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Grup de Treball Perifèries Urbanes, This paper describes the findings and Stefano Portelli Catalan Institute of Anthropology main issues addressed by the “Social Portelli is a cultural anthropologist and founder of the Urban Struggle and Collective Memory in Low Peripheries group of the Catalan Institute of Anthropology. After a Price Housing in ” research number of fieldwork studies on the impact of developmental processes and analysis project commissioned and urban transformation on peripheral neighbourhoods in Nicaragua, Catalonia and Italy, he is now part of the Department of Urban Planning in 2009 by the Associació de Veïns Engineering (DICEA) at the Sapienza University of Roma. He has Avis del Barri de Bon Pastor and worked in Sicily, Morocco, Kenya, Cambodia and Nepal, while his most carried out by an interdisciplinary important research was carried out from 2004 to 2012 in the “cases team of historians, anthropologists barates” (cheap houses) area in the Bon Pastor neighbourhood of and architects linked to the Catalan Barcelona. Institute of Anthropology which also included people living in the low price housing. The gradual demolition of most of these neighborhoods on the outskirts of Barcelona shows the rollout of cultural dynamics that build a “city The Horizontal City image” which is incompatible with some of its population sectors. In this context, anthropological research has to face Social Struggle and Collective great challenges but can also do some important work: documenting social transformations that have been linked Memory on the Fringes of Barcelona to the modification of urban space and the role in this process of the selective reconfiguration of historical memory, he “Social Strug- city under the Primo de Rivera dic- especially that memory of struggle and gle and Collective tatorship on the occasion of the 1929 resistance which is almost inseparable Memory in Low Barcelona International Exposition– from the identity of these neighborhoods Price Housing in had not been subject to any systematic Barcelona” study research like the studies of other sub- S’exposen aquí els resultats i les that we conducted urbs of Barcelona. With the exception principals temàtiques abordades pel from 2009 to 2011 within the frame- of the very recent Rastros de rostros en projecte de recerca-anàlisi «Lluita work of the Ethnological Heritage un prado rojo (y negro) (Traces of Faces social i memòria col·lectiva a les cases T barates de Barcelona» encarregat Inventory of Catalonia (IPEC) is the in a Red (and Black) Meadow) by Pere el 2009 a l’Associació de Veïns Avis product of an unusual, intergenera- López Sánchez (2013), literary and del Barri en Defensa dels Inquilins tional and intercultural collaboration journalistic descriptions of the four de Bon Pastor i realitzat per un that emerged from one of the city’s housing estates have reproduced a equip interdisciplinari d’historiadors, least known and most stigmatized series of negative stereotypes that could antropòlegs i arquitectes vinculats a neighborhoods –Bon Pastor, in the be considered functional with respect l’Institut Català d’Antropologia, i integrat també per habitants de les cases district of – between a to demolition of the Casas Baratas. barates. La demolició progressiva de la group of residents affected by a large- Some examples would be the descrip- major part d’aquests barris dels marges scale demolition plan and a number of tion of the Casas Baratas as obscure de Barcelona permet d’observar el social researchers interested in in-depth pockets of misery and violence in The desplegament de dinàmiques culturals study of the impact of urban transfor- City of Marvels (Mendoza, 1986: 372- que construeixen una imatge de ciutat incompatible amb alguns dels mations on the most disadvantaged 373) and the difficulties Francesc Can- seus sectors de població. En aquest sectors of the population. Historically, del faced following publication of his context, la recerca antropològica ha the four districts of Casas Baratas (low- works (1957, 1964) upon returning d’enfrontar-se amb grans desafiaments, cost social housing –literally, “cheap to “his” neighborhood (the Eduard però pot realitzar una tasca important: houses”) in Barcelona –built by the Aunós affordable housing estate in documentar les transformacions socials que han estat vinculades a la modificació de l’espai urbà, i el paper que té en Keywords: urban anthropology, , neighborhoods, urban renewal, social aquest procés la reconfiguració selectiva disarticulation, political anthropology, historical memory, engaged anthropology, urban studies, de la memòria històrica, en particular worker homes, Barcelona, Sant Andreu, Bon Pastor, , Eduard Aunós d’aquella memòria de lluita i resistència Paraules clau: antropologia urbana, història de Barcelona, barris, transformació urbana, gairebé consubstancial a la identitat desarticulació social, antropologia política, memòria històrica, Barcelona, Sant Andreu, Bon Pastor, d’aquests barris. cases barates, Can Peguera, Eduard Aunós 120 COMPILATION Revista d’Etnologia de Catalunya Juny 2015 Núm. 40

Zona Franca), and they lead us to in one of the pioneering studies on the had been endemically applied to these understand to what extent a “nega- impact of a demolition in a Spanish territories. tive myth” in the sense identified by city, there is always a “legitimizing nar- anthropologist Gary McDonough in rative” corresponding to the “city pro- This demolition was also, however, the Raval neighborhood (1987) per- ject” that institutions plan for a given the only one in this long history that vaded the whole narrative of the four area that facilitates its execution (2010 social researchers had the chance to districts. [2005]: 60). The attempt to demol- observe in detail. From our study of ish the Casas Baratas was variously the Bon Pastor Casas Baratas in 2004, Undoubtedly, however, the affordable pursued by the municipal authorities we observed how the discourse that housing estates were much more than (who held land ownership) during the justified the project to demolish the this myth. Their specific urban shape Franco dictatorship, and it was pre- entire neighborhood –euphemisti- and their peculiar history allowed a vented by firm opposition from the cally defined as the Redevelopment popular culture distinct from that of first neighborhood associations, which Plan– involved a symbolic attack on the rest of the city to be maintained were often still clandestine (Fabre and the identity and self-representation of there. As was highlighted even by Huertas Clavería, 1975: 87, 99-100). the inhabitants of this low-cost hous- David Harvey (2002), Barcelona’s It was in the democratic era that the ing. The district was presented as an recent evolution involved the disap- first two housing estates, Baró de Viver obsolete and deprived area in the press pearance of a large part of the areas and Eduard Aunós, were demolished, and municipal communication; the that provided the city with its symbolic within the framework of the “new discourse on the isolation of Bon Pas- capital: the working class neighbor- developmentalism” that gained force tor, variously repeated, dominated all hoods where the collective identity of around the 1992 Summer Olympics public representation. There was no the city’s working classes was forged (McNeill, 1999). The demolition of consideration for the area’s local culture was systematically attacked by large Bon Pastor, approved in 2002 and and characteristic lifestyle, nor was any urban transformation projects –from begun in 2007, represents the final study of the human impact conducted the historic center to to episode in this series of destructive prior to ordering the demolition of L’Hospitalet to the banks of the Besòs projects using a legitimizing narrative an area with nearly a century of his- River. As Jaume Franquesa emphasized based largely on the negative myth that tory. As was noted by Horacio Capel,

The Casas Baratas of Bon Pastor from above. CAROLA PAGANI, 2004 COMPILATION 121

negative myth had penetrated deep into the population, which in turn resisted accepting many of the implications of the city’s planning. In particular, how- ever, what emerged from these initial interviews was history. The neighbor- hood’s past –marked by the migration of many of the families from the south of Spain, by authorities’ systematic dis- regard for the land and its inhabitants, by social struggle and the 1930s project to emancipate Barcelona’s proletariat politically and socially, by anti-Franco militia, by bombings, by exile and the reprisals suffered during the Franco dictatorship (see Gallardo Romero, 2000)– continued to influence the A group of residents of the Casas Baratas sitting on the street. CAROLA PAGANI, 2004 identities and consciousness of Bon Pastor residents, and still more with “the use of the qualifier “obsolete” is nou, with a team that would soon the demolition of the Casas Baratas excessive; it is used to make unjusti- become the Grup de Treball Perifèries taking shape on the horizon. Nowhere fied decisions” (Capel, 2004). The new Urbanes (Working Group on Urban else in the city were we able to get so in leftist turn in the demolition discourse Peripheries) within the Institut Català touch with this interrelation between further deepened the stigma endemi- d’Antropologia, but nowhere else had popular culture, inhabited space and cally attributed to the Bon Pastor area we found a group of residents who collective memory: the demolition was (Wacquant, 2007): it was through this expressly requested a research project stirring up many significant aspects of realization that our relationship with that would serve them as an instru- Barcelona’s historical identity in a man- the Associació de Veïns Avis del Barri ment of struggle. A dubious referen- ner similar to what Manuel Vázquez en Defensa dels Inquilins de Bon Pas- dum, non-binding and supported by Montalbán had demonstrated with tor (Association of Elderly Residents the same neighborhood association respect to the Raval during the Olym- in Defense of the Inhabitants of Bon that was negotiating the demolition pics. “The new Barcelona is all about Pastor) began. with the city council, was publicized forgetting,” as Donald McNeill wrote as a guarantee of local participation (1999: 52). This association, formed in 2003 in the urban planning decision: 54% through a split from the Associació of voters had said yes to the munici- A few years passed between this initial de Veïns de Bon Pastor (Association pal project, although many did not study and the start of the first research of Bon Pastor Residents) as a result of even know what they had voted for, contract with the IPEC. In 2006, the the approval of the project to demol- as the association of elderly residents same 100 families that we had inter- ish the Casas Baratas, took a critical observed. viewed two years earlier began to relo- stance against urban planning, but it cate to new buildings constructed on needed to discover to what extent such Our survey turned the results of the ref- a site nearby, with some excited and opposition was founded amongst the erendum upside down (PVCE, 2004). others anxious. In 2007, a handful housing’s residents. A door-to-door Not only did we record 40 opinions of these families decided to resist the survey was conducted in the summer explicitly against the demolition and order of eviction and demand eco- of 2004 among the first residences in only 11 decidedly in favor out of 100 nomic compensation for the move, the neighborhood to be affected, those interviews, but among the fifty-odd which they perceived not as a chance making up the so-called first phase of remaining interviews we observed a to escape isolation but as an irreplace- demolition. As a group, we came from variability and complexity of stances able loss of their living space and places a series of urban anthropology and oral that was impossible to reduce to a yes or of memory imposed by city planning history studies on the social impact of a no. The district unfolded before us in that was vertical, just as the new apart- urban transformations, especially in all of its contradictions: the discourse ment buildings were vertical in com- the districts of La Mina and El Poble- of progress and articulations of the parison with their Casas Baratas. The 122 COMPILATION Revista d’Etnologia de Catalunya Juny 2015 Núm. 40

Association of Elderly Residents sup- sidents and moving on to all sectors of contributing to strengthening relations ported the struggle of these dissidents, local residents, proceeding in circles. on the ground. As the North Ameri- but they could do nothing when on 19 can anthropologist Michael Herzfeld October a large-scale police operation A traditionally closed neighborhood, explained in regard to his research in evicted them from their homes, the reserved with “outsiders” and mistrust- the Pom Mahakan district of Bangkok, rent for which they were still paying, ful of institutions, opened up to our in the face of criticism directed at him with a violent charge that wounded view just from the support we had by the authorities with respect to what ten. The following year, relocated to given to some residents in trouble they deemed excessive involvement in new apartments, some members of when fighting the evictions. We would defense of the neighborhood’s residents these families began to meet with us, clearly never again be able to main- against the evictions, he responded that and our research soon began to take tain the role of objective and impartial this engagement was precisely what shape. While it had not been possible observers, a role we probably did not enabled him to understand aspects of to resist the physical force employed even have when we first came into con- community life that he did not have by the Guàrdia Urbana (municipal tact with Bon Pastor. In a space where, access to without siding firmly with police), it was possible to attempt physically, everyone is observed and those affected (Herzfeld, 2010: 261). It to act on the cultural level, develop- ranked as soon as they set foot on the was indeed our proximity to a number ing a discourse that challenged the first street, it is impossible to pretend of local residents that allowed us to see stereotypes used to depict Bon Pas- you are different than you are. From into some aspects of the inhabitants’ tor in a language of exclusion and the beginning this placed our research cultural intimacy (Herzfeld, 1997) and which served as an excuse for urban in line with what is globally being use them to refute the prejudices of and social planning that was deeply defined as engaged anthropology: a the negative myth. This partnership, unpopular. We returned to interview style of research that does not purport which grew out of the conflict, served the inhabitants of the Casas Baratas to simulate impartiality –which for to reduce the distance that had histori- in 2009, this time delving deeper into some time has been considered impos- cally separated the neighborhoods of the history and life paths of neighbor- sible– but instead makes explicit the Casas Baratas from the places where hood families, beginning with the dis- stance one takes and the role one has in discourse about the city is produced.

Members of the Association of Elderly Residents in Defense of the Inhabitants of Bon Pastor hang a banner against the City Council. CAROLA PAGANI, 2004 COMPILATION 123

The team that managed the entirety ries between “us” and “them” became through which alliances or ruptures of the research from the moment the blurred from the moment some of us can be transmitted, according to the project was drafted was thus made up went to live in the neighborhood for occasion: it can just as easily work as by social researchers from the Institut a year, observing up close and even a link as it can serve to convey resent- Català d’Antropologia like Stefano suffering in our own skin some aspects ment and reciprocal hatred. This is why Portelli, Ulrike Viccaro and Núria of the social impact of the urban trans- we were interested in collective forms Sánchez Armengol and inhabitants formation. of managing coexistence and conflict. of the Casas Baratas such as Sandra Capdevila, evicted by the Guàrdia This experience in collaborative eth- From its founding the Bon Pastor area Urbana in 2007; some members of nography (Lassiter, 2005) in an area was “semi-autonomous” with respect the Association of Elderly Residents with an ongoing conflict was difficult to the municipal authorities: first as a continued the research from the out- to manage: the sector of the popula- “dump” where the city threw undesir- set (like Ramon Fenoy, Luis Nuevo, tion that collaborated in planning the able sectors of the population, uncon- Aurora Sardaña, Josep Capdevila, José demolition naturally saw us as both- cerned with their fate; later as an area of María Manzano and Moisés Garre), ersome intruders and even political purely working-class resistance, impen- despite having some mistrust of and enemies, and many refused to be inter- etrable to institutional control; and insecurity about sudden interest from viewed. We felt that this was a risk we still later as an area that had been paci- fied politically but where a widespread a-legality concealed a silent political dissidence. Throughout their history, then, the inhabitants of the Casas Baratas had to develop autonomous forms of conflict management that avoided giving authorities an excuse to enter the neighborhood and col- lect information on an area opaque to their surveillance. Even today, traces of this horizontal self-management of co- existence can be observed in the day- to-day of the inhabitants of the Casas Baratas, which on one hand convey the memory of a history of political auton- omy and on the other are supported in the horizontal urban shape of the neighborhood. Many elements of life A woman from Bon Pastor showing the kitchen of her casa barata awaiting demolition. CAROLA PAGANI, 2004 in the Casas Baratas can be considered forms of managing local coexistence and at the same time instruments for an institution, the Department of Cul- had to run in order to be able to gain preventing the explosion of conflicts. ture of the Generalitat de Catalunya, an internal position in the area being Some elements would be the frequent which up to that point they had seen researched, and it did not stop us from corrillos (small groups of people talk- only as complicit in the demolition of making a progressive approach to the ing) in the narrow streets between the their neighborhood. The collaboration sectors of the population in favor of the houses, which stave off many fights was not easy: the languages were dif- demolition: by 2010 we had almost among neighbors; the constant gossip, ferent and the political implications fully emancipated ourselves from all which, while on the one hand it pushes were often difficult to manage. Every circles of relations of the Association of towards conformity, on the other it aspect of the research, from the selec- Elderly Residents, and we interviewed prevents antisocial behaviors; and the tion of interviewees to the collection of many people with radically different tight-knit networks of relatives, neigh- documents to the conclusions drawn stances. We thus came to under- bors and friends that allow for the pas- and even the writing of the final mono- stand how popular culture, far from sage of information also in moments graph was negotiated between local being a uniform set of shared traits of tension and between the opposing residents and researchers: the bounda- and behaviors, is instead a language sides of a fight. The apotheosis of these 124 COMPILATION Revista d’Etnologia de Catalunya Juny 2015 Núm. 40 ethnotechniques, as we defined them, and social, was our key to understand- they had been deprived of their bear- is the night of Sant Joan, which cel- ing the complexity of the stakes of the ings and were without the plan which ebrates collective appropriation of pub- conflict generated by the “redevelop- acted as a confirmation of their native lic space, the street, as a critical place ment” of Bon Pastor: urban trans- lore, the Indians soon lost any feeling for negotiating coexistence. Around formations have a profound impact for tradition; it was as if their social the fire, eating, drinking and dancing on managing coexistence, which in and religious systems (we shall see that together, the residents of each street turn is a product of the particular his- one cannot be dissociated from the collectively overcome tensions, peri- tory and allows for the daily updating other) were too complex to exist with- odically starting to live together from of this collective heritage. The resi- out the pattern which was embodied scratch again. dents of the Casas Baratas were losing in the plan of the village and of which many of their unifying elements, and their awareness was constantly being With the recent ban on the fire festival a transformation in social organiza- refreshed by their everyday activities” and the beginning of the demolition tion corresponded to the geographic (Lévi-Strauss, 1955: 204). Another of the Casas Baratas, these ethnotech- substitution of the inhabited space. French anthropologist, Robert Jau- niques were in decline. The conflict The objective correlative relationship lin, identified the modification of tra- over the redevelopment plan, which that ties the spatial modification to ditional space as one of the elements divided residents between in favor the change in relations among resi- that had a decisive influence on the and opposed, could not be settled dents is the aspect of this history that “ethnocide” of the Motilon people: through these collective forms of fascinated us most and the one we “An unusual variation in habitat not management, and from the outset found most important in the sphere only brings about a material discom- both sides parted company, not only of anthropology. fort but also deeply disturbs human relationships, family intimacy, some moral qualities, social balance, the organization of responsibilities and an order and nobility that had called our attention” (Jaulin, 1970: 65). The demolition of the Casas Baratas, while not ethnocide, undoubtedly represents an attack on popular culture in Bar- celona, on the autonomy of certain disadvantaged sectors of the popula- tion, on the human diversity that still exists between urban boundaries. In part it recalls the “cultural genocide” of the periphery of Rome described by Pasolini, the process that determined the homologation of behaviors and adaptation to standards defined from A family from Carrer Tàrrega at a house that was demolished in 2010. above in the 1960s and 1970s. CAROLA PAGANI, 2004 As Manuel Vázquez Montalbán wrote insulting each other publically as Many anthropologists of the colonial during the Olympic period for the “had always been done,” but filing era showed how the modification of introduction to the English edition of legal complaints in court or with the space was used by missionaries in their his book Barcelonas: “Those English police: they thus adhered to a vertical attempts to colonize the natives. Lévi- travelers who have already visited or form of managing coexistence, medi- Strauss wrote in Tristes Tropiques that intend to visit Barcelona should be ated by institutions, which penetrated “the Salesian missionaries in the Rio de aware that not one but several cities the area in parallel to the construction Garças region were quick to realize that are contained within its municipal of the apartment blocks –that is, the the surest way to convert the Bororo boundaries, and that nearly all of them verticalization of the inhabited space. was to make them abandon their [cir- have been radically changed under the This dialectic between horizontality cular] village in favour of one with the impact of the Olympics” (Vázquez and verticality, simultaneously urban houses set out in parallel rows. Once Montalbán, 1992: 3). Only now, 20 COMPILATION 125 years later, are we beginning to work the obliteration of distance. Encoun- the center, into veritable garden cities on the specific dynamics with which ter is realized by keeping the necessary where differences and conflicts were this impact modified the least known distance while crossing it at the same self-managed; the same city that has and peripheral Barcelonas. Through the time” (Stavrides, 2011: 18). again today emerged from its ashes experience of this research, we came to in the empty plots of land and vacant understand how difficult it could be for Reticent about institutional control, lots turned into kitchen gardens, in us to get closer to a space historically hidden by the distance imposed from the occupied squares where popular marked by difference andotherness in the center, the Casas Baratas, like assemblies are held, in the abandoned relation to a city and its official dis- other , were the buildings transformed into centers course and at the same time maintain threshold spaces where a population disseminating popular culture. The the necessary distance to understand with very different migratory routes Casas Baratas represent this capacity and describe it. Greek architect Stavros and histories found common ground for resistance, self-organization and Stavrides, an expert on the commons, for negotiation and rapprochement, spontaneous mediation of conflict that has written on this type of approach: building a horizontal sociality that will continue to resurface in Barcelona “In order to approach otherness in an remained largely unchanged until well despite repression and mass demoli- act of mutual awareness, one needs to into the new millennium. All of this tions. Returning to Stavrides (2011: carefully dwell on the threshold. In research and the future book where 18), this is the wisdom hidden in the this transitory territory that belongs the results will be presented –which, threshold experience: “the awareness to neither of the neighbouring parts, logically, will be called The Horizon- that otherness can only be approached one understands that it is necessary tal City– should be understood as a by opening the borders of identity, to feel the distance so as to be able to tribute to the Barcelona that 80 years forming –so to speak– intermediary erect the bridge. Hostility arises from ago was able to proudly transform zones of doubt, ambivalence, hybridity, the preservation and increase of this concentrationary spaces, designed to zones of negotiable values.” n distance while assimilation results from move undesirable workers away from

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