Diaspora and chainsaw. The influx of residents from the urban center of Madrid – all within the walls of the M-30 – is unstoppable. As if it were a pop-up New York, Carabanchel and Vallecas are beginning to be neighborhoods that are talked about in terms similar to how Brooklyn and Queens Manhattan were talked about two decades ago: formerly, depressed neighborhoods, and today, the result of the reigning roaming in the center – and its stinging effect on prices –, new fashionable areas.
The diaspora of middle and low incomes has been accompanied by an intense arrival of large Latin American rentiers, especially Venezuelans, who have settled in the Salamanca neighborhood but have contributed, with their massive acquisition of central properties for its operation as a rental and holiday rental, to multiply the prices of one and the other.
The year 2024 begins with other furors related to the felling that the City Council has undertaken in Madrid Río and in squares such as El Carmen, Comendadoras, Santa Ana or Carlos V. Madrid is one of the cities that boasts the highest urban tree tax in the entire continent, but this statistic contains an important distortion: the Casa de Campo, a park of 1,700 hectares that counts as an urban park even though it is, in reality, outside the city walls, on its western border. Within the city, every action carried out or planned by the Consistory for the coming months goes through the lethal action of the chainsaw.
If the scarcity of shade and tree masses in the city, Madrid compensates for it with the trees that do exist beyond its glacier, for housing, the only arbitrated solution is the same: the gigantic new developments urban plans that are underway, obviously, outside the existing city.
But the great challenge, and perhaps hence the sudden topicality of the chainsaw – combined with a failed repopulation policy due to the lack of maintenance of the new specimens, which after a few months of being grafted systematically appear dead – is municipal inaction with respect to the reality of climate change already very evident in the warm months in the capital: the systematic transformation of common spaces into hard squares without shade, the poor permeability of the city’s drainages, which force to cut the railway infrastructure and the metro in the increasingly frequent DANA, the outsourcing of public spaces – which are exclusively dedicated to ephemeral commercial and hotel facilities of a private nature -, the absence of a strategic commitment to mobility alternatives to the private vehicle, the low level of competition in sustainability plans despite the abundance of funds for these purposes… Madrid has not made receipt of the increasing inclement weather.
The municipal policy of Mayor José Luis Martínez Almeida is the least ambitious of the last thirty years in the capital, without transformation projects and without a clear orientation in terms of improving the environmental quality of the city, beyond the hesitations around the legacy emission reduction plans or road traffic limitations. Almeida entered the mayoralty promising to repeal the Central Madrid of his predecessor, Manuela Carmena, and the only thing he did was to change its name, after becoming aware of the sanctions that could face the city
Along with this, Almeida, aligned with the cultural war of the regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has removed plaques and tributes to the republican exile and to victims of the Civil War and Francoism from top to bottom of the city, while haggling tributes to personalities such as the late writer Almudena Grandes and subscribed to far-right political initiatives such as awarding the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the city’s gold medal a few days after the start of the offensive on Gaza. Initiatives with the purpose – successful – of removing the political opposition, without any other balance for the city than that of disrupting the coexistence that it boasted was the capital of tolerance and freedom.
