"Lavapiés"
by Andrea Ratto
Lavapiés is a neighborhood in Madrid and it is not just any neighborhood. Its history tells us about a place of working-class tradition, which was previously a place of reception for immigrant labor from the rest of Spain, and then the nerve center of several foreign communities that settled there. Its present tells us that it is one of the neighborhoods that stand out worldwide for their power of attraction in terms of tourism, culture and leisure.
What has happened is called gentrification. Although at first you may think that everything is positive, there are many side effects. First and certainly the worst effect is the displacement of the most fragile social classes towards other areas with more accessible and peripheral prices leading to the breakdown of informal aid networks that are so important in the day-to-day life of communities.
Lavapiés has gone from being a cheap neighborhood to having the same rental prices as the most expensive neighborhoods in the Spanish capital, also driven by the emergence in recent years of tourist flats and platforms such as Airbnb.
When I made the trip for my photobook "Europa" I passed through Madrid and it was easy for me to compare what was happening in Lavapiés with the reality of other European neighborhoods. It was clear to me that if I wanted to do a work about gentrification then it was the right place to start. Walking through its streets you could see how different souls lived together, traditional bars and modern bars, shops for African, Indian, Chinese or South American products, art galleries, many theaters and cultural self-managed spaces.
So I started without much thought and spent there a week, then another two and several times more between 2018 and 2019 to get images that were able to document the process critically.
Gentrification perfectly expresses all the bad things of our western society, it is a wild speculation on some of the primary goods that should be protected like the right to decent housing, and that ends up making those who already have large capitals richer, and sacrificing who are most economically and socially fragile. And the worst thing is that, to achieve its objective, it uses to its advantage positive values such as multiculturalism and culture in general or the demand for more security and the improvement of citizen infrastructures. All the improvements that are carried out in a neighborhood in a ongoing gentrification process are not for its inhabitants but for those who will arrive when the first will be forced to leave.
All this is explained in the book / fanzine "Lavapiés" that I self-edited together with the sociologist Marta Morán, author of the texts that, together with my photos, aim to create an informative set to understand the gentrification process in general and in the Madrid neighborhood in particular. Link to buy the photobook/fanzine "Lavapiés" :
I was born in Genova (Italy) in 1976, but I have been based in A Coruña (Spain) since 2005. In recent years I have been drawn to street photography, which to me now means a way of documenting society with a critical view. In 2017 I visited 26 European countries with my camera in search of European society. I published the photobook “Europa” thanks to a crowdfunding campaign in the Kickstarter platform. Now I am working to complete the project about Gentrification in Lavapiés, Madrid.
At the end of 2018, a survey by Time Out magazine designated Madrid’s vibrant and wonderfully diverse Barrio de Lavapiés as the top choice on its list of “50 Coolest Neighborhoods in the World,” after surveying over 15,000 people.