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About this project
With your help, we’re going to buy the space at Duque de Alba 13
Show list of needs
Infrastructure
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Minimum | Optimum |
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Renovation of the space
This is essential to strengthen the building’s infrastructure. Along the way, we’ll improve the usability and accessibility of the space as a whole. This includes expanding the bookstore areas, new critical essay sections, hard-to-find books in different languages and a new space for the children’s section.
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£ 29,339 | |
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Decoration
We’re going to try to make the space even more beautiful and welcoming than it already is. To do this, we’ll need to cover costs for furniture, paint and other decorative elements.
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£ 16,765 |
Material
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Minimum | Optimum |
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Support for purchasing new materials
With the purchase and renovation, we’ll need new materials and equipment to provide more display space, better service and an expansion of our work.
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£ 20,956 | |
| Total | £ 50,295 | £ 67,060 |
Necessary
Supplemental
General information
Almost 10 years ago, we moved into our current space to build a social space for collective struggle. This was possible thanks to alliances that brought together autonomous, libertarian, heterodox communist and feminist spaces, migrants and grassroots Christians, along with many other people with a strong political commitment.
The move, and this is very important in this story, was negotiated thanks to all those alliances, which, working together, got the owners to agree to rent us the space at a price well below market rate.
That change allowed us to grow as a bookstore, as a political project and as a collective, and it undoubtedly strengthened the city’s political networks, since we took this step (and are taking it again) alongside other groups such as Senda de Cuidados and Red Interlavapiés. Duque de Alba 13 thus became an autonomous, shared space for the city, and today it’s a place for meetings, mutual aid, legal self-defense, a bookstore, a space for debate and political education.
Now the owners are stepping away and want to sell, and they’ve made us an offer, once again below market price. It’s an ambitious bet, yes, but how could we give up now? Walking away from the purchase would also mean walking away from the project of political construction.
Securing a space is crucial for putting up a fight, building new networks and continuing to analyze, understand, imagine and build.
And for that to happen, we need each other again, because what’s possible and what’s impossible is fought over or negotiated every single time.
Main features and goals of the crowdfunding campaign
Yes, the figures we’re working with for this step forward are below market rate, but they’re still ambitious: we need to cover €1.2 million for the purchase and another €200,000 for the essential renovations to the space.
To meet this cost, we’re already working within the social and solidarity economy financing networks we’re part of, specifically with COOP57. We’ll ask them for the support needed to make this project possible.
For our part, we’ll contribute €300,000 of our own capital, of which we already have €240,000, raised thanks to contributions from Traficantes de Sueños’ own funds, its allies and its members. Now we need to raise at least another €60,000. This is where you come in.
Why this is important
But what will the space look like after the purchase? What projects will be developed there? The idea, of course, isn’t just to stay afloat, but to grow politically and as a business devoted to critical books.
We’re going to expand the bookstore with more than 8,000 new titles, and the political essay, history, feminisms, LGBTIQ+ and children’s sections will take on a bigger role.
The purchase will also translate directly into more space for the networks of mutual aid, self-organization of domestic work and the fight against borders linked to Senda de Cuidados and Red Interlavapiés, as well as improvements for the XToinfo cooperative and the social organization Fundación de los Comunes, which have their workspaces in our building.
On top of this, we’ll make major technical improvements to the various meeting rooms and especially to the event hall, which, just 900 meters from Puerta del Sol, opens its doors for meetings of various collectives, movements and critical publishing networks across the city.
When we moved into the space at Calle Duque de Alba 13, we were clear about it: as tough as the challenge was, we had to take the step to grow as a bookstore, as a political project and as a collective. Keeping a social space in the city center that could escape the processes of gentrification and the displacement of local residents was the right thing to do.
Having to negotiate the purchase of the space almost 10 years later has been a new turning point. The survival of the space is also what guarantees the continuity of projects as valuable as Traficantes de Sueños, Senda de Cuidados and Red Interlavapiés.
We’ve seen associations, social centers, political bookstores and many neighbors forced to leave Lavapiés and the center of our city because they couldn’t afford abusive rents and speculative processes. So we can only understand this bet as a way of reshaping our collective reality, as the moment to share new beginnings once again.
We already did it with Ecologistas en Acción at Ateneo La Maliciosa, in the Arganzuela neighborhood, and that’s how we want to do it at Duque de Alba. As a community, we can’t give up this strategic position, which we know can only be defended through shared commitment, alliance and symbiosis.
Social commitment
Creating culture
Traficantes de Sueños is a political production and communication project that aims to contribute content and spark debates useful for transformative collective action. It’s also a social economy project, that is, a non-profit organization with no bosses, involved in the social market and in building another kind of economy.
From the start, our main goal has been to create a stable space where people can find material for reflection, and the tool we use for this is the book, understood as a means of individual and collective transformation. Today, the collective has six productive areas: the associative bookstore, the distribution service, the publishing house, the design studio, Nociones Comunes (a space for self-education and production) and print-on-demand for publishers mainly from Latin America. The topics explored across all areas of the collective are linked to the current political and social moment: feminisms, ecology, urbanism, borders, social movements, autonomy, history and critiques of capitalism are some of them.
As we mentioned, Traficantes de Sueños is a social economy project and a political enterprise: a non-profit association where the workers are in charge. A productive space that pays close attention to what can be politically useful for the movements and collectives seeking to transform the current state of things. In turn, the collective can contribute because it’s immersed in the living fabric of the city. Like many other social economy projects, it survives thanks to the community that chooses to support it because it sees it as a valuable resource for everyone.
One of the project’s hallmarks is its commitment to free culture. Free culture movements advocate for the free circulation of knowledge and of society’s artistic expressions. They understand that this knowledge is the result of social collaboration and that locking it up through intellectual property laws harms the development of society and of each of its members.
That’s why the books published by Traficantes de Sueños are released under Creative Commons licenses that allow free copying and non-commercial distribution. But free doesn’t mean free of charge, and free culture projects need the community to share responsibility for them, that is, those who believe in the free circulation of culture need to support them in many different ways.
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