The small awning made of wood and methacrylate stands next to the sidewalk of Calle Farigola, in the Vallcarca district of Barcelona. Like many others in the city, it serves as a shelter for bus users, in this case line 87, from the rain and wind. But except for the fact that it was hand-built by the neighbors just a week ago. “We did it according to the tradition of neighborhood self-management,” says Aran Llivina, of the Som Barri association.
Building infrastructure is a move that has taken social media by storm these days, in part because of its similarity to the story it tells. The 47th the film about the hijacking of a bus in the years of Transition to demonstrate that it was possible to take it to the peripheral district of Torre Baró and that it allowed the arrival of public transport in the area.
In Vallcarca, this marquee that appeared on September 26 is also the tip of the iceberg of a larger neighborhood and associative movement. “It represents our spirit of self-management,” defend those who built it. Located a few meters from the village of Calle Argentera, currently threatened with eviction, it is inside the self-proclaimed Les Vinyes park, a plot of land abandoned for more than a decade, owned by Núñez i Navarro, to which the neighbors are yielding different uses.
At the end of the working day for many Barcelona residents, around 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, there was no one sitting under this particular marquee. Still a little wary of the new construction, the dozen neighbors who were waiting for the bus preferred to do so standing or sitting on the cement wall that separates the sidewalk from the land.
“Initially, it was the Town Hall that made this wall,” explains Glòria, a regular on line 87, sitting in the small gray cement structure on each side of the new shelter. Like her, several neighbors use the wall to lean on and wait for the bus to arrive, but she adds that “when it rains, it’s very exposed.” It may be a while before residents trust the wooden infrastructure for shelter, but Llivina says they’re not going to remove it.
The activists who erected the marquee did so because Barcelona City Hall claimed they could not install it due to the narrowness of the street and sidewalk. There is therefore only one post to signal the stop. “The sidewalk is 1.8 meters wide and the awning models used in the city have a width of at least 1.5 meters, leaving an insufficient distance to comply with the regulations,” say city hall sources.
“The spirit of Vallcarca is: can’t a marquee fit here? Well, we do,” says Llivina. As the canopy is built specifically on the site and does not occupy public space, the Urban Police officers present on site were unable to stop the construction of the structure.
From Som Barri, they went so far as to broadcast the visit of the local police to It seems that the CFP really likes movie of 47, but he didn’t understand it.
Vallcarca, a rebellious neighborhood
This is not the first action of this type by residents of the Vallcarca area. “Three orchards were planted in different places, the sidewalks were widened, trees were planted in almost all plots, 300 vines were also planted,” lists Llivina about the self-management demonstrations of neighborhood activism. He also adds that it is thanks to the neighbors that La Fusteria, a building on Argentera Street that serves as a neighborhood meeting point, was saved and renovated. And that’s not all, they have a bicycle workshop that they run themselves, where any neighbor can go to carry out repairs.
The history of the marquee is also linked to that of the vacant lots resulting from the 2008 urban plan followed by the economic crisis. Some of them come from the Núñez i Navarro real estate agency. Since then, the neighbors have defended that the buildings not be built at market prices and have in turn created community spaces on some of these lands, such as the self-managed Vinyes park.
“Nothing we did in Vallcarca has ever had as much resonance as the big top,” laments Llivina. Despite everything, he assures that there is no great story behind them with which they want to justify themselves, but rather that “the real epic is that of organized people who have projects and carry them out”.
In their initial message, they also pointed the finger at the municipality of Jaume Collboni, which they accuse of making neighborhood initiatives more difficult than their predecessor, Barcelona en Comú. “Now with the CPS we are starting again,” says Llivina.
