From “Chabolas” to Invisible Squats: A Reflection on the Residential Informality Evolution in Madrid

Abstract

After the subprime crisis of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and in a context of overabundance of empty housing and job insecurity, informal squatting has become a generalized housing solution among the popular classes of Madrid. However, the existence of poor, illegal housing is not new. In a historical perspective, residential informality has been a mirror effect of the structural incapacity of the market to provide housing for poor populations. Before the current housing occupations, the so-called “chabolismo”, allowed to poor populations to obtain a shelter by constructing without permission precarious housing in empty lands. Both in the past and today, the State arbitrary repress or tolerate residential informality in close relation to the interests of the legal real estate market. Both in the past and today, homeless population flee from the state’s gaze, forging solidarities and constructing collaborative networks, in order to locate habitable spaces, identify legal gaps, and resist the risk of eviction. Combining both historical and ethnographic sources, this chapter leads us to understand how territorial control of the State has evolved in order to erase poor urban areas, and what strategies their population has developed to resist to it.