“The physical order, the conflicts and the way we live in cities can be explained in large part by the inequalities and the struggles that this gives rise to,” writes Oriol Nel·lo in an article published in the journal Metropolis of Barcelona in April 2024. If anyone has studied this dynamic well, he was Secretary of Territorial Planning of the Generalitat of Catalonia between 2003 and 2011. This was the time when the Barrios Plan was imagined and implemented, intended to reverse the disasters of urban segregation coming from Lejos, but it degenerated until the mid-seventies with a social specialization of the territory that still persists. This segregation is the result of what happened in the Sant Roc neighborhood of Badalona with the expulsion of the old B9 institute.
Forty years of Democratic politics have betrayed many great things, but have failed to reverse the dynamic that chronicles and perpetuates poverty in these segregated neighborhoods. This dynamic consists of the fact that, when thanks to the educational or work social elevator, some of its inhabitants improve their income, they leave the neighborhood in search of a better social environment, and their place is occupied by new contingents of poor people, many of whom come from recent immigration. People die, poverty remains.
This is how residential segregation is perpetuated and it is the greatest failure of the urban planning model applied until now. The colonization of the real estate market by predatory financial capital has not yet worsened this dynamic. The fact that tents are flying and that there are tents in the campaña below the road bridges can only be considered as a symptom of a more general and worrying phenomenon.
It has not been possible to reverse the specialization of territory according to income which was established in urban planning, largely reactive and chaotic, during the expansion of the 1970s. This demonstrates that neighborhoods like Sant Roc de Badalona, La Mina de Sant Adrià, like so many others distributed throughout the metropolitan area, continue to be pockets of poverty despite the fact that less than a kilometer away there are neighborhoods of brilliant wealth, such as the Forum. As Nel·lo reminds us, urban segregation is a double movement: the confinement of the poor and the secession of the rich.
It is in these poor neighborhoods that the clash between young people and vulnerable people takes place, between those who have precarious conditions and those who have no one. But it is segregation itself that keeps them in the spiral of poverty. If, under these conditions, irresponsible politicians seem willing to confront the poor with the poorest, the poorest immigrants with the new immigrants, in a merciless struggle for ever-scarce resources, we will have as a result what happened in Sant Roc. Seeing the mayor of Badalona, Xavier García Albiol, aggravate the confrontation and sympathize with those who, through marginality, come forward to prevent a parish from welcoming those who have just arrived and this is the most serious thing that has happened in politics in recent years. An unpleasant episode of institutionally instigated xenophobia, racism and aporophobia. But the political maneuver was so obscene and brazen, so obvious in its objective, that it should be turned against the person who instigated it.
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