Crisis,(re-)informalization processes and protest: The case of Barcelona

Introduction

Since its appearance in the 1970s, the concept of ‘informality’ has been used to analyze how social practices of the urban poor have contributed to shaping cities in the Global South. These practices, subject to exploitation and social inequality, can be considered as forms of adaptation to the changing pressures of capitalism. In this regard, ‘urban informality’ refers to a set of non-regulated social practices that allow marginalized groups to create mechanisms to cover their material and immaterial needs. It affects the physical structure of cities, the social relations that unfold in them, and forms of collective behavior and social control. The analysis of these practices has focused primarily on the structural economic conditions that lead to marginality and informality, the relation of informality to community empowerment (McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008), and the role played by informality in economic growth (De Soto, 1995). The majority of these writings focus on cities in the late industrializing world, now frequently conceptualized as the Global South.

This article examines informal practices in a very different context: the city of Barcelona, a well-industrialized city in Spain that prides itself on longstanding cultural and economic connections to Europe. It focuses on their emergence in the context of the financial crisis and the imposition of austerity policies. It suggests that through a closer examination of these practices, we are better able to understand the timing and nature of organized social movements battling cuts and austerity in the city. The starting hypothesis is that the weakening of social rights brought about by economic crisis and austerity has legitimized the use of informal practices as a means for survival and, in some but not all cases, contributed to large-scale politicization in terms of demands for rights.

The article analyzes different sets of citizenship practices, paying special attention to migrants in Poblenou, a neighborhood that has seen the re-emergence of informality. There, the urban poor are squatting in old factories and empty lots, rehabilitating them as spaces for housing and work (specializing in the collection of garbage), while also trying to negotiate and formalize their situation. The analysis is based on the collection of secondary data that document a wide range of strategies to assert these citizenship rights, including official reports, documents developed by neighborhood associations and social movements, as well as media coverage of the emergence of informal practices. The article is also based on participant observation of an informal settlement of migrants in the Poblenou neighborhood, based on three visits to the settlement and participation in the migrant protests and demonstrations of June and July 2013.

In what follows, I first offer a theoretical reflection on the role of informality in cities during the current global economic crisis. I then analyze the case of Barcelona, including an analysis of its historical trajectory, the rise of social inequalities with the economic crisis, and the role that informality has been playing as a form of survival and protest for different groups. The article then draws conclusions about the case and establishes possible lines for further research.

Informality as a source of social response to the crisis

The changing role of welfare states has brought increased attention to self-organization among citizen groups who, in prior periods, counted on formal mechanisms of employment and social service to survive. Crisis and austerity have meant a rise in unemployment and inequality, as well as negative outcomes with respect to the provision of housing, the downgrading of public services on the local level, and constraints on public spending. This situation has led to the emergence of individual and community initiatives based on self-organization and co-production of policies and services no longer being covered by public administration or the private market. These initiatives, being depicted as socially innovative strategies or as low-budget initiatives (Hilbrandt and Richter, 2015), provide new forms of coping with the constraints in everyday life.

These practices can be understood as tools for the implementation of neoliberal urbanism and the transfer of responsibility for the provision of welfare from the state to society (Rosol, 2012). Different governments and supranational institutions propose that these new forms of collective organization can be seen as possible solutions to challenges created by the expansion of markets and the withdrawal of the state (Murray et al., 2010). Some scholars have even linked such practices to social justice, emphasizing that social innovation entails fighting uneven power relations (Moulaert et al., 2013) and that such practices incentivize the co-participation of citizens in the design and delivery of policies, especially at the local level.

From a regulatory perspective on governance (Le Galès, 2011), such reciprocity mechanisms historically emerged ahead of redistributive mechanisms. Regulation based on reciprocity takes multiple forms including family solidarity, the neighborhood organization of services, and the creation of solidarity networks. However, such reciprocities also have been known to sustain patronage, corruption, and the growth of illegal activities (Mingione, 1994). As such, to better understand local forms of regulation and who gains from them, we must also direct our attention to the invisible activities, including the illegal ones, which are an integral part of the city itself. As we will see in the case of Barcelona, some of these activities have been reframed in terms of citizenship and rights, despite their illegal character. To understand these developments and their implications, we must look more closely at the logics underlying the turn to informality as well as the expectations of the citizens who follow this path.

Researchers on informality have focused on the role of ‘ordinary people’ (Bayat, 2013) in developing practices beyond the state, including the management of entire neighborhoods, the informal occupation of public space, forms of economic development, and other practices based on reciprocity and self-organization. Schematically, informality has been depicted as: (a) a useful tool for providing economic growth and prosperity in the context of capitalism, (b) a tool used by states to reinforce neoliberal urbanism, and (c) as a form of resistance and a source of and possible basis to develop political mobilization (Varley, 2013).

This article follows the third line of research, focusing on the organization of informal practices and their impact on political and social movements (McFarlane, 2012). Scott (1989) analyzed informal practices by peasants as forms of political resistance against the state and its modernization, stressing that lower classes without rights develop ‘hidden’ forms of political mobilization consisting of ‘everyday forms of resistance’. More recently, Bayat (2013) analyzed informal practices in the Middle East and Latin America as a form of struggle, also acknowledging that they differ from ‘ordinary’ social movements. He argued that such practices were more understated, building ‘quiet and atomized actions by the poor with episodic collective action to modify the pre-existing composition of forces’ (Bayat, 2013: 46). In a parallel fashion, McFarlane, when analyzing Mumbai slums (McFarlane, 2012), stresses the process of politicization of informal organization and its negotiation capacity with authorities, stressing the relation between formal and informal over time and how the politics of formalization are being developed.

These approaches can help us understand the emergence of bottom-up practices and their significance for local regulatory practices in European cities, precisely because they allow us to understand the role of government in formalization and informalization (Fairbanks, 2011; MacLeod and Jones, 2011). In European cities, lower classes are embedded in governance systems that formally recognize civil, political, and social rights, and that generate mechanisms and institutions to grant these rights – in the form of local welfare policies, local ombudspersons, and participation mechanisms in city decision-making. Despite the fact that only citizens have full recognition of rights, cities tend to develop policies that ensure the social citizenship of foreigners, fostering forms of urban citizenship (Isin and Turner, 2007). This usually means that migrants and foreigners have been engaged through different mechanisms, based on inclusion, integration policies, and community-based approaches rather than formally participating through electoral means.

These models have developed in a more fragile way in Southern European cities in recent years, with a focus on the establishment of citizenship rights in the face of austerity measures that have weakened the more inclusive, social democratic model. Healthcare, housing, education, and social integration policies have suffered severe cuts, which in turn hamper the effective fulfillment of formal rights. ¹ Debilitating mechanisms for urban citizenship and growing unemployment have brought increasing vulnerability for non-citizens while also weakening the possibility for accommodating citizen demands. In the face of state neglect, groups of citizens and non-citizens are relying on informality as a strategy for survival and as a form of protest (Kaika, 2012).

The connection between informality and mobilization demands greater attention, particularly with respect to the politicization processes and the relationships of local groups with local government. One must analyze the role and attitude of different levels of government towards self-organization at the margins of the state: what kind of practices are they willing to formalize; what other practices remain illegal and marginal; and why does this happen? So too must the role of various social actors in such practices be considered.

An informality-based reading of bottom-up initiatives in Barcelona

Since its industrialization, informal practices have been part of the local scene in Barcelona, even influencing the city’s physical development. The weak modernization of Spain brought limited consolidation of civic and political rights (Marshall, 1950). This situation helped produce working-class movements, many formed in the tradition of anarchism and built around collective self-organization.

The rapid growth of Barcelona during the nineteenth century produced new working-class neighborhoods in which self-organization was the main mechanism regulating social life, coupled with weak intervention from the state. By the beginning of the twentieth century, migrants continued to arrive in Barcelona and the built city was filled, giving place to the first slums on its outskirts. Another wave of migration came to the city during the Francoist dictatorship (1939–1977), especially after the economic recovery taking place since the 1950s when there was a certain liberalization of the economy. Historically, these migrants relied on informal practices as a way for survival but also as a form of resistance in the absence of political and civil rights.

The process of urban growth taking place during the dictatorship was based to a great extent on weak or noncompliant state regulations and thus on a strong role of informal practices of two kinds: practices developed by the urban poor (informal housing and urbanization, informal economy and the creation of slums) and practices developed by private companies (who developed housing states without urbanizing the area and without providing services). Neighborhood associations took on a leading role in the organization of informal practices during the 1970s and their transformation into political demands. In fact, neighborhood associations were pushing for the recognition of rights and the formal intervention of the state in the resolution of problems and creation of infrastructures, pressing for the formalization of informal housing, the relocation of slum dwellers in social housing, and the creation of public facilities for disenfranchised neighborhoods. ² With the return of local democracy in 1979, the city councils of the Barcelona metropolitan area, mainly led by leftist parties, deployed this political agenda in close connection with neighborhood associations.

The city council developed a local welfare system based on collaboration and consensus between civil society actors including NGOs, neighborhood associations, and other groups as well as the city council. During the 1980s social policies and urban infrastructures were developed, especially in the disadvantaged neighborhoods. The proclamation of the city as the host of the Olympic Games of 1992 consolidated the physical transformation of the city and allowed for the eviction of the last slums and the relocation of its population. These policies brought also an improvement of quality of life through the improvement of public space (Degen and García, 2012) and a reduction in the gap between rich and poor neighborhoods.

These policies reinforced the consolidation of an urban middle class, with informal practices being relegated to migrants and extremely poor people. With the increase of international migration flows to Barcelona since 1998, informality has become increasingly linked with migrants. Since then, new activities such as street vending, offering services and products on the beach, and domestic services grew in parallel to a context of national economic growth.

Despite their formal lack of citizenship rights, the city government promoted, in collaboration with civil society actors, a network to offer possibilities of integration and representation in the city for migrants (Godàs and Gomà, 2008). Migrants’ associations were integrated into the governance model of the city, and informal activities were fought out through a combination of repression and negotiation. The impact of these models was uneven among different migrant groups and activities. For instance, street vending of copyrighted material, mainly developed by sub-Saharan migrants, was severely repressed following pressures from above.

This local welfare system was weakened with the arrival of the crisis. Like all of Spain, poverty and social inequality in Barcelona have grown steadily since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008. The burst of the speculative bubble and the rise in unemployment brought a social housing emergency, as many owners could not pay their mortgages and were evicted (De Weerdt and García, 2015). Between 2008 and 2010 there were 12,657 evictions in the Barcelona province, which means 15.6 evictions per day (Colau, 2011). Evictions and unemployment are concentrated in certain parts of the city, giving rise to a pattern of spatial polarization following the spatial distribution that shaped in the nineteenth century.

These trends have been reinforced by cuts in the welfare system. Between 2010 and 2015, public spending in Catalonia suffered significant cuts in education (17%), health (14.5%), housing (60%), and active employment policies (25%). ³ Moreover, between 2011 and 2015 a conservative liberal coalition governed the city for the first time since the return of democracy, reinforcing a neoliberal approach.

All this has challenged the local welfare model and weakened social rights in the city. Policies and organizations developed to fight poverty and social exclusion have seen a huge increase of users. For instance, the Catalonia food bank provided food to 57,381 people in Barcelona in 2008, five years later, it covered four times more people, reaching 146,286 users (Pomar and Tendero, 2015: 34). During this period, local social emergency budgets were increased, whereas other policies to fight social exclusion were limited to avoid a growing number of beneficiaries.

This context of crisis and strong deprivation fostered the emergence of informal practices among the new urban poor, who subsequently contributed to the creation of new forms of mobilization framed in terms of rights.

Informal practices and mobilization against the weakening of citizenship rights

In Spain the crisis brought a new cycle of mobilizations that started with the 15M movement in May 2011, and included a wide range of collective claims around housing, energy supply, health, or education, among others. ⁴ The success of these protests can be understood by looking at the role of daily practices for survival and their progressive legitimation in reaction to the inaction of the state in the provision of rights, the imposition of austerity policies to rescue the banking system, and the prevalence of corruption in the political class. These emerging forms of protest and social action are built on the existence of well-organized movements that existed before the crisis, coupled with newer forms of ‘quiet encroachment’ that provide minimal living standards.

Throughout the crisis, the informal provision of food, water, energy, and housing became increasingly seen as legitimate practices for three reasons. The persistence of the crisis and unemployment inspired a wider range of citizens to look for mechanisms of subsistence apart from the labor market mechanisms. This meant the growth of informal work, but also the growth of practices of self-provision for resources including energy, water, and living space. The imposition of cuts and neoliberal agendas on local, regional, and national levels has also encouraged the perception that these informal practices are legitimate forms of resistance. This connects directly to the third element, a sense that the economic and political elite were benefiting from the crisis, even as inequality worsened. The perception of corruption among the political class, the role of the banking system in the crisis, and the increasing role of private actors in the management of basic sectors such as water and energy thus helped legitimate informal practices as everyday forms of resistance put in motion by the poor against the established powers.

However, this legitimation was hard won. The acquisition of piped water, electricity, and gas has been contingent to a large extent on clandestine individual (household) direct action, based on informal transmission of knowledge between neighbors. Media attention focused on the most impoverished neighborhoods, and increased control by energy companies over such areas by imposing fines and cutting services, set limits on these kinds of solutions. ⁵ In response, neighborhood associations and other social movements fighting for the right to these services have created the Alliance Against Energy Poverty, a group claiming the recognition of these services as rights and their coverage by companies. They also demanded public action against price hikes for electricity and water. ⁶ These pressures brought the city council to approve a fund to cover the cost of the services for those who cannot afford to pay. Even so, the movement went one step further in its demands, clamoring for a re-municipalization of these companies and the de-commodification of water, electricity, and gas.

The legitimation of informal practices and their use as a tool for political demands was even stronger in the case of housing. As in other Southern European countries, in Spain, new opportunities for home ownership nurtured the speculative bubble of construction since 1998. During the economic growth period, squatting was strongly stigmatized, as cheap mortgages allowed for the buying of houses. The real estate sector also pressured for a change to the legal framework to allow rapid evictions for people squatting in a house. When the crisis arrived and the number of evictions rose, the first reaction was to use or reoccupy empty buildings to live in, on an individual basis, keeping a low profile wherever possible. ⁷

In reaction to the growth of evictions, the government and some media portrayed the victims of evictions as ‘being guilty of living beyond their means’. ⁸ The generalization of resistance against evictions was only possible with the social organization of those affected under the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH), which was created in Barcelona (De Weerdt and García, 2015). One of the first and main tasks of the PAH was to provide psychological support to victims, showing that they are not responsible for their situation. This psychological help, together with actions to stop the evictions and political campaigns by the PAH to change the law, has brought not only a legitimation of squatting but also the use of this practice as a political tool for protest. The fact that dwellings are becoming the property of banks saved with public debt and that these flats remain empty as the banks cannot sell them due to the crisis, has helped to legitimate these practices.

Informal practices have therefore gained legitimation as a tool for subsistence and as a form of resistance. However, only in some cases have they produced forms of social organization and politicization around specific projects or political movements, whereas in other cases they have remained in the informal economic sphere without connecting to any political movement. Stated differently, although informal practices became more common during the crisis, only in certain neighborhoods of the city did they combine with social protest organized through large social movements.

Informal practices in the absence of formal citizenship rights

In accounting for these different outcomes, which can be understood as the ‘uneven politicization’ of informal practices, several factors are important. For one, it is important to underscore the role played by the 15M movement in the politicization of only certain informal practices, and their involvement in wider political protests around citizenship rights brought to life in the Indignados movement. Only when citizens successfully linked their survival strategies to larger social mobilizations did informality become a basis for large-scale political resistance and claim-making. For another, groups of more recent migrants, especially sub-Saharan migrants without the same historical connection to the city’s mobilization history, and who were hamstrung by their foreigner status, showed a weaker ability to articulate their demands. This not only meant they had more difficulties linking their demands to larger political struggles; it also meant that their informal activities were more easily repressed by the city council.

All this occurred despite the seriousness of their claims and their clear dependence on informality for survival. Foreigners were the first to lose their jobs, mainly in the construction sector, and were strongly affected by the housing crisis. A significant portion of those at risk of default on their mortgages were of foreign origin. Furthermore, the very poorest sectors of foreigners were unable to pay rents. They lost their jobs and their living places, with consequences on their legal status as foreigners. As a result, many began organizing around informal economic activities and settling in empty lots and abandoned factories in the city, mainly in the former industrial neighborhood of Poblenou.

Although this neighborhood was the site of large urban renewal plans during the period of the economic boom, lots of old factories remained abandoned as construction activity stopped. These old factories and vacant lots are being used by migrants and the poor in general to create informal housing and new forms of economic activity. Some groups of migrants concentrated in abandoned factories, thus creating new forms of building occupation, whereas other families and small groups created informal housing in empty lots. These settlements vary in size from a few families to large groups of 300 people, with some of these spaces also used for economic activity.

Most of the dwellers in these factories and empty lots work informally in the recycling sector, collecting scrap, glass, paper, and other waste from the whole city. According to data from the city council, in 2013 there were more than 25 squatted factories in which more than 500 immigrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, live and work. ⁹ In fact, the illegal collection of materials for recycling has been growing in the city. Calculations show that 33,000 people are employed in scrap collection in Barcelona, with increasing competitiveness as recycling resources are limited. In Catalonia, informal collection covers 22% of the waste recycling and €141 million are spent in buying waste from informal collectors. ¹⁰ This activity threatened the operations of formal companies processing metal and other materials for recycling, who paid taxes for their collection work. Despite the fact that the informal collectors could formalize their situation as being self-employed, they preferred to remain informal as they couldn’t earn enough money if they had to pay the official taxes. In fact, the collective organization of scrap collection and processing in these old factories soon became very professional. One of the larger factories existing (evicted in July 2013) had 300 dwellers and 700 workers worked in the scrap processing, collecting metal, glass, paper, and processing complex elements. ¹¹

It was precisely the combination of both housing and work informality that became a problem for this group of migrants, initiated by a media story focusing on a family whose members died in an accident in an empty lot where they had built their informal dwelling in the first months of 2012. When one of the main newspapers of the city published articles and reports on the issue, it forced the city council to take measures to avoid the growth of new slums. ¹² Additionally, as they were using private spaces, and because in most of the cases there was no legal action against it from owners, the city council could not act against these forms of housing.

Nevertheless, with the official argument of ensuring health conditions, the city council started a program to avoid the creation of a slum in Poblenou, convincing private owners to expel users of the space, then relocating dwellers and giving them support for their integration in the formal labor market. Not surprisingly, the migrants were strongly against this plan, for three reasons: in most cases, the migrants cannot fully participate in the program as they do not have a regular situation after losing their job. Additionally, the relocation plans foresees only a temporary relocation and then they become homeless again. Lastly, and most relevant, these spaces are not only spaces for living but also spaces for developing an economic activity.

With these concerns in mind, the dwellers of the biggest settlements started to organize collective responses to the evictions being planned by the city council. In one of the largest factories, they proposed the creation of scrap collector cooperatives operating with legal status, and began negotiating with the owners of the factories, looking for the support of the neighborhood association and the local assembly of the Indignados movement. ¹³ In fact, after the deaths in the empty lot, the neighborhood association organized a network supporting the settlements and developed neighborhood initiatives to fight for migrants’ rights. These actions were framed as a discourse defending the rights of migrants as neighbors and members of the community. Migrants’ strategies have involved developing actions to resist with the legal support of these associations and neighbors, by trying to formalize their collective economic activity, something that could also solve their legal status. Yet despite demonstrations and having a presence in the media, the occupiers of these large factories were finally evicted and the dwellers were relocated.

It is important to note that in this case, the city council did not select negotiation or mediation, as it did in the case of electricity or water provision for instance, but rather it shifted the question to social policy, providing individual and temporal solutions to dwellers, which solved the problem of negotiating with a collective actor. The solutions were mainly based on providing the factory dwellers the use of social services facilities for a limited space of time, and giving them advice to regularize their situation. For the factory dwellers, this solution meant weakening the collective organization but also losing their source of income in the informal sector. Despite their attempts to bring their informal practices into a state of legality, and even with proposals for formalization of the activity, they were not recognized as a collective actor and there was no negotiation with them, as they lacked citizenship rights.

Conclusion

Through the case of Barcelona, this article has analyzed how the weakening of citizenship rights after the imposition of austerity policies in Southern European countries has brought the re-emergence of informal practices as a form of survival, and how they can be read as forms of resistance and are unevenly politicized in the demand for rights. In comparison to cities in the ‘Global South’, informal practices can be transformed into political demands for rights and some mechanisms for negotiation and mediation are created. However, those who do not have political rights, such as poor migrants, find this path much more difficult, with informality practices and strategies becoming much more similar to those taking place in other cities from the South.

The article has questioned the usefulness of literature on informality to understand social movements and protest cuts and austerity in Southern Europe. The literature defines informality as a source for politicization and a form of protest that differs from that happening in developed countries. Nevertheless, the concepts and tools developed are useful to understand current protests in Southern European cities, not merely because they have faced late processes of modernization being shaped largely through informal practices, but also because these countries are suffering a weakening of social and political rights, making it more difficult and ineffective to use the traditional repertoires of social movements.

These parallels call for a more comparative analysis between movements in the Global South, such as those linked to the Arab Spring, and anti-austerity movements in Southern Europe, analyzing to what extent practices in the latter can be analyzed as varieties of quiet encroachment or the politicization of the informal. The interesting question for analysis is the connection between citizenship rights and the development of informal practices. In the case of Barcelona, the emergence of informal practices can be read as the result of a weakening of the coverage of social rights and the feeling that the state is not providing answers to increasing needs. In this context, informal practices are combined with, and in some cases are part of, wider mobilizations demanding change in the political system to ensure full citizenship. In Barcelona, these mobilizations have fostered the organization of a new political platform reaching the city council, whereas in the countries of the Arab Spring such aims have been less successful in political terms, due to the lack of formal political rights being recognized in many countries (Bayat, 2013).