Marinaleda - an inspirational story

The Observer newspaper has recently carried a fascinating article about a new book - The Village Against the World published by Verso. This tells the story of Marinaleda, a village in Spain, which has responded to the turmoil of Spanish history over the last three or four decades in a quite distinctive way. It seems to be based in a particular form of socialist politics. The Mayor, Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo, has represented the village since 1979, standing for his own party, the Collective for Worker's Unity and originally winning 76% of the vote. Under his leadership, the village engaged in protest politics in the 1980s, a key claim being to land around the village belonging to the Duke of Infantado. In 1991 the Andalucian government granted the village 1,200 hectares of this land and this formed the basis of the village's collective farm together with facilities such as a swimming pool, sports centre, school, gardens and some 350 new homes (all 'mortgage-free' according to the paper). The collective basis of the local economy has meant that the villagers have survived even during the austerity budgets of the post-2008 period and the bond-crisis of the Spanish government. Unemployment is reported at 5% compared to the regional level of 36%.
Clearly this can be read as a triumph of oppositional politics and of separation from the capitalist economy. But the important elements, to my mind, of this story are twofold. First, there is the central role that the transfer of land-ownership played. Here we have community landownership underpinning local economic activity and housing development. This just reinforces how little we use this resource in the UK. Second, this is not a village in isolation from the wider capitalist economy. If it has managed to keep unemployment so low, it must be trading its agricultural products with that wider economy. Rather this story seems to fit well with many other stories from lower-income countries where the benefits of collective forms of economic ownership and production enable a 'third' economy - neither the formal economy nor the black economy - to operate successfully. We have often lost sight of this 'third' economy in European countries but it could be ripe for a revival.

From the Dublin conference

Last week planning academics from across the world met at the joint congress organised by UCD in a very sunny Dublin  for the European and North American associations of planning schools: http://aesop-acspdublin2013.com/. Around a thousand people attended so difficult to summarise the discussions or even the main themes! There was plenty of continuing evidence that market-led development often failed to deliver for local communities and, further, that it was running into problems as a strategy in current economic climates. But there were also a couple of interesting papers that linked very directly to the arguments and proposals in The Future of Planning.
A fascinating paper by David Adams, of Glasgow University, discussed urban land reform in Scotland - where he is advising the Scottish Government - and proposed a Community Right to Sell. This would be a measure whereby a community could force a plot of vacant or derelict land in their area to go to auction and be sold. The idea is that the auction process would result in the land being sold for a beneficial use even if this was a price below that desired by the current landowner. David's view is that often this lower price would enable communities to buy the land; even if they were outbid, land would be brought into use rather than being blocked by landowners.
Another interesting analysis was put forward by Peter Phibbs of the University of Sydney. His paper outlined the ACT Land Rent Scheme under which households are able to rent land and then buy a building to put on it, purchasing the land at a later stage to unify the two elements. There is an annual land rent fixed at 2% of the land value for lower income households and 4% for others. This seems an innovative idea which Peter describes as a government CLT and as having some significant success. He also points though to the opposition that it faced at the outset, a reminder of the need to build wide coalitions of support to challenge the existing growth-dependent paradigm.
Two ideas to watch....