“Physical organization, conflicts and the way we live in cities are explained to a large extent by inequality and the struggles that this gives rise to,” wrote Oriol Nel·lo in an article published in the magazine Barcelona Metropolis in April 2024. If anyone has studied this dynamic well, it is him, who was Secretary of Territorial Planning between 2003 and 2011. This is the period in which the Neighborhood Plan was devised and applied, aimed at reversing the disasters of urban segregation that came from afar, but that escalated in the mid-seventies with a social specialization of the territory that still persists. What happened in the Sant Roc neighborhood of Badalona with the .
Forty years of democratic policies have brought many improvements, but they have not been able to reverse the dynamic that chronicles and perpetuates poverty in these segregated neighborhoods. This dynamic is 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 them recent immigrants. People pass, poverty remains.
This is how residential segregation is perpetuated and this is the greatest failure of the urban planning model applied so far. The colonization of the real estate market by predatory financial capital has only aggravated this dynamic. The return of barracks and tents under highway bridges can only be seen as a symptom of a more general and worrying phenomenon.
It has not been possible to reverse the specialization of the territory based on income that was established in the urban planning, largely reactive and chaotic, in the expansion of the seventies. This is demonstrated by the fact that neighborhoods like Sant Roc de Badalona, or , like so many others spread throughout the metropolitan area, continue to be pits of poverty despite the fact that neighborhoods of brilliant wealth have grown less than a kilometer away, such as those of the Forum. As Nel·lo recalls, urban segregation lives on a double movement: the confinement of the poor and the secession of the rich.
It is in the poor neighborhoods where the clash occurs between the old and the new vulnerable, between those who have a precarious roof and those who have none. But it is segregation itself that traps them in the spiral of poverty. If in these conditions irresponsible politicians appear willing to pit the poor against the poorest, yesterday’s immigrants against new immigrants, in a ruthless fight for resources that are always scarce, we will have as a result what has happened in Sant Roc. Seeing the mayor of Badalona, incite confrontation and empathize with those who, from the margins, demonstrate to prevent a parish from welcoming those who have just arrived is the most serious thing that has happened in politics in recent years. A disgusting episode of institutionally instigated xenophobia, racism and aporophobia. But the political maneuver has been so obscene and brazen, its purpose so obvious, that it should be turned against whoever instigated it.
