During the years 2009 and 2011, some members of our research group helped in the organization of Repensar Bonpastor International Competition of Ideas promoted by a group of architects and urbanists from Barcelona with the collaboration of the International Alliance of Inhabitants. After various years of fieldwork (2004, 2009) in Bon Pastor’s casas baratas, and helped by the stable relationships we entailed with a series of families of residents, we reached a conclusion: that in spite of the media and institution constantly repeating how this neighborhood is in need of “renewal” (the word they use to say “demolition”), other solutions are possible, for this group of social houses, “red” and popular, built by Barcelona’s City Council in 1929: it could be possible to preserve the historical and social peculiarity that this neighborhood represents for its residents and for all the city. Cultures, habitus, techniques and languages developed during decades by the inhabitants of the 784 casas baratas, and deeply rooted in this particular style of housing, will not survive after the demolition of the neighborhood. Even many of its inhabitants, since “modernity” arrived to the neighborhood under the form of demolitions, had to leave the neighborhood or suffered violent evictions.
[audio:http://periferiesurbanes.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/ZFP_Zona_De_Fumadores_Paranoicos-Humildad_De_Barrio.mp3]