Community Project: The People’s Palaces
The Rayuela Association is implementing the project Social Infrastructures: The People’s Palaces in the communities of San Andrés and Punta Brava on the island of Tenerife. The initiative aims to strengthen community ties, combat isolation, and prevent emotional distress in neighbourhoods affected by urban pressures. This project has received funding from the Government of the Canary Islands through the 2025 Call for Social Innovation Project Grants from the Ministry of Universities, Science, Innovation, and Culture, where it achieved the second-highest rating. It has also been awarded by the General Council of Social Work in its call Highlighting Innovative and Inspirational Projects in Social Work – 2025, ranking among the top three evaluated nationwide. The project begins with a mental health study in collaboration with the University of La Laguna, which will allow for the assessment of the intervention’s impact.
Main Objectives
The primary aim of this project is to evaluate the effectiveness of this model in contexts of population displacement resulting from tourist pressure. It focuses on reclaiming what are known as “social infrastructures,” such as plazas, cultural centres, libraries, and other spaces that facilitate socialisation and act as support networks against loneliness and vulnerability. Through the support and revitalisation of these spaces, People’s Palaces seeks to reconstruct community bonds to share concerns, generate collective solutions, and enhance collective well-being.
Conceptual Background
“People’s Palaces is a concept derived from sociology, specifically from Eric Klinenberg, and has its roots in the earlier notion of social infrastructures,” explains Irene Ruano, the project’s coordinator and a member of the Rayuela Association.
“Klinenberg posits that social infrastructures are those spaces where relationships of cohabitation and trust foster mutual support and community, and this can occur in any space where interactions happen: the park, a queue in the market, the entrance of a school,” she notes.
For the sociologist referenced in the project, the perfect example of a people’s palace would be a library: open to all and where every user can engage. “These are spaces,” Ruano continues, “where there are no fees, where no specific participation is required; rather, they are configured as places to foster community and social cohesion.”
According to Ruano, it is precisely within these networks that tools for social resistance and resilience are generated. “One of the objectives of People’s Palaces is for people to understand that the spaces they create themselves form a palace, a very potent place with significant transformative capacity.”
The Privatization of Common Spaces and Tourist Pressure
When asked about the progressive privatisation of community spaces, Ruano argues that “the chaos in which we live often prevents us from being fully aware of it, as the system has ensured we lack the time to think and converse. This is another aspect present in the project: the collectivisation of unease.”
This perspective starts from the premise that all individual problems, sometimes even addressed medically as solely individual, originate from collective issues.
“We discuss emotional well-being and distress, and we are not strictly talking about mental health problems. We believe that various types of distress have been overly pathologised, and we mention this in the project as well. The consumption of medication for emotional distress, particularly in the Canary Islands, is quite high. While we do not deny this, we do think it has been pathological in the sense that when one experiences distress, they are prescribed a pill,” she asserts.
The creators of the project believe that many emotional distresses treated individually stem from structural and collective sources. Ruano offers an example: “If one has to travel an hour and a half to work and return home again after a workday for another hour and a half in traffic, and upon arriving home there is no place to park because one lives in a tourist area, it generates unease. This situation can impact one’s sense of belonging to a neighbourhood that provides meaning to one’s life.”
Ruano discusses the potential resources for measuring distress in populations that are forced to relocate from their neighbourhoods and towns due to tourist pressure. Currently, there is no definitive count of this “discontent,” and the project awaits the completion of a final test among participants in collaboration with the Social Work Department at the University of La Laguna to create a measurable instrument. “Based on our discussions and interviews conducted—even with officials—there is considerable distress surrounding the inability to choose to live in Punta Brava or San Andrés. There is a sense of sadness and longing for not being able to remain there.”
Throughout the project, the Rayuela Association has encountered instances of individuals with young children who, despite having to relocate due to tourist pressure, frequently return to maintain their connection with the neighbourhood. “An idea that persists in the minds of many people who have had to leave is the desire to return,” points out Ruano.
Hopes for the Future
During this study, participants were also asked about their hopes. There are shared ideas and sentiments among them. “I believe there are individuals who have been struggling for a long time in various ways, and that sense of heaviness is not central; instead, there is always a feeling that things will change. For instance, in the case of Punta Brava, I think it is not associated with a great hope, but gradually, some improvements concerning the beach and waste management are being achieved,” elucidates the coordinator.
“In the case of San Andrés, this relates significantly to a feeling of having already lost the beach, but at least they are determined not to lose their neighbourhood identity. From those identity markers they possess—culturally and in terms of community organisation—how they gather and interact,” she concludes.
