Chabolismo (Spain)

Chabolismo 🇪🇸
Location: Spain
Definition: Abundance of low-quality peasant housing in central Spain
Keywords: Spain – Europe – EU – Housing estate – Informal settlement – Migration
Clusters: Informal dwelling
Author: Noel Manzano
Affiliation: Instituto Universitario de Urbanística, Universidad de Valladolid and Institute for European Urban Studies, Bauhaus University of Weimar

By Noel Manzano, Instituto Universitario de Urbanística, Universidad de Valladolid and Institute for European Urban Studies, Bauhaus University of Weimar

In Spain, chabola is a small, poorly constructed dwelling and chabolismo is the condition of abundance of chabolas in the urban peripheries. The phenomenon has an extensive historical, sociological and cultural dimension in Spain. In the Catalan-speaking area, this type of dwelling is also known as barraca (Tatjer and Larrea 2011). The word chabola is likely to originate from the Basque word txabola dating to the 1800s to denote low-quality peasant housing in central Spain (El Pensamiento Español 1869). In the Spanish capital Madrid, similar housing for rural migrants was called choza (Luque Revuelto and Pulido Jurado 2014). This informal development has been documented in the city’s northern and southern peripheries since the first half of the 19th century (Diez de Baldeon 1984, Pallol Trigueros 2011, Vicente Albarrán 2011). It was outlawed by the authorities within the municipal limits of Madrid in 1898 on the grounds that it was a threat to public health, public order and the city’s reputation (Manzano Gómez 2022). However, during the first decades of the 20th century, more precarious dwellings, often built with waste materials, re-emerged illegally around the city. They became the object of frequent demolition operations by the public authorities, which helped push self-constructed housing further out to the suburbs, outside of the municipal borders (Manzano Gómez 2022). In 1924, national minimum housing standards and urban planning measures were established, which finally banned informal dwellings nationwide. Since then, such housing, built for survival, began to be popularly known as chabolas (Rodriguez Chumillas 2010).

After the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the construction of chabolas acquired enormous importance. Rural–urban migration and inadequate living conditions gave rise to a massive suburbanization process in larger Spanish cities. In Madrid, in the locations zoning approved in 1946 prohibited housing land uses, landowners began to sell vacant land plots at lower prices. Tenants built housing on them, despite having agreed to the terms of the rent-to-buy contracts, which made them liable for any non-compliance with the law (Canosa Zamora and Rodriguez Chumillas 1985). An increasing number of rural immigrants began to build houses during the nights or weekends to avoid police control, often without fully owning the land (Montes Mieza, Paredes Grosso and Villanueva Paredes 1976; Burbano 2015). At the same time, people were also building homes clandestinely on vacant land, often around areas where illegal housing already existed (Mancha 2018). The illegal dwellings built on legally acquired land were also known as casas bajas. This expression had been used since the 19th century to denote popular self-built housing legally developed in Madrid’s periphery (Vorms 2017), and continued to be used to identify less marginal chabola areas.

During the Franco regime (1939-1975), the way of life of the chabola dwellers was often denoted as a social and cultural pathology (Vorms 2017), reprising the ‘scientific racism’ representations about pre-Spanish Civil War shantytowns (Manzano Gómez 2021).

Chabolas, around 1960. Source: Archivo Regional de la Comunidad de Madrid. Fondo Martín Santos Yubero, 021480_010. © Archivo Regional de la Comunidad de Madrid.

In 1945, approximately 150 thousand people were living in chabolas on the outskirts of Madrid (Comisaría de Urbanismo 1945). In the 1950s, public policies such as the Plan de Urgencia Social (‘Social Emergency Plan’) and the Plan de Absorción del Chabolismo (‘Chabolismo Absorption Plan’) aimed to relocate the slum inhabitants and make space for the development of legally approved urban planning (Sambricio 1999; Tamayo Palacios 2011; Vorms 2013, 2017). However, the continual arrival of new populations and the development of new chabola neighbourhoods kept the number of chabola units stable at about 32 thousand well into 1970s (Archivo Regional de Madrid. File 251208/5, 1960, Ministerio de la Vivienda, 1977). To protect themselves from slum clearings and private urban planning management (Kreibich 2000; Manzano Gómez and Castrillo Romón 2019), residents formed neighbourhood associations (Castells 1974; Villasante et al. 1989; Schierstaedt 2016; Ofer 2017). The movements to defend the rights of chabola dwellers took hold in most of the country's large and medium cities.

In the ‘transition’ to democracy period after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, the fight for housing rights and neighbourhood improvements resulted in the Plan de Barrios (‘Neighbourhood Plan’), carried out in Spanish main cities, but especially relevant in Madrid (Ministerio de la Vivienda 1977). In the late 1970s and the 1980s, the authorities built 38 thousand housing units in Madrid alone and rehoused about 150 thousand people from deprived neighbourhoods and shantytowns (Aguilera 2021) by constructing subsidized private housing in accordance with the guidelines by the neighbourhood associations (Kreibich 2000). However, the socio-economic criteria for allocating new housing systematically excluded the Roma population, which generally had lower incomes (Nogués Sáez 2010). The demolition of chabolas and the failure to rehouse the Roma population led to the growth of new shantytown areas, constructed more precariously than previously due to the risk of new demolitions (Aguilera 2021).

Chabolas in 1981. Source: Archivo Regional de la Comunidad de Madrid. Fondo Juan Gallego Sanz, JUGA0006_000002. © Archivo Regional de la Comunidad de Madrid.

The public notions linking shantytowns to social marginality were exacerbated by the association of these spaces with a growing drug problem, which lead to racist revolts against the chabola dwellers (Nogués Sáez 2010). In an effort to control shantytowns, the government developed racialized policies, still in place today, directed not directly at the poorbut at the ‘culturally different’ (Aguilera 2021). Under these policies, the chabolas inhabited by the Roma were eradicated and the dwellers relocated to prefabricated houses in areas called Barrios de Tipologia Especial (Special Typology Neighbourhoods), far from urban centres. Under the auspices of rehousing dwellers ‘without traumatic shocks’ and ‘avoiding conflicts’ with the rest of society, these operations freed up land for legal urban development and strengthened the marginalization of these areas and their population even further (Lago Ávila 2014). However, new chabola neighbourhoods continued to emerge – in 1988 there were still more than a thousand of them around Madrid (Aguilera 2021). The demolitions continued in the 1990s and 2000s when the displaced population was relocated to Cañada Real Galeana, a shantytown persisting outside the city since the 1960s and reaching 11 thousand inhabitants in 2012. Despite decades of government effort to eradicate them, chabola neighbourhoods continue to exist in Spain. They have been recently studied in the regions of Galicia (Iglesias 2021) and Andalusia (Torres Gutiérrez 2011), but there is no current country-wide analysis . Recent research revealed the existence of new shantytowns built near larger farms, housing agricultural workers (Cáritas 2020).

Demolitions without relocation have recently taken place in the Cañada Real Galeana (Álvarez Agüí 2017) and other shantytowns in the metropolitan periphery of Madrid (Álvarez-De Andrés 2020). A hundred years after the chabolas were outlawed, the eradication policies have reduced this type of housing to its minimal expression. However, they have also made its legal status precarious, weakening its inhabitants and exposing them to a constant risk of eviction. Moreover, a new type of informal housing could be replacing chabolismo. In the absence of social housing and the face of the historical, progressive suppression of self-help housing processes, populations unable to access the private real estate market are increasingly squatting vacant houses as the only option (Manzano Gómez and Castrillo Romón 2019).

References

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