This post is part of a symposium on movement lawyering in times of rising authoritarianism, run in collaboration with the Global Network of Movement Lawyers and Movement Law Lab). (Available also in Espanol and Português).
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Under slogans such as “The Canary Islands have a limit,” “Enough! Let’s put limits to tourism,” or “It’s over! Let’s lower the rents,” mass mobilizations have recently spread throughout Spain. The movements are a reaction against the overexploitation of the territory, real estate speculation fueled by international capital, and the effects of extreme touristification. They cry out against the unlimited appetite of the global market; they connect the depredation of housing, cities, and territories with environmental degradation; and they demand measures to protect the dignity and ecosystems of the affected communities.
In this brief post, I consider the role of movement lawyering and social movements in navigating the tension between a law that erodes and sacrifices ecosystems and dignity in the name of progress, on the one hand, and a law that tries to resist and defend the social function of housing, the intrinsic value of nature, and the need to establish limits to the power of the market – all of which is occuring in a context of growing authoritarianism that aims to eliminate any resistance in order to push economic growth to the edge of the ecosocial abyss.
A Chronic Housing Crisis
These protests are not the first of their kind, nor did they appear spontaneously. On the contrary, they are a response to growing discontent over the past fifteen years, during which Spain has experienced a chronic housing crisis. The two million people evicted from their homes since 2008 are the result of deep, historic, and interrelated causes. The most recent are the financialization of housing and the Spanish government aligning itself with the predatory industry of vulture funds, by cutting tenants’ rights, giving tax breaks to investment funds, and allowing international investment to fuel a financial bubble in the rental market. This alignment helps explain why the Spanish government opted to squander a historic opportunity to expand the public social housing stock in 2012 when the bank bailout led to the creation of a huge state-owned real estate agency and the privatization of hundreds of thousands of houses, effectively putting decent housing out of the reach of broad segments of society.
The precarity and social unrest generated by these policies has given rise to the organization of a series of social movements, such as the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH, 2009), the citizen tides (“mareas ciudadanas”), and the “movement of the indignados” (2011). In the case of the PAH, their defense of the right to housing involved reviving past practices of resistance, including disobedience in the face of evictions, taking over empty homes owned by banks and vulture funds to rehouse people without alternatives, and non-violent direct actions, such as occupations of bank or public offices, that called for debt forgiveness, social rents, and limits to speculation. Subsequently, other movements were born, such as the tenants’ unions, which revived other historical practices of resistance, such as the rent strike.
From a movement lawyering perspective, these movements have created assemblies and spaces for collective learning, decision-making, and action. In these fora, discussion ranges over legal, strategic, and social issues, democratizing legal knowledge among the affected people themselves, under the mantra that “no one will be a better lawyer than yourself.” Moreover, these spaces have enabled the transformation of collective demands into legal instruments, whether as bills, popular legislative initiatives, or strategic litigation.
These sustained mobilizations have also been crucial in the adoption of several measures that, although insufficient, have helped to alleviate the worst effects of the housing crisis: the moratorium on mortgage evictions (2013-2028), the recovery and moderate extension of the rights of tenants (2018), the moratorium on evictions during the pandemic (2020) and its extension until December 2024, and rent control in Catalonia (2021, 2024).
In this regard, in our work at the Observatori DESCA, we are aware that law is the reflection of a neoliberal power structure and a cultural substratum that, as Pier Paolo Pasolini would say, drinks from a consumer fascism, and that, for some time now, has been trending toward authoritarianism and fascism. But we also know that law is a disputed territory and a living discipline, that although it often enables oppression, it can also be used as a tool for emancipation if it has the support of civil society and citizen mobilization.
Therefore, we work together with social movements and organizations such as the PAH, the Alliance against Energy Poverty (“Alianza contra la Pobreza Energética”), the Union of Tenants of Barcelona (“Sindicato de Inquilinas de Barcelona”), and the Assembly of Neighborhoods for Tourist Degrowth (“Asamblea de Barrios por el Decrecimiento Turístico”). By joining together with these groups, we have achieved several important victories, such as a measure in Barcelona that requires new construction and major renovations to allocate 30% of the units to affordable housing, as well as a measure in Catalonia that obligates large landlords to offer a mandatory social rent to people at risk of residential exclusion.
The Promise & Perils of Law
This last measure is a good example of the difficulties that social movements face in trying to use law in the service of human dignity: it was drafted by a group of activists and movement lawyers, gained the support of more than 140,000 citizens as a popular legislative initiative, and was approved by the Parliament of Catalonia in 2015. Since then, however, it was suspended by the Constitutional Court (2016), until citizen pressure forced the state to withdraw its initial appeal (2019); its coverage was then extended thanks to the same pressure (2019), a modification that was declared unconstitutional on formal grounds by the Constitutional Court (2021), and which, again extended (2022), has just been declared unconstitutional for impinging on the jurisdiction of the central government. This ‘antisocial decision’ of the Constitutional Court removes protections from vulnerable families, puts pressure on Catalan government to offer them alternative housing, and transfers to the central government the pressure to approve a mandatory social rent requirement at the national level.
While this policy has been in place, it has benefited more than 20,000 families, and it would have protected many more if other actors had not operated against it. For instance, many large landlords simply ignored the rule, despite the imposition of more than 6 million euros worth of fines on 79 large property holders. And, as for the courts, many decided that the obligation to offer a social rent had no effect on the eviction process, turning their backs on an existing law that emanated directly from the citizens. In response, it was the housing movement itself that developed and disseminated an alternative legal strategy to turn the tables: the people at risk of eviction were the ones who were submitting civil complaints against large property holders.
All this demonstrates the tension between the right to property and the social function of housing, between the constituted powers and the citizen’s constituent power, between a sacrificial law and another that is trying to break through. These tensions are particularly visible in a context in which more measures are needed to combat speculative phenomena such as tourist apartments, seasonal rentals, or the sale and purchase of housing by non-residents in disputed areas.
That is why the various movements and unions for the right to housing in Catalonia are aware of the need to share resources and strategies; and of the importance of weaving alliances between different movements, such as anti-racist, feminist and environmentalist movements, to imagine joint horizons.
Global Connections & Utopian Thinking
However, in a globalized world, merely domestic alliances will never be enough. It is essential to develop transnational consciences and narratives capable of connecting the massive destruction of housing in Gaza with the 15 million people who are evicted from their homes each year around the world; to share strategies and lessons learned among social movements for the right to housing on different continents; and to impose international limits on investment funds that, with impunity and with the collaboration of States, are eating away at the housing stock of the world’s major cities.
Any international dialogue about the right to housing and territory will inevitably lead to other complex conversations, as our political possibilities will be limited by existing law, structures, and social relations. Yet I believe that as movement lawyers and social movements, it is important to build international dialogues that detach themselves, at least momentarily, from vulgar realism, and to dare to explore utopian horizons, such as those suggested in Luigi Ferrajoli’s Constitution of the Earth, which proposes measures like the disarmament of states, the democratization of the United Nations, or the elimination of borders.
Given our current predicament–authoritarianism is growing, speculation has no limits, and humanity is facing an imminent ‘eviction from the Earth’ due to the repeated non-compliance with the laws of nature–social movements and movement lawyers must be bold and utopian to build a culture and a law that protects the limits imposed by the dignity and ecosystems of the neighborhoods, cities, and territories.
