Cases barates: temporary housing that lasted a century

A low house, an entire life

In Can Peguera, a front door opens almost directly onto the street. There is no shared lobby and no lift; the distance between the kitchen table and the pavement is tiny. A plan might read this closeness as architectural poverty. It also supported open doors, mutual watchfulness, children playing outside and a shared memory that never fitted comfortably inside the administrative category of “temporary accommodation”.^[1]

Barcelona’s cases barates were born from urban urgency. Works associated with the 1929 International Exhibition and related clearances required low-income families to be rehoused. Four estates — Can Peguera, Bon Pastor, Baró de Viver and Eduard Aunós — were built far from the centre, with small dwellings, low construction costs and initially inadequate services. What was intended as a quick solution began producing a durable form of city.

The edge was not empty

Distance was part of the arrangement. Families were moved to peripheral land separated from jobs and services by railway lines, open ground or water. Residents did not wait for the municipality to finish the neighbourhood. They adapted homes, added rooms, maintained shared spaces and demanded transport, schools, sewers and facilities. Housing policy did not end when a key was delivered. It opened a negotiation lasting decades over what it meant to belong to the city.^[2]

At Can Peguera, the survival of many low houses makes that accumulation visible. Their value is not only architectural. It lies in the relationship between dwelling, street and neighbourhood network. Preserving walls while making continued residence impossible would produce an empty kind of heritage.

Four different futures

Bon Pastor followed another course. The progressive replacement of houses with apartment blocks promised improved living conditions, but it also dissolved a morphology and forced decisions about what should be retained. Demolition still under way in 2024 turned a small number of houses into memory objects while most of the estate disappeared.^[3]

At Baró de Viver and Eduard Aunós, successive renewal programmes reduced or erased much of the original fabric. These differences show that there was no inevitable outcome. Each estate was shaped by planning decisions, building condition, land value, resident organisation and different official ideas of rehousing.

When improvement can also unmake

A small deteriorated house should not be romanticised. Damp, poor insulation, limited floor area and obsolete services are real problems. Yet it cannot be assumed that replacement by an apartment is automatically the best solution without asking what happens to social relations, costs, outdoor space and the right to return.

The history of the cases barates requires three things to be separated: the physical quality of a dwelling, the social value of a neighbourhood and the real-estate value of its land. Improving the first should not require destroying the second in order to release the third.

Time changes the meaning

The municipality built cheap homes to answer an emergency. Their inhabitants built biographies, institutions, friendships and campaigns. A century later, the question is no longer whether the houses performed their temporary function well in 1929. It is who gets to decide what is preserved, what is transformed and who remains.

In Can Peguera, a door still opens almost directly onto the street. The distance is small. The history inside it is immense.