Intro

SPCC, A Casa Amarela, was always going to be demolished one day. We knew that. Seeing it first as a ruin, then as nothing at all, motivated me to have at least something written down about it.

I was only one of many participants of what I would call an exhilarating collective experiment. While most of the other participants are now gone, geographically and physically, myself, being perhaps the most textual of the participants, pushed for this book. It's an attempt to document what we did, but also includes some tools and instructions in case this book reaches you past societal collapse.

I also decided to include the community’s full journals, typos and anger included. I think it makes an interesting contrast between me, writing in hindsight and over 10 years after the demolition, and how we all wrote in the heat of the moment, as the community was built and then completely destroyed.

My personal political ideas have since matured, and so has my understanding of privilege, especially my own. A lot of the journal entries really are just side channels for ingroup/outgroup lines we developed in the community, consciously or unconsciously. These lines are always there. Class, background, education. It's naive to think these would somehow disappear in our community, but we were a lot more naive back then.

We started SPCC on a high from escotilha8. What followed was a slow descent from idealism into disillusion, which is very obvious in the journal entries. The same trajectory was already there in escotiha8, which makes me think communities really have a lifetime. Moving on and starting again, rebirth if you will, restarts the cycle. It really is people, their life and relationships, that fertilise these otherwise sterile urban spaces. The vitality of the disorganised anti-authoritarians burns strong and bright, and often burns the very same structures they build. I think that's is a small price to pay for the freedom that is created and experienced in those environments.

After reviewing the journals, I realised most of them were predominantly negative. When things are good, the digital world seems to lose its appeal. It's almost like keyboards, accepting any word we type in, also enable a perfect environment for venting and complaining. I realised there were too many missing pieces. The beautiful moments we had, the brave and stupid things we did. I added a few of my own accounts. They are all personal, and probably not entirely true, but that is a good contrast with the dryness and immediacy of the journal entries.

Even squatting itself was, at the time, mostly okay in Portugal. If the later half of the 20th century meant many progressive ideas around squatting and housing, the 21st century represents a backlash against them. The ebb and flow of authoritarianism and totalitarianism caught up with us in the 21st century.

Perhaps a project like this one might remind people that housing bubbles are collective hallucinations best offset by lock picking and clever social engineering. That wants and needs are different beasts, and defiant minds can make do in any situation.

Though these are true stories, names have been changed. Any description of criminal activities is for literary pleasure only as these may or may not have happened. Any instruction manuals describing any illegal practises are not to be followed in any situation whatsoever. Read this book at your own risk.

All original journal entries are headlined by a nostalgic from: heading with the date they were published, and are in a different font. These were originally published in the community website.