Help, my neighborhood is getting beautiful! This is gentrian anxiety, the fear of urban improvements

First of all, opening a new public library in the neighborhood should always be good news. And even more so if it is a monumental one, which receives prizes, which is visited by architects passing through the city, one like the Gabriel García Márquez in the Barcelona district of Sant Martí, the very incarnation of what the American sociologist Eric Klinenberg calls “palaces for the town”, public buildings that generate social infrastructure and help to correct inequality.

Klinenberg, who is the author of a book called Palacios para el pueblo (Captain Swing), also visited the García Márquez Library when he was in Barcelona and, amazed, posted photos of the Scandinavian-style building by Suma Arquitectura on his Twitter account. , the ventilated facade, the staircase that seems to be held in the air, the light wood finishes, the extremely comfortable cushions to sit on the floor and read. “It’s magical, it’s real,” he wrote.

The writer Jordi Corominas, whose latest book, Bohigas against Barcelona (Athenaica) is very critical of the bombastic and interventionist urbanism that, in his opinion, has been practiced too often in Barcelona, ​​replied: “Your reaction is a cultured foreigner. Real it is, but magical it is not. Let’s not freak out At most gentrifying and a waste of money worth 15 neighborhood libraries.

From this dialogue, a juicy discussion was generated in the thread between those who see this library as a delirium made for photos and those who see it as a beautiful, functional and necessary place. “If they put pleasant public spaces with beautiful architecture in the neighborhoods, it is gentrification and waste. The best thing for us is to make our lives in ugly and generic places for the good of the neighborhood”, lamented another user.

Klinenberg himself admitted the validity of the criticism and drew a conclusion that is easy to understand for anyone who inhabits an urban environment: “One disturbing thing about this moment in urbanism is that every beautiful project generates as much anxiety about gentrification as praise for make things better. And even more disturbing is knowing that those anxieties are justified.

It is no longer just the emergence of a specialty coffee or a bakery with buckwheat sliced ​​bread – in Barcelona, ​​the appearance of a Turris oven in a neighborhood has become a marker of gentrification, as the writer Anna Pacheco recently pointed out, that one sighted in Sant Andreu–, it is no longer enough to fear a “Brunch all day” sign –the new Consell de Cent has them, huge and bright, every 20 meters, lest any visitor run out of their blueberry pancake –. Now also the residents of the neighborhoods, or at least those who do not own apartments, fear the arrival of libraries, trams, public bike stops and pedestrian areas because these improvements in public space could end up causing their own expulsion. A phenomenon that can be baptized as gentrian anxiety, when you are terrified that your neighborhood will become too pretty, or worse, too livable.

The researcher Jorge Sequera, director of the UNED Critical Urban Studies Group (GECU), has also recorded the phenomenon. “This problem exists and we should not understand it as something particularly paradoxical, but rather as part of the vulnerability diagnosis of many neighbors”, he says. He has in mind, for example, the conversations with members of neighborhood movements in Carabanchel Alto, in Madrid, who preferred that Bicimad, the public bicycle rental system, not reach their neighborhood, for fear of the expulsion effect that it could generate.

Also in Madrid, the demolitions of the so-called scalextrics on the M30 generate what the researcher Isabelle Anguelovski, from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​has dubbed “green gentrification”. Her project Greenlulus (Green Unwanted Local Land Areas) received an endowment of 1.5 million euros from the European Union to study how the implementation of green areas had affected the demographic fabric of 40 European and North American cities. The main conclusion is that wherever a park is placed, housing prices rise (up to 500 meters around) and some neighbors are replaced by others with higher income and educational level.

“You also have to see that the people who pass through that area are not affected,” says Sequera, citing the research of Antonio López-Gay, a demographer who has studied the changes that have taken place around the Mercat de Sant Antoni, in Barcelona. “The remodeling of the market raised the price of housing, which is the backbone of the segregation capacity. There is a change of uses, the new areas are used more by young people, especially at night, than by older people, and the ethnic minorities that are very present on the street disappear, because the surveillance cameras arrive and these people may not have papers. A social sanitization occurs when these people understand that this new place is not theirs”.

Sequera also remembers a conference in Malaga, perhaps the most perfect Spanish laboratory for gentrification and touristification due to the speed that these processes have integrated. “All the researchers arrived with our a prioris and there we found that any pedestrianization exercise was viewed by the neighbors with absolute fear. It implied that where there were parked cars, which had been more or less still since six in the evening, there would be bars and terraces. Neighbors preferred to have cars under the house than pedestrian areas because what they lost in environmental pollution they gained in noise and light pollution and lack of rest. This can lead to the neighbors ending up demanding: please, I want cars under my house”.

In the use of the car in the city, many votes will be settled in the next municipal elections on May 28. Marc Andreu, journalist and historian of neighborhood movements – he dedicated his doctoral thesis to the role of these associations during the Transition – experienced the implementation of the first Superblock, that of Poblenou, from the Administration, as a technician in the Sant Martí district. “For a sector of the residents, accustomed to driving everywhere, not being able to leave home by car meant a change of culture, they did not understand the restriction of what they understood as an acquired right as opposed to people who wanted to more space, not so much noise, not so much pollution. Seven years after the first installation, none of the banners that existed at the beginning remain and it is difficult to find people who do not value the change, even those who oppose it for political reasons quietly admit that they are delighted”.

It is not so much a question of what use those who have been able to stay make of urban pacifications, but what effect they have on the expelled and on those who will no longer be able to enjoy them. In fact, Poblenou is experiencing new neighborhood conflicts that derive, as Andreu says, from tensions between newcomers “with greater purchasing power, who believe that having bought an expensive apartment gives them the right to define the environment” and those who were already . This was clearly seen in the recent conflict over the fence that several residents put up closing the Mercè Sala square, and assuming a private cost of more than 52,000 euros. Finally, the City Council agreed with the neighborhood associations of the neighborhood that asked to tear down the fence and be able to continue circulating at any time in that public square. “We also see it at the Festa Major”, points out Andreu, who is a resident of the neighbourhood. “In Poblenou everyone knew that in the month of September there are ten days that are holidays, it is assumed. When new neighbors arrive who are not familiar with this tradition, there are complaints and calls. Everything comes from this mentality: if you buy a flat, you buy the neighborhood”.

Having a series of neighbors (tenants, in many cases) who prefer not to introduce improvements and others (owners) who do want them can initially generate friction in the same neighborhood struggle, which currently has a very different morphology from what it was. in the sixties, seventies and eighties. “Now there is no longer a single entity that speaks for the neighborhood but rather a constellation. Entities such as the Union of Llogateres, the PAH and the AFAs of the schools have gained importance, which have gained a lot of strength and are playing an important role in redefining public space”. The so-called School Revolt, which promotes safe and peaceful spaces around educational centers, started in Barcelona and later spread to Madrid and other locations.

To the historian, however, the gentrian anxiety debate seems “somewhat false.” “People never complain because their neighborhood is too nice, they complain because they raise their rent. The city is always improving and it gives people satisfaction. The prices of the apartments do not rise because they pedestrianize the street ”, he settles.

The journalist Jorge Dioni found in his previous book one of those happy concepts that sociologists, tweeters, teachers and politicians enthusiastically adopt: “the Spain of the swimming pools” refers to the PAUs in which the middle classes expelled from the cities. Now, in the book that he has just published, El malaise de las ciudades (Arpa), he turns his gaze from the periphery to the urban centers. The essay just begins with a memory of the last apartment in the city that he lived in before buying a house on the outskirts of Madrid. The apartment was in Consell de Cent, in Barcelona, ​​the new star street of the Eixample, newly pedestrianized, the place where, if you look closely, each photo looks like a render, with its benches where the workers eat from tupperware , its kiosks that look like TV series sets and its greenish flower beds recently placed. Beyond the photo, it is also a perfectly walkable place and won from cars.

“Of course I couldn’t afford to live there now like the young newspaper editor that I was. It’s been years since I could. The rent for what was my house costs the same as my entire salary at that time or more, and I suppose that now it will go up even more, because, despite what some discourses maintain, they usually like not to hear the noise of the traffic all day and to be able to walk down your street or go by bike. If you have small children, I’m not telling you to be able to go out without shouting: be careful!, don’t worry! It is a space that allows these children to develop processes such as running errands or going down the street alone, something very important”.

But there are those who understand “miraculous urbanism” as an extension of the “miraculous architecture” that Dioni also talks about in the book, referring to that measles, not yet overcome, that gripped cities, especially Spanish ones, in the eighties, nineties and two thousand, for competing for great works of star architects. “It was a way of showing that industrial cities were renewing themselves and that I could enter the movement industry.” Dioni believes that in this context even a library “can become a poster saying: here there are capital gains. And much of the anxiety stems from that contradiction. I have to show things that attract attention, but doing so can be dangerous because I can attract too much attention and put that area on the market.

Regarding the solutions, to appease the fear that the neighborhood itself will become great, all those consulted have more or less the recipe, take the house off the market. “Of course there is this anxiety, but just being afraid doesn’t help anyone. It is impractical, and also unfair, to have to deny communities infrastructure so that they can remain affordable,” says David J. Madden, a sociologist at the London School of Economics and co-author, with Peter Marcuse, of the book En home defense (Captain Swing). “Anxiety is useful if it pushes people to support anti-displacement measures like rent control, tenant rights and social housing. If citizens have secure housing, then they do not have to fear spatial and infrastructure improvements. The only answer is to demand and strengthen the right to housing”, he says. Jorge Sequera points out the same thing: “If you intervene in a place, as has happened in the areas of the superblocks, in which there are already processes of speculation underway, it must be associated with a moratorium on evictions, a strong intervention on the price of housing, there must necessarily be a social intervention of the environment”

For Eric Kleinenberg, the sociologist who described the Gabriel García Márquez library as “magical”, “cities have to protect their permanent residents and establish a public commitment to prevent their displacement. Too many people, in too many cities, have watched their neighborhoods get too pretty, only to find out they couldn’t afford it anymore. We cannot create a world in which people are afraid of good urbanism, because it signals their imminent expulsion. Also, he said, by the way, that the library is “real” and that is indisputable. Since it was inaugurated, exactly one year ago, the facility has been full at all hours of the neighborhood, and also from other more remote areas, who go to work, read, spend the afternoon and do schoolwork. It looks like anything but a render.