The Barcelona City Council has these days arranged a good number of New Jersey model barriers on a plot of land in the Vallcarca neighborhood in order to prevent shacks from being erected there again. This is a very unusual use of these elements of urban furniture. The most common is that they are used to cut traffic, organize mass events… and for these latitudes and for a long time, to protect the terraces installed on the road during the pandemic. The Consistory has thousands of concrete barriers stored in a lot in Horta-Guinardó!
And here in Vallcarca, among the neighbors, in the neighborhood of perpetual plots, urban waste and municipal impacts forgotten for years and years, this innovative manifestation of what is known as hostile urbanism – like the bars that prevent a can lie on a bench – is generating the corresponding division of neighborhood opinions. No one likes to be in this situation.
What is happening is that some are celebrating that the City Council is taking care of what is happening here, while others understand that the government of Mayor Jaume Collboni prefers to ignore those who do not agree with their principles. The affair of the hostile New Jerseys reveals once again the prevailing neighborhood division in Vallcarca. Some are betting on finally executing those already hazy plans of a couple of decades ago and opening that happy new avenue, and others on discarding them forever.
The fact is that for several years between Avinguda Vallcarca, the viaduct and Carrer Gustavo Bécquer, a handful of railway workers, mainly Romanian gypsies, have been living in a settlement where sooner or later the Barcelona City Council will build a park historically claimed by the neighborhood. At the moment, after so much waiting, the Council is completing the executive project of the central park of Vallcarca. And every now and then a group of ironworkers tries to settle in another place, like in this corner located a few meters away. What is happening is that the City Council ceded this land to a foundation to build a building with 36 sheltered homes for affordable rent. The Consistory expects the works to begin during the first semester of next year.
“So, as they will be building soon – explain some residents of the area – the lot in question is very well conditioned. And, well, the ironworkers used an urban landscape canvas from the Barcelona City Council to limit the space, which is ironic… Last weekend, at one point, they erected a couple of shacks . Here in Vallcarca, since everything is delayed, since we live in urban planning limbo…”. On Tuesday a considerable device of the Urban Guard went to the new settlement, but then no one was there. Municipal sources point out that the City Council proceeded to secure it “to slow down new occupations and not alter the planned housing construction”.
This management, however, undermines the neighborhood’s other sensitivity. “We were in contact with this family – they say indignantly to the Som Barri association. They had been granted a flat, but they needed a place where they could work on scrap metal. We were talking to them to find a solution, but since the socialists don’t talk to us… In the previous term we had very fluid communication with the district of Gràcia. Now, despite this, the new municipal government seems more willing to talk with the entities that are more similar to it, with those who want the new promenade to open. Well, some residents here are bothered by poverty so close, but what needs to be done is to fight against the causes of poverty, not against the people who suffer from it.”
Years ago someone renamed this area the Sarajevo of Barcelona.
