Self-built Barcelona

A staircase before a street

In Roquetes, some routes climb by stair because the gradient makes it impossible to pretend the ground is flat. Houses adjusted to difficult plots, retaining walls and sharp changes in level. The map may look irregular. Seen from the ground, it records many small decisions: where a room could fit, how to reach it, where water would pass and what had to hold for the house not to slide.

This Barcelona was not drawn all at once. It grew through accumulation. Families arriving in the city bought or occupied inexpensive land, often far from services, and built with the materials and time available. A wall today, a roof tomorrow, another floor when money and need allowed. Self-building was a technique and an economy of survival.^[1]

A house was not yet a city

Constructing a dwelling did not guarantee a road, sewer, running water, school, transport or recognised address. In parts of Torre Baró, Roquetes, the Carmel, Can Baró and the edges of the Trinitat, the formal city arrived late and often after sustained campaigns. Residents repeatedly had to demonstrate that the place where they lived deserved public services.

The distance between house and city matters. Authorities might classify a structure as irregular, yet rely on its inhabitants to stabilise land, maintain paths and organise demands. What later appeared as a municipal improvement had often begun as collective labour or neighbourhood protest.^[2]

Self-building and shanty settlements

Precarious housing did not take one form. The barracks of Montjuïc, Somorrostro or the Carmel could occupy land without stable plots and use highly fragile materials. Other self-built districts combined informal land purchase, small permanent houses and successive extensions. The histories overlap, but they should not be collapsed into a single category.

Turó de la Rovira concentrates several layers: military infrastructure, shanty settlement, removal of the informal neighbourhood and later museum development. The panorama that now attracts visitors sits over a geography of families who turned an abandoned anti-aircraft position into domestic space.^[3]

When planning arrives

Regularisation can bring services and safety. It can also impose demolition, oversized roads or replacement housing that ignores existing relationships. Planning enters land that has already been planned from below, even if no official drawing records it. Every staircase, wall and passage contains a response to topography and limited means.

To “urbanise” is therefore not to begin from nothing. It is to negotiate with a city already made, decide which everyday solutions survive and determine who bears the cost of normalisation.

Who built Barcelona

Self-building is often described through absence: absence of planning, quality or the state. It is also presence — practical knowledge, family networks, labour after the working day and political organisation. It need not be romanticised to recognise that many families performed work the formal city had refused to undertake.

In Roquetes, the staircase continues upward before a street can. Each step solves the slope. Together, they describe a city built by people demanding recognition as its citizens.