These days, Barcelona City Council installed a good handful of New Jersey model barriers on a plot of land in the Vallcarca neighborhood in order to prevent shanties from rising there again. This is a very unusual use of these elements of street furniture. The most common thing is that they are used to cut off traffic, organize mass events... and in these latitudes and for a long time to flank the terraces installed on the road during the pandemic. The City Council has thousands of concrete barriers stored on a plot of land in Horta-Guinardó!
And here in Vallcarca, among the neighbors, in the neighborhood of perpetual lots, of the urban planning nonsense and of the municipal effects forgotten for decades, this innovative manifestation of what is commonly known as hostile urbanism – such as the bars that prevent one can lie down on a bench with one leg out – is generating the corresponding division of neighborhood opinions. Nobody likes to find themselves in this situation.
What happens is that some celebrate that the City Council pays attention to what is happening here, while others understand that the government of Mayor Jaume Collboni prefers to ignore those who do not fully agree with its principles. The issue of hostile New Jersey reveals once again the prevailing neighborhood division in Vallcarca. Some are betting on finally executing those already blurred plans from a couple of decades ago and opening that blissful new Rambla, and others are betting on discarding them once and for all.
The fact is that for a few years now, between Vallcarca Avenue, the viaduct and Gustavo Bécquer Street, a good handful of scrap dealers, mainly Romanian gypsies, live in a settlement where sooner or later the City Council will build a park historically claimed by the neighborhood. At this moment, after so much waiting, the City Council is finalizing the executive project of the Vallcarca Central Park. And from time to time a group of scrap metal dealers threaten to settle in another place, like in this corner located a few meters away. What happens is that the City Council gave these lands to a foundation to build a building with 36 protected affordable rental homes. The City Council hopes that the works will start during the first half of next year.
“Well, since they are going to do work soon,” explain some residents of the area, “the lot in question is super well conditioned. And, well, the scrap metal dealers used a Paisatge Urbà tarp from the Barcelona City Council to limit the space, which has its irony... Last weekend, at one point, they built a couple of shanties. Here in Vallcarca, how everything is delayed, how we live in an urban limbo..." On Tuesday, a considerable force from the Urban Police went to the new settlement, but then there was no one. Municipal sources indicate that the City Council then proceeded to secure it "to stop new occupations and not alter the planned construction of homes."
This management, however, stirs up the other sensibilities of the neighborhood. “We were in contact with this family,” the Som Barri association says indignantly. They had been granted an apartment, 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 do not talk to us... In the previous mandate we had very fluid communication with the Gràcia district. Now, however, the new municipal government seems more willing to talk with the entities that are most related to it, with those who want the new Rambla to open. And, well, some neighbors here are bothered by finding poverty so close, but what we have to do is fight against the causes of poverty, not against the people who suffer from it.”
Years ago someone renamed this area the Sarajevo of Barcelona.
