“What does it mean to live in such a densely populated neighborhood?” repeats Pedro Luna on the other end of the phone. “It's easy to summarize,” adds the former president of the La Florida Neighborhood Association, in Hospitalet, “We are cramped and we need a lot of social rent.” In the heart of this neighborhood, more than 56,158 people live in just one square kilometer. That this is the most densely populated point in Europe is not new; That there are more and more people, yes.
Almost 10,000 more people now live in this perimeter than in 2011, when the Eurostat series began. It occurs in the Florida neighborhood but also in many other parts of the Barcelona metropolitan area. But especially in the urban continuum that goes from l'Hospitalet to Badalona, which is where these blocks with the most residents are concentrated.
The Barcelona area concentrates 9 of the 10 square kilometers with the most population density in Europe. The Barcelona region is thus consolidated as the urban area with the most hyperdense kilometers. On the other hand, cities like Paris and Madrid, which had several of these overpopulated kilometers, disappear from the list. The population of these areas stagnates and is surpassed by the Barcelona area, which continues to grow.
For Joaquín Recaño, doctor in Geography and researcher at the Center d'Estudis Demogràfics, the arrival of foreigners in Barcelona is one of the key points that explains this difference. “The massive influx of immigration causes hyperdensity to consolidate, while in other areas of Europe the population stagnates because there is no such influx.” In Europe as a whole, natural vegetative growth is negative: the old continent ages because more people die than are born. In Barcelona, the arrival of immigration supports the population pyramid and fuels the growth of the urban area.
In all of Europe there are only 4 kilometers that bring together more than 50,000 people. Except for one, the fourth on the list and which is in the Parisian neighborhood of Clignancourt, the rest are located in the metropolitan area of Barcelona.
“The problem has been going on for a long time,” says Recaño. “We have a very compact city because there are no green spaces. Paris, on the other hand, has many kilometers of low density.” Precisely, the two most densely populated areas of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area – the Florida neighborhood and Llefià and La Salut, in Badalona – are the product of the wild urban planning that was carried out during the migratory wave in the middle of the last century.
The blocks in Florida, for example, were built to house migrants from other parts of Spain who, upon arriving, lived in the barracks on Somorrostro beach. Over the years, the homes have changed hands and now house neighbors from other countries, who arrived in Spain in subsequent movements.
Currently these neighborhoods are crying out for an investment of resources. “The Florida CAP serves around 45,000 neighbors: we have been waiting for years for another one to open in the neighborhood,” claims Pedro Luna, a resident of the neighborhood and president of the neighborhood association until last year. “In addition, this excess population also causes tensions due to the lack of public spaces,” adds Luna.
To all these pressures, we must add the increase in housing prices that impacts these neighborhoods as well as the entire area. Tourism and the arrival of digital nomads – foreigners who live on higher salaries than locals – in the center of Barcelona drives an increase in rental prices throughout the area.
The gentrification process expels residents to neighboring cities and causes access to housing to become unattainable for the local population. This is why today l'Hospitalet is the city in Europe with the most demand for social rentals, according to data from the Idealista real estate portal. “We have a serious problem in guaranteeing all residents access to decent housing,” Luna claims.
In Europe there are thirty square kilometers that concentrate more than 40,000 inhabitants, of which 68% are in Spain, according to population data per square kilometer published by Eurostat. At the municipal level, the Barcelona Metropolitan Area takes the cake and groups the majority of these dense kilometers. But some of them are also found in the neighborhoods of La Chopera, Trafalgar and Lavapiés, in Madrid; in Delicias, Zaragoza; in Santutxu, Bilbao; and in Ceares, Gijón. The only city in the ranking that is not located on the peninsula is the Paris Region, which groups a handful of these areas in the northern zone.
The high population density in the coastal areas of northern and southern Spain, and in the metropolitan areas of Madrid and Barcelona, contrasts with the desert in the center of the peninsula. For Recaño, this imbalance occurs to the extent that Spain, unlike other European neighbors, “does not have a network of medium-sized cities with a solid economic base in the center of the peninsula capable of absorbing the rural exodus, which occurred at middle of the last century.” Madrid then played the role of a black hole that absorbed – and still continues to absorb – the residents of the rest of the plateau, while the metropolitan region of Barcelona did the same on the coast and acted as a population vacuum cleaner.
