Stories and essays
The forgotten streams beneath the streets
Barcelona looks like a dry city. Its gradients, street names and retaining walls tell another story: beneath the asphalt, water still organises the city.…
Cases barates: temporary housing that lasted a century
Four estates built on Barcelona’s edges in 1929 show how cheap, temporary rehousing became neighbourhood, home and a struggle over the right to remain.…
The villages Barcelona absorbed
Gràcia, Sants, Sant Andreu, Sant Martí, Horta and Sarrià were not neighbourhoods waiting for Barcelona. They were municipalities with streets, governments and institutions of their…
The industrial city and what remains of it
A chimney is not a factory. To understand industrial Barcelona, brick walls must be reconnected to energy, transport, housing, pollution and labour.…
Self-built Barcelona
On Barcelona’s edges and slopes, residents did more than build homes: they made streets, secured services and turned precarious settlements into claims to urban citizenship.…
The city built uphill
Slope is not scenery. It determines the cost of walking, carrying shopping, reaching school, running a bus route and being noticed by government.…
Factories turned into parks, schools and cultural centres
A factory can survive as a building and disappear as a world. What matters is who enters next, for what purpose and under whose ownership.…
Heat, shade and the unequal summer city
Temperature is measured in degrees. Protection is measured in windows that open, mature shade, nights that cool and refuges people can actually reach.…
Civil War traces in the neighbourhood landscape
The war survives not in one monument but in shelters beneath squares and homes, batteries on the hills, repaired façades, family archives and absences that must be learned.…
The Olympic transformation and its uneven legacy
The 1992 Games did not build a new city in a fortnight. They accelerated roads, beaches, housing and projects that distributed access, value and loss unevenly.…
Barcelona before Cerdà
Before the grid, the plain was not empty. Roads, fields, irrigation, factories, towns, property and a military building exclusion already organised it.…
The city beyond the Eixample
The grid is Barcelona’s international image, but most neighbourhood histories follow other grammars: village, factory, slope, estate, port and river.…
Making and remaking the waterfront
The line where Barcelona meets the sea has moved repeatedly. Sediment, docks, railways, shacks, factories, beaches and redevelopment have produced many different coasts.…
Railways, roads and rivers that divided neighbourhoods
Lines that connect the metropolis can split the street. At every major infrastructure, some people’s mobility becomes noise, detour and boundary for others.…
The workers’, cooperative and anarchist city
Barcelona’s working-class power was not made only in great strikes. It required cooperatives, ateneus, schools, unions, printing presses, bars and streets where collective life cou…
Urbanising under Francoism
Post-war Barcelona grew through housing blocks, estates, self-building and speculation, often without schools, transport, sewers or democratic representation. Neighbourhoods had to…
Housing size, rent and overcrowding
The price of a flat does not reveal how many people must share it, how much income it absorbs or whether a bedroom has become a market of its own. The housing crisis has an interio…
Migration from elsewhere in Spain
Twentieth-century Barcelona did not merely receive population: it was physically built, cared for and transformed by people arriving from Andalusia, Murcia, Extremadura, Galicia, A…
Barcelona’s newer migrant geographies
Recent migration does not produce fixed enclaves. It produces networks between room, work, school, worship, shop, remittance and transport — geographies that cross neighbourhood bo…
Noise and the geography of rest
Noise is not only an acoustic measurement. It is an unequal distribution of the ability to sleep, talk, open a window and recover from work.…
Roma histories of Barcelona
Roma presence in Barcelona is neither a note of folklore nor a problem category. It belongs to the labour, music, markets, families, organising and memory of the neighbourhoods.…
Gentrification without clichés: what the evidence shows
A new café does not prove gentrification, and a high rent does not explain its mechanism. Housing, tenure, income, commerce, tourism, investment and displacement must be followed —…
Tourism pressure beyond the centre
Tourism does not stop at La Rambla. It follows icons, viewpoints, beaches, congresses, coach routes and digital platforms, producing different pressures in very different neighbour…
Food markets as neighbourhood infrastructure
A market is not only a roof full of stalls. It is a network of supply, trust, prices, labour, waste, schedules and streets that can sustain everyday life or become scenery.…
Neighbourhood newspapers and counter-archives
A duplicated bulletin could record a missing school, a demanded bus or an imminent demolition years before the conflict entered an official file. Neighbourhoods also produce their …
Women who shaped Barcelona’s neighbourhoods
The city was not made only by mayors, architects and industrialists. It was also made by women who worked, cared, taught, organised strikes, demanded services and preserved the mem…
Queer Barcelona beyond the city-centre narrative
Barcelona’s queer history does not fit inside one axis of bars and clubs. It is also made in civic centres, care networks, youth groups, memory spaces and ordinary routes through t…
Football grounds, clubs and local identity
Before a club represents a city to the world, a team may represent a school, factory, parish or four streets. Local football turns ground, colours and routine into urban identity.…
Cemeteries and the stories they preserve
A cemetery is a city of names, occupations, classes, languages and absences. It preserves not only individual deaths but the ways a society chose to remember them.…
Vanished neighbourhood landmarks
A factory, cinema, barrack settlement, football ground or farmhouse can disappear without leaving an empty place. Plot, name and route continue to carry the shape of what stood the…
The Barcelona that was never built
Rejected, cancelled and incomplete projects are more than a gallery of fantasies. They show which cities were possible, who defended them and which Barcelona ultimately prevailed.…
The social life of squares
A square is not merely an empty shape between façades. It is a timetable, a negotiation and everyday infrastructure deciding who may play, rest, sell, protest or remain.…
Barcelona at night: where the daytime city disappears
When shutters come down, the city does not stop; it changes hands. Cleaning, markets, care, transport, leisure and sleep produce a nocturnal geography barely visible on the daytime…
Official boundaries and the neighbourhoods people recognise
The administrative line organises data and services. Neighbourhood identity grows from markets, slopes, parishes, former municipalities, micro-place names and routes that often cro…
Seams: where two neighbourhoods meet
A neighbourhood edge is not always a margin. It may be a shared street, dividing infrastructure, a school that connects, or a strip where two histories remain visible at once.…