Convivencia: urban space and migration in a small Catalan town: by Martin Lundsteen, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2022, xilv + 199 pp., $120.00 (£92.00) (Hardback). ISBN: 978-1-78661-452-0

Abstract

Since the end of the Franco regime, state regulation has made home ownership one of the main strategies of social reproduction of the Spanish working class. In the 1960s and 70s, new subsidized private housing projects were built on the outskirts of cities to accommodate migrants coming from the Spanish rural exodus. It was in these neighbourhoods, with poor facilities and far-reaching class stigmas, where migrants from the global South began to settle around the year 2000. Much like their internal migrant predecessors, the new international immigrants were also funnelled into home ownership. Due to their (over)indebtedness, these newcomers bought from native working-class homeowners who were thus able to move to other neighbourhoods with better housing and facilities. In many working-class areas, the population change happened very fast. When the financial crisis of 2008 hit, these neighbourhoods were left with an aging and impoverished contingent of native neighbours, who could not leave and now felt trapped, and the newcomers from a racialized working class who, in the middle of a severe economic crisis, could not afford to pay their mortgages. The resulting environment was conducive to conflicts of convivencia (conviviality), such as those studied ethnographically by Martin Lundsteen.