"Behind closed doors, everyone does what they want": "interior" micro-stories of an imperfect urban relocation

Abstract

The transformation of the Raval neighborhood has been the subject of exhaustive analysis at an urban scale, highlighting its importance as a model for urban planning at a national and international level. The construction of the current Rambla del Raval, one of the emblematic operations of the Raval Interior Reform Plan (PERI), involved the most extensive demolition of housing blocks in the history of pre-Olympic Barcelona. This article aims to recover some fragments of the "interior" and daily life of a group of people affected by the demolition of the first blocks of demolished homes, whose daily stories of relocation and adaptation remain partially unknown. Residents affected by the demolitions were rehoused in various phases during 1988 in a newly built public housing block close to the area undergoing regeneration or "esponjament" (sponging). This text is presented as a reunion in the present time of the first phase of construction of the Rambla del Raval, through data from ethnographic field work carried out between July 1989 and August 1990, two years after the process, demolition and subsequent relocation. The human landscape presented encompasses the lived microhistories of the neighbors in the "interior" space of the officially protected housing block, where they were located close to their old homes that have already demolished. Their experiences, traumas and hopes to make up a veiled story of everyday fragments and apparently inconsequential in their supposed smallness.