Civil Society Initiatives
The Right to Fair Housing in the City: Creative Protest in Berlin, Marseille and Barcelona

Urbanization is one of the defining developments of the present and future. In view of widespread social ills and injustices due to urban growth, people all over the world need to stand up and speak out for social justice, participation and co-determination in our cities. Three particularly effective civil society and artistic initiatives along these lines can be found in Berlin, Barcelona and Marseille.

By Sonja Preu and Bernadette Kiekenbeck

Representatives of the tenants' association Kotti und Co. (Berlin), of the initiative Tabasco Vidéo and the activist Valérie Manteau (Marseille), and of the cooperatives La Péra Communicació and Mujeres Pa'lante (Barcelona) meet up online to share news and views on day-to-day life in the three cities and present their concrete efforts to achieve fair housing.

 

Kotti and Co., Berlin: Speaking out for Fair Housing  

The right to fair housing has been a major political issue in Berlin for a long time now. Rising rents and large-scale development projects are driving low-income residents out of their neighbourhoods to the outskirts of the city. When rent increases for public housing were announced in 2011, residents of Kottbusser Tor – or “Kotti”, as locals affectionately call this Kreuzberg neighbourhood – formed a tenants' association called Kotti & Co. In 2012, the association occupied the square in front of the housing project in Kotti with a gecekondu, a traditional Turkish wooden house they’d built themselves. And since then, other residents of this very diverse part of the city have joined the association in carrying out various campaigns and actions, including loud rallies, to protest against high rents in Berlin's public housing and other market forces driving low-income residents out of Kreuzberg.

  The association have achieved some crucial victories for local residents: namely, a rent freeze on all public housing in Berlin and an increase in rent subsidies for low-income tenants of subsidized housing. In 2015, they collected over 45,000 signatures for a referendum on rent and developed a public housing law in concert with the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and Housing; the law was subsequently passed. The tenants' association have succeeded in mobilizing the local community in order to call attention to their rights and thereby take a stand with signal effect for the right to fair housing. "Women play an important part in mobilizing for the protests," say Kotti und Co. representatives Fatma Cakmak and Ahmet Tuncer:
 

Tabasco Vidéo and Valérie Manteau in Marseille: Giving Residents Visibility in Public Space and Discourse

Élodie Sylvain and Benoît Ferrier of Tabasco Vidéo use audiovisual and digital tools to raise awareness about social issues. Their collective serves as a participatory medium for Marseille residents to describe their real day-to-day lives, which are often depicted in stereotypical terms and clichés in the media. They put out a magazine called Fatche 2! in digital and printed form, which is closely connected to the Coco Velten project, a temporary squat that accommodates various social and cultural actors and is tolerated by the city.
    The video makers at Tabasco Vidéo seek to empower residents to influence discourse about urban space. One of their projects focuses on the Rue d'Aubagne, a street in the Noailles neighbourhood of Marseille, in which several residential buildings collapsed on 5 November 2018, killing eight people. The film shows the local residents’ disheartened reactions to the indifference of the city administration, which refused to admit responsibility for the disaster. They started up the Collectif du 5 novembre to fight for the rights of victims and evacuated residents, some of whom are still housed in barely habitable makeshift accommodation. Thanks to their advocacy, the city administration has recognized the official status of forced evacuee along with a number of concrete demands and suggestions for improvement. Valérie Manteau, a journalist and activist in Marseille, seeks to increase the visibility of the city’s residents in public space and discourse. She is a member of the Collectif du 5 novembre and the collective Cultures des états généraux de Marseille. An avowed feminist, she has produced a series of portraits of women activists in Marseille for the regional newspaper La Marseillaise with a view to making women's voices heard at the political level and pointing up their importance in the city’s social issues.

La Péra Communicació and Mujeres Pa'lante, Barcelona: A Feminist Perspective on Social Change and Community-Based Solidarity

Like Tabasco Vidéo’s Coco Velten in Marseille, Cóopolis, housed in a former textile factory in Barcelona, provides a base for cultural, social and civic initiatives as well as collective communities. Organizing in the form of a self-managed collective enterprise is also part of the philosophy and social and political positioning at Cóopolis. Barcelona’s residents, especially women with low incomes and an immigrant background, have been hard hit by alarming developments in the city, including non-sustainable tourism policies and a property market that threatens their very livelihood. Two Cóopolis initiatives are aimed at providing social and legal support for women as well as dispelling misrepresentations of the social realities in current-day Barcelona.

Alba Terrones, Laie Hernández and Heura Vàzquez of La Péra Communicació Cooperativa are committed to social change and to transformative non-competitive economic alternatives. Modelling their approach on the Fotopica project, the cooperative are putting these principles into practice on a photo database. Mujeres Pa'lante Cooperativa: A women's cooperative | Mujeres Pa'lante Cooperativa La Péra Communicació’s feminist perspective and their understanding of community-based solidarity are reflected in all of their audiovisual projects. The cooperative are also committed to giving greater visibility to the elderly and ethnic minorities.
 


Mujeres Pa'lante are concerned with the social reality and livelihoods of women in Barcelona. Leire Manrique, a representative of the cooperative, provides support for immigrant women in matters of training, employment and official registration in the Catalan capital. The cooperative advocate for the women’s rights and for the regularization of their employment status and salaries. These days, immigrant women with inadequate social resources find themselves in even more precarious situations due to the pandemic.  There is a great need for action to heighten civil society's awareness of social ills and give them greater prominence in public discourse in major cities. These various initiatives in Berlin, Marseille and Barcelona are making a decisive contribution to improving people’s everyday lives there through their commitment to community-based solidarity, civic engagement and the right to fair housing in the city.