Since the economic crisis of 2008 and before, people and movements in Spain have been experimenting with how to radically alter the terms of their lives away from the interests of the connected, wealthy and greedy and towards livable lives.
Mortgaged Lives, translated by Michelle Teran, tells the story of the PAH, the Platforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages). The PAH is massively popular yet outsider social movement that has been driving the most direct challenge to the authority of the state and corporations to rule, directly focusing its social energy on materially and politically addressing Spain's home bankruptcy crisis. Written by two of the founders of the PAH, Ada Colau and Adria Alemany, Mortgaged Lives explains the causes, analyzes the role of the public administrations, reveals the fight carried out by the PAH with first-person accounts, and offers advice and resources for defending the right to housing and avoiding abuses of power by the banks and financial institutions.
Spain is in an extended moment of radical political transition, this book offers an insight in both one of the organizations and two organizers who are helping drive the democratic insurgency
Journal of Aesthetics and Mortgages,
http://www.joaap.org/press/mortgagedlives.html
"How did a handful of people in a room in Barcelona grow to become Spain?s nation-wide anti-eviction movement? How did those in mortgage arrears, a sector of society overwhelmed by debt, faced with the immanent possibility of homelessness and often suffering from unemployment, become a political actor which could place the housing crisis at the centre of the national conversation and put collective action back on the map for millions of people?
To answer these questions is to understand the Plataforma de Afectados por La Hipoteca, (PAH, or Mortgage Holders Platform) the most dynamic, widespread and popular of the movements which have arisen in Spain since the crisis of 2008. For activists and those concerned with social change across Spain, the PAH has been a game changer. The organisation, formed through a grassroots network of local groups and with strong participatory and horizontal characteristics, has re-written the rule book of effective political action. To date, it seems to us the significance and the potential of the movement is currently being woefully underestimated outside of Spain."
Provisional University in "Six lessons from Spain's Anti-Eviction Movement" http://provisionaluniversity.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/six-lessons-from-s...
