IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section A

Abstract

This research aims to deepen the relationship between ecology and community, with self-building as a point of view and urban history as a guiding thread. Through memories and archival documents, it reconstructs the process of urbanization of the foothills of the ‘Muntanya Pelada’ in the Carmel neighborhood of Barcelona and, in particular, in the ‘Turó de la Rovira’, in a way that ties its construction to the everyday life of the community that inhabited the area during the twentieth century. This perspective allows for a more complex understanding of reality through the affective bonds between the social context, the built space and its surroundings. Two main themes are the backbone of the discourse. On the one hand, the investigation explores the class stigma that hovers over self-building and shantyism at the top of the mountain. A conceptual confusion has been created between the two terms, which today needs to be clarified and broadened. On the other hand, the nature-culture couple is considered in a less antagonistic reading of the relationship. The “Parc dels Tres Turons” project, which threatens to demolish part of the urban fabric of the mountain, offers both the delimitation of the case study and a fertile proposal to this same project, which is at a key point in the environmental debate on the relationship with the “natural” environment and the community dimension of a bottom-up ecology. Through diverse narratives and imaginaries regarding the mountain, it opens a discussion ground that intends to nourish the contemporary social struggle around “els Tres Turons”.