors_Ex Borsa delle carni Except for the external actors, which are mainly SOGEMI a participated of the Municipality, which owns the 99.7% of it and the Municipality itself, which have been owners of the building throughout the years and have different interests in the buildings. Macao counted collaboration with citizen of the most different interest, architects, fig.10 designer, activists, electicians, plubmers, students, artists, and many more. Attracting also the interest of many important personalities of the show business, theatre and politics. As well it participated with students and professors from Milanese universities, like Politecnico di Milano and UniversitĂ Bocconi
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MACAO: conflicts_economical
The first conflict between Macao and other actors is the economical one. Even if the building is unused, the private or public owner takes a damage: inaccessibility of the property, property damage, image damage and value damage are all relevant consequences of this kind of act. This issue has got particularly relevant in the last years, when site of MACAO owned by the Sogemi Srl and Municipality of the Milan, which was later occupied by the MACAO on 16 July 2012. The Sogemi Srl company had a debt of 24 million euros with the institution of Piazza Della Scala, due to the concession for the right of surface conferred by the latter to the first on the spaces of via Lombroso (site of the fruit and vegetable market) between 1980 and 2017. Thus, to repair the debt, the two parties agreed to sell the liberty buildings - a total value of 22.5 million euros, according to the revenue agency - which would return to municipal ownership. But due to the occupancy of the building by the other interested actors the sale of this is not possible. And due to its location attributes of the area, the real estate market value has fallen by 25% and over the years there has been a worsening of the maintenance status.
The Liberty-style buildings, which had been abandoned for some time, were owned by Sogemi, the company that manages the General Markets. To pay off an old debt with Palazzo Marino, a January resolution decided to return it to the municipal property. The buildings of the Ortomercato are intended for sale. And to get the 22.5 million euros of estimated value, it is necessary that they are empty. Corriere della sera, 18 September 2014
To sell the buildings, it has been inserted after a vote of the municipality inside of the BNP Paribas Fund II, getting back the property of the Ex-Borsa from SOGEMI.
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conflicts_local
positive perception
• Attractor for local business (bars, resatuarants..) • Promoter of social and political action • Promoter of inclusion • Promoter of cultural development • Maintenance of a local abandoned good
negative perception
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• Open structure (being open all day and permitting free roaming) gives space to criminal activities • Loudness • Decay and garbage • Not direct interest of the neighborhood, but more oriented to the metropolitan city
The relationship with the neighborhood is source for local conflict. MACAO in fact didn’t manage to become a particularly relevant institution for it. While it’s an interesting reality for local businesses, which take advantage of its function of attractor in an area that doesn’t present any interest for extra-local young people. Anyway for the rest of the neighborhood, the social activities promoted by the establishment, are not that compelling, since most of the surveyed population (mostly non young people) either ignore the presence of it or highlight typical problems connected with this type of realities, like garbage, loudness, decay and criminality, a view similar to the one of the Municipio. Conflicts that are well known in the intern of MACAO.
social media mapping
We see that the distribution is very poor in terms of the popularity of the area, which shows that this area is not seen as a “up class’ or the place worth talking about in the educated lot of the people. Also, if we find the most of the posts from these relate to revolution or hipster or educational, which give varied feeling about the area. (used hashtag #macao) https://arcg.is/1qCnbe
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conflicts_political The presence of Macao in the building of the ex-slaughterhouse has been characterized by an exceptional longer stay, if confronted with the previous experiences of Torre Galfa and Palazzo Citterio, the main differences are that in the Ex-Borsa we are facing a public property, unused for years, but also with no actual plan for the future (Torre Galfa was private, in fact it has been the owner the one to push for the fast dismantle, and for Palazzo Citterio other than having the presence of important elements of artistic heritage, the site was chosen years before to host a new museum). So this state permitted to have more distended dialogue, also with a leftist government, which put in its electoral promises the will to permit a participated and bottom up development of new systems of governance, as already diffused around Europe. Along the years, the discussion has been kept alive, with different votations, proposals and a difficult coexistence. Even if it will be interesting to deepen the knowledge about these years, we skip to the last 2 years, when especially thanks to the economical conflict presented before, which accelerated and focused the interest of the municipality.
2017
MACAO tries to participate to the ban to buy legally the building, anyway without any (illegal) favoritism from the municipality the cost is unbearable and also ideologically unsustainable, since it would make MACAO the owner of the space, cancelling the effort of the collective to create a new system of governance of the public good, based on the only community effort and bottom up strategy. http://www.radiondadurto.org/2017/03/23/milano-macao-compra-lex-macello-perche-no/
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01/2018
With the participation also of personalities from Politecnico di Milano and UniversitĂ Bocconi, MACAO proposes to finish the clash with the municipality by requesting the use of the space in exchange of maintenance. In this occasion we have the production of plans for future sustainable development and internal governance systems. http://www.macaomilano.org/spip.php?article659
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This type of call is still on tryout from MACAO, but the municipality doesn’t seem willing to listen
09/2018
The municipality still wants to proceed with the dismantle of MACAO, cancelling the years of discussion and dialogues and betraying its political promisies, voting to get MACAO building in the BNP Paribas fund to capitalize it.
10/2018
To answer this Macao mobilize with a funeral for Neoliberal left, a public manifestation that wanted to bring up the hypocrisy of the government choices. Anyway the vote to put the building up for capitalization doesn’t pass and the situation remains in stall
What we don’t accept is that this Administration (one of the few “leftist” remaining in Italy) discredits a political discourse held for years on the management of the public assets as a common good, on the right of self-organization and self-determination of people, diminishing in a paternalistic and narrow-minded way the issue to a “young people’s need for aggregation spaces”. And that to do this, pretends to stay in the financial field: the method of the lesser evil due to force majeure. They called it “Requiem for the Neoliberal Left” and like at funerals they saw relatives or friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while. Macao has brought its activists in front of the City of Milan and above all that all the humanity that passes through the space of Viale Molise 68. Young people, artists, precarious people, progressive people, loose dogs that don’t always crowd the political squares. They staged the funeral of this neoliberal left with a coffin, smoke generators and noise music, something a bit different from the classic political squares or movement. On the possible eviction of Macao risks opening a crack in a piece of city, helping to crack the narrative of the “Milan model”. “What a failure for the left if Macao is also evacuated”, the recurrent phrase among the people in front of Palazzo Marino. https://www.radiopopolare.it/2018/10/lopportunita-di-avere-macao-a-milano/ http://www.macaomilano.org/spip.php?rubrique150 https://ilmanifesto.it/macao-sotto-sgombero-tradito-dalla-giunta-sala
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01/2019
The vote happens again, and also now doesn’t pass, since the municipality seems to want a pacific dismantle and wants to keep the negotiation with MACAO (which for now hasn’t restarted yet). The right wing minority isn’t ok with this and feeds the political internal conflict. http://www.milanotoday.it/politica/rissa-palazzo-marino-macao.html https://www.ilgiorno.it/milano/politica/macao-bocciato-sgombero-1.4425830 http://www.milanotoday.it/video/sardone-centro-sociale-macao.html
Now the area doesn’t have actual plans, other than mere capitalization and some proposal from the municipality but that didn’t have the approbation from the council, as the one of moving the civic center of Municipio 4 in the building (which is the biggest and the most interesting) So in the further discussion MACAO has three possibilities, given that the municipality leaves it in place: 1. The City Council remains the owner of the building (which is now owned by SOGEMI, but is passing through the real estate fund of the City), but finds a way to entrust Macao (which should become a cultural association or similar) with the management of the building of via Molise, on the model of one of the many public spaces such as Les Grands Voisins in Paris, the Matador in Madrid, the Vooruit in Ghent or many other cultural centers, reception, production from below that flourish throughout Europe. 2. The Municipality finds another space for Macao, and sells the building as it pleases, at market price. 3. The City Council sells the building in Macao, at a considerably lower price than the market price, with the model of the Mietshäuser Syndikats (MhS), an organization that by statute has the objective of "supporting the genesis of self-organized projects for the home - a human living space and a roof over the head for everyone - and to create political consensus around them", through the collective purchase of real estate and the constraint on their inalienability. https://zero.eu/it/news/il-consiglio-comunale-vota-contro-lo-sgombero-di-macao/
TABACALERA: history
La Tabacalera is a self-managed social centre, under the management of the collective LTBC: space where there is theatre, music, dance, painting, conferences, meetings, audiovisuals, workshops, events, interventions in the neighbourhood. It is located in Madrid, in the neighbourhood of Lavapiès. The principles followed for the organization of the centre are similar to the one used by MACAO, with the main difference that while MACAO is a collective not related with the particular space it occupies, LTBC is a collective born specifically as an association of citizen for the management of the building of the Tabacalera.
history_places
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The building of the former FĂĄbrica de Tabacos de Embajadores is publicly owned and is attached to the Ministry of Culture, through the Directorate General of Fine Arts (DGBA). Due to its characteristics, it is a historical patrimony, catalogued as an Asset of Cultural Interest.
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history_actors 1998 Network of lavapies collectives, proposal for the reuse of the spaces of
Tabacalera for social use: a training centre, assisted housing for the elderly, social housing for rent, a space for stage-artistic experimentation, a school city, a self-managed social centre with rehearsal rooms, meeting spaces, conference rooms, an area for self-production in new technologies, an area for editing and audiovisual projection, a resource centre for new modes of social production, etc. Ideas that update much of the spirit and history of this building, which was an economic engine and one of the fundamental generators of the forms of social bond that characterized Lavapiés 2000 The Madrid Tobacco Factory was definitively vacated in just after the privatisation of La Tabacalera/Altadis. The building was abandoned during ten years of progressive deterioration and no maintenance. 2003 Laboratorio de exile proposed to start a democratic debate between the institutions and the city hall to decide how to develop the new social direction for Tabacalera’s spaces. No answer from the institutions. 2004 The ministry of culture presents a plan for the revitalization of spaces, with a focus on culture interventions, proposing ideas as a starting point for a debate. Tabacalera or Lavapies are never mentioned in the proposal. 2007 Council of Ministers approved an agreement creating the National Centre for Visual Arts (CNAV), whose headquarters would be located in Tabacalera. 2008 Seven teams of architects were invited by e-mail to submit a proposal. 2009 The competition gets announced the after 5 months the winning project is awarded. The project, which has a cost of 30 million euros, is not carried out for lack of budget. 2010 DGBA proposes to the cultural association SCCPP to carry out an artistic-cultural project in the building. This association, which had participated in citizen debates on the future of the building, extends the proposal to other groups and inhabitants of the Lavapiés neighbourhood and accepts the commission from the DGBA, signing a one-year contract committing itself to develop a project called Centro Social Autogestionado La Tabacalera, using 9,200 square metres of the 30,000 available in the building. 2012 The assignment was made to the Asociación Cultural CSA La Tabacalera de Lavapiés, an association created by the assembly of the social centre -and to which any person can associate- with the sole objective of having a valid legal figure who could take charge of the assignment.
MACAO/LTBC: conflicts
The Tabacalera is currently active and after the years of difficulties encountered for the installation of the space, a lot of activities connected to social and artistic production are currently active, with support of the local government and participation from the local communities. The current situation of Tabacalera seems to result positively on the three aspects that we discussed for MACAO, the economical, local and political.
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The two cases considered don’t find a good confrontation ground for what concerns economics since the two case start from different backgrounds, while MACAO started its work from the occupation of private space, the other one works on public space. Right now, as we reported the ownership of the land on which MACAO is currently staying has passed to public ownership, highlighting a new possibility for the presence of the collective. But what is relevant to highlight is the presence of an economical conflict in the political debate. In both case, in fact, it is possible to see in the political debate a demand for a different type of productivity. In fact, as we saw, the two collectives focus on the generation of a social and artistic production, that aspires to be alternative to the common market: on this issue both in Madrid and in Milan we find a political view adverse to this look on the common good in the city, seeing as not sufficiently significative for the city this typology of production. This kind of controversy is intrinsic to a certain entrepreneurship centred vision of the city, posing the ur-ban space as an instrument to produce money value and moving in the background the social value.
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On the other hand, MACAO is facing a different type of political conflict, the one derived from the beginnings of the collective, related to the squatting. In fact, as we saw LTBC didn’t occupy the space but answered a call from the Ministry. This difference is extremely significative, for two reasons: first, it explains the contrast with the political parties on both side, right-wing that propose an aversion against the use of the building and left-wing that can’t completely justify the presence of the collective, given their starting. The second reason why it’s important to highlight this conflict is how the action of MACAO, starting from the first occupation of Torre Galfa, were necessary. If in Tabacalera, even if this decision came after the problems in the private revitalization of the space, we have an acknowledgement of the relevance of a new approach to the management of the common goods, in Milan the MACAO actions were needed to unlock an unfunctional situation, characterized by abandon, disinterest and private speculation. Only after the squatting the Municipality activated a debate for the development of bottom-up management of the common good, even if not completely effective, showing in this way how Milan had, and has, still a long way before arriving to move its focus from the entrepreneurial/market guided development to a more social attentive policy design. Nevertheless, the local and national attention on the topic is not an exception: as it’s possible to see from the social media mapping and from the comparison between news about the two places, the attention has two completely different focus, while for what concerns LTBC, even if we are in presence of similar criticality (criminality, drug problems, police in-tervention), the media response is generally positive, posing the at-tention on the produced value (exhibition, activities, relevance) and not, as we see with MACAO, on the conflict (police intervention, improvised political blitz, drug problem, etc), obscuring completely events or exhibits. Highlighting in this way not only the difference in the city planners and policymaker approach but also the position of the public opinion over the development of a different type of production in the city. fig.25
table of contents produced acquired fig.1 fig.2 fig.3 fig.4 fig.5 fig.6 fig.7 fig.8 fig.9 fig.10 fig.11 fig.12 fig.13-19 fig.20 fig.21 fig.22 fig.23 fig.24 fig.25
Map of MACAO locations. bing maps Torre Galfa during MACAO occupation. macaomilano Torre Galfa during MACAO occupation (interior). macaomilano Palazzo Citterio during MACAO occupation. macaomilano Palazzo Citterio during MACAO occupation. macaomilano Position of MACAO in the neighborhood. bing maps MACAO event in via Molise 68. macaomilano MACAO event in front of via Molise 68. macaomilano Actors scheme Torre Galfa Actors scheme Via Molise 68/Ex Borsa Map of surveys Media mapping analysis of MACAO https://arcg.is/1qCnbe Projects for the future management of MACAO. domus.it Position of Tabcalera in the neighborhood. bing maps Historical picture of the Tabacalera tabacalera.net Current picture of the intern of the Tabacalera tabacalera.net Public assembly in Tabacalera tabacalera.net Public assembly in Tabacalera tabacalera.net Media mapping analysis of LTBC https://arcg.is/1WWSOn
bibliography • macaomilano.org • latabacalera.net • domus.it • corriere.it • ilmanifesto.it • repubblica.it • milanotoday.it • ilgiorno.it • comune.milano.it • archive.org • news.google.it
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