Urbanising under Francoism

Blocks before city

In Montbau, long residential blocks stand on terraces cut into the slope above the Vall d’Hebron. Their placement expresses a recognisable modernist ambition: sunlight, air, open ground and a planned relationship between buildings. Elsewhere, large estates arrived as rows of dwellings before the ordinary machinery of urban life. A flat could exist before the school, the clinic, the bus or the paved square. The dictatorship’s Barcelona did not expand through a single model. Public and semi-public housing programmes, church-linked initiatives, private speculative construction, tolerated self-building and surviving barrack settlements operated at the same time. Congrés, Montbau, the Besòs, the Verneda, Ciutat Meridiana and Trinitat Nova therefore cannot be reduced to one category called “the periphery”. They are different answers to the same pressure: how to house a rapidly growing metropolitan population while land, finance and political power remained profoundly unequal.^[1]

Planning without citizenship

Authoritarian planning could draw roads, allocate plots and approve thousands of homes without allowing residents to decide what a neighbourhood required. The result was not always poor architecture. Some estates were carefully designed; some private blocks were technically worse. The democratic deficit lay in the separation between producing dwellings and producing collective life. That separation became visible in mud, long walks, overcrowded classrooms and journeys requiring several changes. It was also visible in the distance between a promotional plan and the inhabited estate. The archive of Montbau records a planned settlement; neighbourhood memories record how plans were completed, altered and lived.^[2] The history of Congrés similarly joins an institutional housing project to the slower making of a neighbourhood around it.^[3]

Services became politics

A demand for a traffic light or a bus route may look modest beside constitutional politics. Under a dictatorship, it could become a practical claim to citizenship. Neighbourhood associations gathered evidence, organised meetings, issued bulletins and demonstrated for schools, sewage, health centres, green space and safer roads. Women often carried these campaigns because failures in water, transport, education and care landed directly in everyday domestic work. By the final years of Francoism, the city’s outer districts contained dense organising networks. Their victories did not erase the origins of the estates, but they altered the urban fabric: a reserved plot became a school; a dangerous junction acquired a crossing; an empty slope became a park; a distant block entered the bus map. Popular-memory projects preserve this history as a sequence of concrete demands rather than an abstract transition to democracy.^[4]

The dictatorship remains in the plan

The political regime ended; much of its housing remains. Buildings age, accessibility becomes urgent and the population changes. Some estates have strong construction and generous open space. Others carry defects, isolation or steep topography that continue to shape opportunity. Rehabilitation must therefore read the original plan closely rather than treating every post-war block as a failed object. The most revealing legacy is the mismatch between the speed of housing construction and the slowness of public provision. Francoist urbanisation made Barcelona larger. Neighbourhood mobilisation made much of that expansion into city.