Labs of Contextualized Urban Social Work
The Faculty of Social Work at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) has collaborated in the LOCUS project with the City Council of Coslada, specifically with the municipality’s Social Services Center, and with Provivienda, a non-profit organization.
The Coslada Social Services Center is part of the universal public network for citizen assistance and serves as the basic unit or facility where Primary Social Care services are provided. It is entirely publicly funded and serves as the gateway to the Public Social Services System.
Regarding Provivienda, its work focuses on addressing housing exclusion from a rights-based perspective. Its funding mainly comes from public grants, contracts, and agreements. It operates in the neighborhoods of Villaverde and Vallecas—territories where LOCUS has been implemented thorugh community-based housing projects.
About the locations
The selection of territories was based on pedagogical, social, and strategic criteria to ensure a suitable environment in terms of experiences, challenges, and learning opportunities for participating students.
First, Coslada represents a peripheral municipality that has experienced rapid urban and demographic growth in recent decades, hosting a culturally, generationally, and socioeconomically diverse population. It has a well-established Social Services network, the result of cooperation between public and private entities, offering an ideal ecosystem for observation and analysis from a community-based and participatory perspective.
On the other hand, the Madrid districts of Villaverde and Vallecas are characterized by a strong neighborhood identity, a long history of social mobilization, and the prominent presence of structural issues such as unemployment, inequality, and housing vulnerability. The selected territories offer a complex and dynamic urban context in which future Social Work professionals can develop key competencies in research, diagnostics, and social action.
Student activities
Our students do a myriad of activities in the neighbourhood such as a Jane's Walk and survey research.
LOCUS has enabled the implementation of active social research methodologies through which students have carried out neighborhood walks (Jane’s Walks), collaborative mapping, participant observation, interviews, surveys, and participatory audiovisual production. In this way, the territories have become open classrooms, allowing students to understand, research, and reflect on these environments through a professional and interdisciplinary lens.
