Green Gentrification: book review and research provocations

García-Lamarca reviews Gould and Lewis’s new book and highlights three missing and important topics for future research on green gentrification. Does greening whiten? Does greening richen? Does greening raise rents and housing prices? These are the three core questions behind Kenneth A. Gould and Tammy L. Lewis’s new book titled Green Gentrification: Urban sustainability and …

Energy struggles: combating energy poverty in Catalonia

A diverse range of social and environmental collectives have come together in the past few years in Barcelona to form the Alliance Against Energy Poverty, successfully mobilising and fighting to stop energy and water cuts for families unable to pay their bills.* Household access to energy and water remains an urgent issue for well over …

The Political Ecology of Everyday Life under Settler Colonialism II – Reporting from Palestine

By Melissa García Lamarca Picking up from the first post by several ENTITLE fellows on our experiences in Palestine at the International Conference of Critical Geography, this post focuses on dispossession, appropriation and the erasure of (certain) histories in the city of Jaffa. Traveling from Ramallah to Jaffa: a lesson on dispossession through cement As …

Solidarity needed: Stopping the eviction of the PAH’s BlocLaBordeta in Barcelona

We, the ENTITLE collective, have signed the manifesto to support an occupied housing block in Barcelona named BlocLaBordeta – recuperated in February by the PAH, a potent housing rights movement with over 220 local groups across the Spanish state – against a possible eviction. The manifesto is reproduced below in English, following a one and …

Empty living: inhabiting the residues of Spain’s urbanisation tsunami

by Melissa Garcia Lamarca The bust of Spain’s real estate boom has left 3.4 million empty housing units across the country. By 'inhabiting' empty or unfinished housing units, Agustín Ortiz Herrera's Empty Living project underlines the contradictions and consequences of the housing boom and the frustrations generated by its failure. Over seven years ago, Spain’s …

Emotions in struggle: reflections on militant/activist research processes

by Melissa Garcia Lamarca I can’t sleep at night, in fact I’m taking sleeping pills regularly, but my dreams are filled with children grasping on to me for help. The other day one of my comrades (compañeros) sent a foreign television crew to our squatted building for an interview, which was not supposed to last …

Federici and De Angelis on the political ecology of the commons

by Melissa Garcia Lamarca As part of a recent tour across Spain promoting her book Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (in Spanish here, thanks to the political communication and production project Traficantes de Sueños), the feminist autonomist Marxist Silvia Federici was joined by fellow autonomist Massimo De Angelis for a talk on the political ecology of the commons in …