“See how La Mina is changing“, you can reed on a huge poster from Barcelona’s Ronda Litoral highway, past the enormous buildings of La Mina. This neighborhood was built in the ’60 to give housing to the inhabitants of the gypsy neighborhood of Campo de la Bota”, when the coast of Barcelona had to be cleaned, just where today there is the “Forum”. Francisco Franco himself inaugurated the neighborhood: its scale is still impressive, just imagine how it ways half a century ago to the eyes of those who came from the slums on the beach. In the occasion of 2004 Forum of Cultures, La Mina received another “integral urban renewal plan”, driven by the Consorcio de La Mina: after many years of useless negotiations with the Consorcio, the Platform of associations and residents of La Mina decided to move directly against the project, and asked us a survey on the opinions that La Mina’s residents have about the urban renewal plan. This report has been used within the legal actions that the Platform moved against the project. It’s very different to watch how La Mina is changing from a car running on the Ronda highway, and to see it through the eyes of its residents, in the squares between the buildings. They see the opposite part of the poster.
- Download Transformació urbana i canvi social al barri de La Mina de Barcelona (2009)
- Some gypsy jokes we recorded on march 12th, 2009 in La Mina neighborhood [audio:http://periferiesurbanes.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/chistes_12-3-09.mp3]
- La Mina photos, 2009 [ALBUM1][ALBUM2]
