The rehabilitation project Clau Mestra is in a lethargic phase awaiting the execution of the agreement signed with the Sant Cugat del Vallès City Council in 2015.

The agreement provides for the promotion of a cooperative housing project in this property, owned by the municipal company Promusa, based on the constitution of a surface right in favor of the cooperative Sostre Cívic. However various bureaucratic and administrative problems have delayed the project until today, to the despair of the awardees who entered the project in January 2016 as user partners of the cooperative.

We are at the beginning of 2019, and the last procedures, still prior to the signature of the surface right, have not been carried out, and have not even been on the agenda of the February Plenary of the City Council of Sant Cugat, as we had been told. This umpteenth delay has spilled the beans, and the group demands that the City Council put a date on the signature of the surface right with a firm and public commitment.

grup Clau Mestra has written the following manifest demanding from the City Council the fulfillment of its commitments:

Four years after the agreement between the 6 Claus collective and the Sant Cugat del Vallès City Council, the transfer of assets between Promusa and the council has still not been approved, as well as the modifications to the initially agreed agreement that we are demanding from Sostre Cívic and that they were already accepted by Promusa three months ago.

As of today, there is still no certainty that this issue will be debated in the next full session of the City Council this February. Always with the limits of the administration's rhythm, and right now, with the electoral panorama very close, we express the fear of encountering the umpteenth obstacle: the non-inclusion on the agenda of the next plenary session on the 18 of February 2019 for the approval of the agreement. From the collective there is a lot of fatigue and even mistrust of this whole process that seems to have no end. We demand seriousness, clarity and responsibility on the part of the City Council so that they complete the procedures and respond to their commitments.

Members of the group Clau Mestra

Three years of work despite bureaucratic and administrative problems

Shortly after the allocation of the Casas dels Mestres to the user partners, the project already encountered its first obstacle, when the City Council realizes that it did not have in its possession one of the parcels of the estate of Casas dels Mestres that gives access to the road, and that therefore this property could not obtain the prescriptive building permit. A subsequent change in the planning around Case dels Mestres, where several properties owned by Promusa and the City Council had to be segregated and parceled out, have come to complicate the operation even more.

All this has involved multiple actions and procedures (search for the property and purchase of the access lot to the road, approval of subdivision licenses, registration, agreement on capital increases at the general meeting of Promusa shareholders , etc.) and other procedures still pending (approval by the plenary session of the capital increases, processing of the commercial register, notarial deed of the increases, inscriptions in the register, etc.) which are delaying the signature of the surface right that will allow actually start the project.

Despite the obstacles, the technical team of the cooperative and the group of user partners have not stopped working and organizing. Over the course of these three years, progress has been made in the definition of the architectural project that has already been delivered to the City Council, in the estimation and budget of the project, in the financial plan and in the search for financing through the 'ICF, in the internal participation plan, etc. The group is organized into work committees and meets periodically to move forward with the different stages of the project. In this sense, apart from participating in the definition of the project, the group Clau Mestra has participated in various spaces: from the neighborhood council of La Floresta, to the Governing Council of Sostre Cívic, through participation in talks and trainings to spread the cooperative housing model.

A project resulting from the collective struggle

The Houses of the Masters, which had been abandoned years before, they have been protagonists of the neighborhood struggle for the right to housing in La Floresta. After a series of occupations, in June 2014, given the property's general state of deterioration, it was occupied again by the 6 Claus collective (which later became Clau Mestra) as a means of pressure to force the City Council to use the building as social housing, with the support of different social and political entities.

During the following year, a process of negotiation took place Sostre Cívic acted as mediating agent between the group and the City Council. Employment ends on març of 2015, at the time that an agreement was reached between the parties and the conditions for the constitution of a surface right were signed of the building in favor of the cooperative to promote HPO housing under a right of use regime.

The project contemplates the comprehensive rehabilitation of the property and its expansion to allow access to all homes and increase the living area. Bioconstruction systems and materials are proposed, as well as highly efficient passive and active installations that will make the building an example of more sustainable construction and consumption than conventional construction.