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Once we made news: the forgotten battles

21/06/2012 admin 0
It is been decades now that in Barcelona whole neighborhoods are demolished without the media even mentioning them any more. If someday these situations "made news", soon oblivion covers back their memory. A recent example was Can Tunis neighborhood, whose demolition was surrounded by silence in summer 2004; but in 1993, another neighborhood in the same Zona Franca district, the cases barates of Eduard Aunós fell leaving almost no trace in the city collective memory. The media were too busy celebrating the success of the Olympic Games, as well as years later they were covering the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures. A group of former inhabitants of Eduard Aunós have found this old reportage: it reminds us a forgotten battle, astonishingly similar to the one now taking place around the demolition of anouther group of cases barates: Bon Pastor. Someday, this one too will be forgotten.
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Suburbs according to Reclús

11/06/2012 admin 0
The suburbs, according to the anarchist geographer Elisée Reclús (1830-1905), are not places of exclusion in which are confined those who can't afford to live in the city center. On the contrary, the margins, the periphery, were for him the ideal spaces to develop ways of life closer to nature, without losing the relationship with the hustle and bustle of the city (Reclús had been involved in Paris Commune), but out of the insane density of the metropolis. Reclús lived the last half of his adult life in the suburbs, claiming the last urban fringes as places that permit to break the gap between nature and the city; a central problem for the geographers and urbanists of his time, especially the ecologists and anarchists (Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and, in Catalonia, Cebrià de Montoliu).