dWElliNgS ON ROOfTOpS

what is the housing situation in spain, you ask? it’s not good, we know the story. and it isn’t because of a lack of housing programmes, royal decrees, European regulations, leasing incentives, right-to-housing legislation and endless regulatory and legislative measures that represent the public authorities’ attempt to provide a solution, however clumsy, to citizen access to improved decent housing.

i mean, comments like the one i heard three months ago from the president of the andalusian association of private developers, who said: “we need more land and greater funding... because the economy is propped up by two things, tourism and construction”, are enough to send shivers down your spine. where is the money for research and sustainable development, new technology, company creation? you would really have to be clumsy, if that’s the word for it, to set out to use up a limited resource like land. don’t forget, we’re at the bottom of the list of European countries in terms of r+d.

Everybody knows that hundreds of thousands of houses are empty because they have been abandoned or are in bad condition, or simply due to property speculation. these should obviously be the principal target for government intervention. if you add the thousands of obsolete, disused public buildings that could form the base for wonderful architectural refurbishment projects, we would be looking at gaining an enormous number of square meters of housing. this would go a long way towards alleviating the problem, while avoiding the need to prey on our land. the crisis that has spain in its grip should lead governments to encourage, or at least allow, self-organised citizens to bring these empty buildings to life.

But sometimes politicians are clueless. several times, politicians commenting on housing creation measures have suggested to me that they are “very European” and not really applicable to our society. they mean the management cooperatives for rental public housing (see cobijo and sostre civic).

i remind them that most of our legal frameworks come from other European countries like Holland and france, and that i’m sure it would be possible to apply some of these “foreign” solutions here. unfortunately, it would happen very slowly, because there is almost no institutional support. i’d also bet that the majority of the population who have “grown used to the mortgage system” would have no interest in it at all.

there lies one of our major social problems. pathetic as it sounds, our society lacks the critical mass required to exert real pressure. Just think back to the recent demonstrations in favour of housing─minority groups burning themselves out on the streets. But we are part of the “social force” that aims for a growing presence and an increasingly important role in the opinions and decisions of the social and cultural life of cities... and that’s something we can’t abandon.

But i’m sick of complaining, so i’ll share a little solution with you, one of the many that could be put into practice.

urban situation no. 16 a group of friends assemble a non-legal dwelling on a communal rooftop madrid, march 2008 imPlementation unit 16

A group of friends builds a non-legal (neither legal nor illegal according to Spanish law) dwelling on a communal rooftop, rescuing a collective activity with a long tradition: erecting buildings on rooftops and terraces