This is a CTP of initiative: ICA/MOI (Argentina)
This CTP addresses the formal creation in 1991 of the Movement of Occupants and Tenants (MOI), as a social movement of transformation in the field of habitat. In the 1990s, the cooperative developed fully experience of the MOI which, together with other organizations in the city of Buenos Aires, claimed the right to the city and housing. From this confluence of popular organizations, movement and struggle, also of discussion and relationship with the state, a set of regulatory frameworks of support and funding for self-managed experiences in housing production were created. The creation of the MOI is considered a CTP because it is the institutionalization of the movement and the beginning of its activities in the field of cooperative housing and public policies. In the 90s, the MOI began a second stage in his career as an advisory body and intervention of many cooperatives that were formed from the occupation of buildings. In that scenario the MOI develops a strategy to visit all occupied buildings. Some families of these buildings were already linked since the time of the occupation of the PADELAI building, where there had been a meeting of squats that then led to the 1st. Open Congress of San Telmo; in parallel to the establishment of a Roundtable to interact with the government. In the period 1992-1998, the MOI organise the main occupied buildings of the city forming about 15 cooperatives distributed in the same number of buildings and involving some 350 families approached. Excluding Padelai (118 families), by different regularizing processes, the MOI achieved the legalization of four occupied buildings. Each regularization process, the legal occupancy of the building in which the people were dwelling, was developed through self-managed organization and cooperative. The MOI members, called this stage "Building Without Bricks" and had to do with the concepts of settlement in the city and its Democratic Construction. This experience involved a decanting process and almost always conflicting, while inside the building are families who for various reasons were not involved in the process. 4 successful experiences after PADELAI (Lobos, Peru, La Union and Yatay), totalized about 70 families, ie 20% of families who had initially integrated cooperative processes. This represents that 5 families initially incorporated, 1 has reached the end of the first stage of the self-managed processes.
The formalization of the MOI arose in part as a reaction to the advance of neoliberal reforms implemented by the government headed by Carlos Menem. These policies focused on reducing public spending, privatization of public companies and public asset sales. In addition, profitability was imposed as the organizing principle of public policy. Among the main consequences of these policies, were included the increase in unemployment and the number of people with housing problems. Also, internal conflicts arose trade unions which had to adapt to this new reality. Then, one of the first social responses to liberal policies, was the creation of a Trade Union Confederation proposed the unification of the employed and the unemployed as workers, integrating within it social organizations. With these proposals and basic positions was born the Central of Argentine Workers (CTA-in its spanish initials) CTA in 1990. When the MOI assumed the habitat movement coordination in Argentina, the leaders of the CTA supported them. In 1996, was performed the First Congress of the CTA in an important place in the city of Buenos Aires. In this space, the committees of land, housing and habitat established, in general terms, the creation of national federations. In 1998 the MOI participated in the integration of the Federation of Land, Housing and Habitat (FTV-in its spanish initials). In another level, different organizations, including the MOI decided to create a Latin American network based on opposition to these policies, promoting the integration of grassroots organizations of popular habitat and the promotion of self-management policies. In this context, during 1998 a cooperative brigade of FUCVAM (Uruguayan cooperative housing federation), began working with the MOI, sharing in joint weekly seminars. This experience promoted the interaction between the MOI and FUCVAM, which enabled the formation of new cooperatives and facilitated the knowledge of Argentine and Uruguayan self-managed experiences. For the implementation of activities, they articulated resources to purchase materials and to technical assistance from one national housing public program and recruitment of skilled labor from individual national subsidies they articulated (integrated into the cooperative) has called "Plan Trabajar" (Working Plan).
One of the most important events related to the MOI's trajectory is the liberal policies implemented by the National Government of Carlos Menem in 1989. This government eliminated all the the cooperativism promotion policies and the social policies. This scenario, constituted a great space for the learning and development of the MOI project, even in an adverse context. Neoliberal economic policies, which were part of a global turn, promoted the abandonment of public assistance from problems such as habitat and involved the destruction of the welfare state: privatization of strategic public companies; Accelerated growth of external indebtedness; Destruction of labor legislation through deregulation, employment flexibilization and precarization; Liberalization of imports and destruction of the national productive apparatus. These were some of the actions that the Argentine government applied obeying the reccomendations of the international organisms as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. “During the years 1989 and 1991, the government developed a policy that, at least in the City of Buenos Aires, allowed the existence of 4 proposals related to the theme of popular habitat with uneven levels of development: the “Albergue Warnes” building in the neighborhood of La Paternal, the “Recup Boca” in La Boca, the block of the Franciscans, on “Plaza de Mayo”; the three motorized from the official areas. The fourth proposal was the PADELAI Experience at the heart of the Historic Preservation Area of the San Telmo neighborhood, built "from below" in the process we discussed in the CTP 1- quickly vanished.” Concrete expressions of these policy changes at the local level were overwhelming: 1- interrupting the support of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires to advance the PADELAI experience; 2 - indication to the Zonal Social Centers, decentralized government agencies strongly linked to the neighborhood demands, that not to be linked to the MOI; 3 - media construction of strong discriminatory campaigns, in which the General Confederation of Labor (main labor union of the country), was a functional operative part, in part because they was a direct beneficiary of privatization policies; And to finish, 4- writing a new Civil Code that framed the occupation of buildings as a criminal figure. Somehow it was stated that: “The one who does not have a home for his children because he lost his job and decided to occupy an empty building - usually for years - is arrested.” Contrary to the social objectives pursued by the MOI, the City Government oriented its housing policy to intervention in urban renewal processes linked to the concentrated sectors. Such is the case of the Puerto Madero Project where the urban land was practically given away to less than 200 dollars per square meter, to promote "private investment".
This CTP has an important contribution at the level of the different points of view of the MOI with respect to the occupation / appropriation of abandoned buildings. During the 1980s, in the face of growing housing problems and the lack of state responses, occupation of buildings was the primary action. However, both the legal "irregularity" of these actions, as well as the permanent insecurity regarding the evictions and the harassment of the State, generated debates on the strategies of the movement. “In the different spaces of internal debate and with other organizations, the emergence of the occupation was always discussed in the face of a medium and long term strategy, associated with the visibility of the movement and its demands. Both positions were not necessarily contradictory, but they pointed to the complexity that the movement began to take in the face of its consolidation and expansion.” This process also opened an opportunity for the multiplication of a set of social organizations that became central actors of the movement in its development at the national level. As another product, the execution of this operation made it possible to initiate a debate / reflection on the distinction between "emergency" and "self-management", based on the encounter between organizations supported in the situations and proposals for the emergency and the inconveniences they are facing. There is a need to differentiate a policy for the emergence of guidelines for the development of self-managed cooperative production. These struggles, debates, meetings and precedents were foundations for the recognition in the Constitution of the City of Buenos Aires of the right to the establishment, the support to the self-management processes and the recovery of idle buildings, concepts all expressed in article 31 of Constitution of the City of Buenos Aires.
The 1990s represented a crucial moment in the trajectory of the MOI like movement of social transformation in Argentina. The creation of the MOI was not only anticipated by the founding cooperatives who occupied the first buildings a few years earlier, but proposed as a central objective to intervene in the habitat policies in Argentina. The creation of cooperatives was, in the words of the members of the MOI “The first day we occupied the first building and we created the first cooperative we knew that it was only the beginning, we intuited. We were not insane usurping properties. We were an organized group that claims the right to decent housing, with social ties and concerns about the growing housing deficit.” The creation of the MOI also has to do with the reassembly in the early 80's at the University of Buenos Aires of a design chair that existed in since before the dictatorship at the University of La Plata. From there, architects and social workers began working with isolated groups and social organizations to develop direct intervention actions. That was the beginning of occupations of buildings and land grabbing, all anticipatory actions for the creation of the MOI.
The main learning of the MOI in the 1990s was associated with the consolidation and expansion of the movement as one of the main spaces in Argentina for the development of self-managed housing cooperatives through mutual aid. New internal construction methodologies: the Guards, normative processes of self-management policies of popular habitat, like any other process, are essentially historical constructions directly linked to the level of development of the social movement and the level of articulation of this with popular political constructions. A significant face of this process of building popular norms in the 1990s in Buenos Aires, is that emerged as a consequence of the popular reaction to urban renewal processes in the traditional neighborhood of La Boca. Renewal entails socio-spatial -as historically happens in the capitalist city- processes of eviction and expulsion. Faced with this phenomenon, the Assembly of Displaced Persons of La Boca is built - an association of the affected families with the San Juan Evangelista parish, and the formation of Its emergent grassroots organization: Mutual of Displaced People of La Boca. This organization encourages the sanction of an Ordinance in the Legislature and its subsequent regulation, which generates the operative 525 and operates from the responsible area of the executive, the Municipal Housing Commission (CMV, in its spanish initials). “This is an operation for families in a situation of housing emergency, that implements individual mortgage loans and as such - individual - misaligned in its form with respect to what had been a collective struggle. There are problems of correspondence between forms of struggle and type of operation ... not very different from the collective struggle for land, then transformed through regularization processes, into atomizations through access to individual property.” These were the initial bases for the construction of self-managed proposals of social transformation. The creation of the MOI institutionalized not only the trajectory but also stabilized the learning of previous years. Movements such as the MOI began to "show up" as alternative constructions to the prevailing official system of financial resources for business executions, while becoming alternative forms of transformation. These processes were set up on the basis of working groups between government spheres and self-managed social organizations of habitat in order to move to higher normative levels: to move from almost paradigmatic punctualities to more general norms, to promote and cover the broad and generalized development of Collective self-management experiences within the city.
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