Further critical analysis of food systems and land ownership in Valencia, thanks for subscribing and please leave feedback if you fancy!
Mon 22 Aug
I’m woken up by renovations in the courtyard, read on the sofa for a bit, then walk w Carles through the park in the drained river. We meet in Benimaclet with Aitor, a local agro-ecologist and community organiser. He’s holding a folder of maps and we compare them with the one on the back of a bus stop to study urban expansion on the outskirts of Valencia. Beniclamet, once a peripheral town with its own water tower and irrigation, was absorbed into the city in 1970s when impoverished rural families began flooding to the city for factory work.
We look mainly at land procurement, Aitor highlighting the accumulation of empty plots by private landlords right besides the city boundaries over twenty years ago, still with unfulfilled development plans, and the diminishing public-owned agricultural land. The visual shift from urban to rural is pretty stark, separated by just a dual carriageway, which differs immensely to a more integrated suburban periphery in British city design. I read later that L’Horta de Valencia –the entire city province contained in a boundary– and their traditional style of field farming gave us the root of the term ‘horticulture’.
We walk through a few empty plots, one contains a community-planted guerilla orchard, one is dissected by a concrete irrigation pipe, another I’m told used to be a swaying meadow but is now visibly not. There’s an autonomous space tacked on to the edge of a dusty plot, with an old sofa under a big tarp and a hand-painted rule set. Nextdoor, a former agricultural field with a recently flattened barraque has been gifted by the Town Hall on long-term loan to a group of residents, who have split it into allotments and built an outdoor kitchen using only materials that were on-site. A poorly palm tree is propped up with crutches and plaster wedges, fig trees offer small fruits, and an enormous white mulberry tree nods to another industry that landowners may have dabbled in for local prosperity – silk.
The final stop is Grama, a squatted alqueria (hamlet) that hosts anarchist food justice groups and a large food growing area with an impressive man-made flooding irrigation system based on the one in Almàssera. Huge tarps tied between buildings provide shade for a large working area used to separate surplus fruits and veg collected from Central Mercad every week, and redistributed to low- and no-income households nearby. A climbing frame made from pallets and old kitchen equipment, a small dog park, and plenty of sun-protected benches ensure a wide range of needs are met for the living community and visitors. The shed (an old bathroom) is full of donated and fixed hand-tools, labour rotas and lizards.
Both main buildings are adorned with painted murals and anti-fascist slogans, “No Governers, We Care For This Space Together”, embellishing the ethics of horizontal organising onto the physical structures that enable the action. In all the anticapitalist projects, squats, self-organised spaces, and community gardens I’ve visited, volunteered, or worked at in UK, I’ve never seen such a clear connection between political activism, neighbourhood resistance and food justice work.
In this initial point of contact with the project, it strikes significantly for a few reasons. Firstly, most democratically- or sociocratically- run organisations lean into the arts as a ‘creative methodology’ to provide common ground to attract bourgeoise citizens and potential participants, and as an organised output in the form of gigs, workshops, exhibitions which grow conceptual identity, while gardens tend to focus on food-growing and host occasional events, particularly fundraisers and family shows. Secondly, most squats don’t have the space, skills or longevity to grow food, while most community gardens I’ve been to have quite clear hierarchy which pertains to historical imbalance of power and unwillingness to change. Thirdly, I’m thinking about ideological disconnection between acquiring food and fighting politics, both widely accepted as systems that we receive and cannot change. We organise brilliant, loud, practical protest, and recharge halfway with a Pret sandwich or celebrate with a takeaway. It leads me to consider the need for superficial validation rather than self-initiated praxis; there is a whole different essay in there, but you get my drift. We don’t see food as a tool of commoning or resistance in the same way.
Here in Valencia, family, food and social solidarity is literally baked into the culture. Like a recipe once you combine the ingredients, these individual elements are conceptually and chemically inseperable. Spain is a nation of farmers, who only started flocking to (and therefore urbanising) cities in the 1970s, so the plight of one farmer is the plight of the whole community.