Barcelona Metropolis

Historically, these neighbourhoods have been home to people from very different backgrounds and with fairly low economic means. Ciutat Meridiana, Vallbona and Torre Baró, in that order, are the three neighbourhoods with the lowest average family income in the city. Canyelles is ranked tenth from the bottom. As for the number of inhabitants, Vallbona and Torre Baró do not amass even 5,000 residents. Canyelles is home to almost 7,000 and, Ciutat Meridiana, more than 10,000. The latter neighbourhood also has a population density of 28,000 people per square kilometre. Outrageous, although far from the population density of the neighbourhood La Florida, in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, which ranks the highest in Europe with more than 74,000 inhabitants per square kilometre. The houses are also different depending on the neighbourhood. In Torre Baró and Vallbona many self-built, low-rise houses abound. In Canyelles and Ciutat Meridiana there is a profusion of warren-type, developmentalist and huge buildings, many of which lack decent living conditions.

Past (and present) of neighbourhood struggle

Filiberto Bravo is an institution in Ciutat Meridiana. Longstanding president of its residents’ association, his legacy of neighbourhood struggle is an encyclopaedia open to anyone who talks to him: “Filiberto’s vision of the neighbourhood is one of togetherness and social struggle, but the possible vision of Ciutat Meridiana held by a woman who has recently migrated from a small town in Morocco is a sense of freedom”, explains Myriam Meloni. For this resident, having a close-knit community that cares for one another but at the same time does not interfere in each other’s lives is critical for personal development in freedom”. Ciutat Meridiana, Bellvitge on the northern border of Barcelona, is freedom and it is struggle and, as one of the testimonials presented in Linde notes, that of Esperanza, it is also class dignity: “When they proposed we come to live in Canyelles, we accepted because we liked it. […] At night I could only think of the flat – Esperanza lived with her family in a shack in El Carmel – of how it was made, the balcony... A modest working-class house, but for me it was a palace… And it still is.”

They are isolated neighbourhoods, in good times and in bad. Until the Congost bridge was built in 2005, after decades of neighbourhood demands, Vallbona was separated from Barcelona. Only a goat path connected it with the adjacent neighbourhoods of Torre Baró and Ciutat Meridiana. Arnau Bach says that, around here, if there is a relatively flat terrain, someone prepares what is needed and in a couple of days children are already playing soccer. And if there is waste ground, young people will adapt it to rehearse urban music choreographies: “The legislation is the same as in the rest of the city, but there might be more permissiveness. Nor do they need to direct thousands of tourists each day.” Myriam Meloni rounds off the reflection: “There, in Barcelona (sic), every piece of public space has been allocated a use, ‘you walk here, you cross here, the terrace goes here’, but here, in these neighbourhoods, that’s not the case. It ends up being a matter of economic interest. In the Barcelona for tourists, each piece of city has a huge potential for economic revenue; but not here”.

The centralist and productive conception of here and there is blurred in these neighbourhoods. In other words, here is usually the mountains, the forest; and there, the rest of Barcelona, what is beyond the motorways. For a resident of Barcelona at sea level, however, Collserola, Tibidabo, remain there. Candel was referring to this type of peripheral neighbourhoods with his famous Donde la ciudad cambia su nombre [Where the City Changes Its Name], and while it is true that the residents (including the photographer who has spent a bit more than a year in these neighbourhoods, as read in the previous paragraph) say “go to Barcelona” when they are already in it (something that also happens in the neighbourhoods that centuries ago were independent towns), the historical aspiration of the residents of Canyelles, Torre Baró, Vallbona and Ciutat Meridiana is to overcome this otherness and be treated just like the rest of Barcelona.

Giving new meaning to sometimes monstrous spaces

The relationship with nature is much closer at these latitudes of the city. In Vallbona, for instance, the last vestiges of the Rec Comtal irrigation canal are still used by young people to go for a dip, and the last vegetable gardens in the city also lie in this area. In Linde we become acquainted with the story of Rosita, a wild boar that roams the area: “When I call her”, says Blas, a neighbourhood resident, “she always comes to me and we spend time together. This is pure nature. This house is my life, it’s everything that I want”. Blas works the land and has raised animals, especially doves, although no longer for competition, just for exhibition. When his daughter died, he buried her ashes in the garden. Such is the sense of attachment.

In these neighbourhoods, the landscape changes in a few hundred metres. From the mountain surroundings we enter the hub of roads (C-17, C-33, C-58, AP-7), the city’s quintessential non-place that has been reappropriated by its residents. If in Canyelles, Torre Baró, Ciutat Meridiana and Vallbona they have learned to live next to the mountains, they have still had more to learn to live hemmed-in between piles of concrete. The entry road links to Barcelona to the north have marked the life of these neighbourhoods, separating them from the rest of the city and from each other. Bridges, overpasses, motorway entries and exits and columns of implausible diameters to hold it all together ooze through the hovels, the little vegetable gardens and the waste grounds of Barcelona’s northernmost neighbourhoods. The photographs of these landscapes featured in Linde convey that overwhelming sense of insignificance of human measure in the presence of such architectural abominations.

Many of the residents who use these non-places to meet up come from realities in which many people had to live in miniscule places, such that all social life took place on the street, explain the authors of the book. Similarly, many of the flats in Canyelles and Ciutat Meridiana are tiny and are still inhabited by lots of people, often overcrowded, so to a certain extent they are not only reproducing customs, but also they are still adapting to the circumstances. “This also occurs in the Raval neighbourhood. People playing ball, cricket, on the street. Occupation of the public space is a very cultural thing, and which is inherited”, recalls Meloni. It is a reappropriation of space without too much press, but it is effective. The residents of these neighbourhoods have given a new meaning to the non-place, breathing life into it, meeting up with their families and friends, giving it a use, denying it the nickname of non-place. In short: “The space outside homes is given new meaning, turning it into something to be shared by the community”, explains Meloni.

Under tons of cement and countless cars that travel in and out and cross the city limits in a frenzy of movement, productive, endless and jarring at all times, a few meters below, at ground level and availing of the shade under the bridges, the residents set up a picnic. And they are dressed in regional costumes that they have been sewing for weeks, and they dance, chat and laugh and, from being there so long and having made the place their own, they have also internalised the constant and piercing noise of rolling tyres and rattling engines, and that no longer bothers them.