PS

Migrants from poor countries send home about $300 billion a year. This is more than three times the global total in foreign aid, making 'remittances' the main source of outside money flowing to the developing world." (New York Times, November 18th, 2007)

Approximately 150 million people remitted money at an average cost of $200 per year in 2007 . Our workshop examined the institutions, and built products of the informal global trade in money. We have documented the ways in which the movement of money is manifested locally. The Raval district of Barcelona was our site and we have used our eyes to understand the flexible forms and institutions that emerge with informal patterns of global migration.

Rather than reaffirming the common presumption that the West or the developed world establishes institutions which dominate the developing world, we document and respond to the reverse trend, in which the developing world establishes new patterns in its host cities, Euro by Euro, person by person, often in an ad hoc, makeshift, unapparent ways. Our work is provisional, since this is a massive, still growing, dynamic global network of physical, informational, and institutional spaces.

Data

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The Chart below, is based on data assembled by Inter-American Dialogue (at IFAD) in 2007. It shows that approximately 2.5 million migrants sent approximately 7.6 billion euros home to developing and transitional nations in 2007. Although we do not have a complete data for 2009, based on 200 interviews undertaken by Orozco and his team in 2009, remittances will drop 22percent percent this year.

— As a group we have created a map of remittance locations in Raval, Barcelona. Photo’s were all taken on June 15th and 16th and 17th, 2010.

GEOSPATIAL ARCHTECTURE

METROPOLIS

International postgraduate program in architecture and urban culture

Laura Kurgan MASTERCLASS

2010