Between Marie Curie and Albert Einstein

Barcelona's street naming system has turned Nou Barris, specifically the district headquarters, into a tribute to science. These municipal facilities, which include a library, a police station, and other municipal services, are located between two parallel streets: Marie Curie Street and Albert Einstein Street, two of the most well-known great scientists in history. Since 1995, these researchers have given them their names.

The street dedicated to the scientist, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, has only a single residential building, right at the beginning, and the shops, some of them closed, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The street continues and becomes the back of the district headquarters. More of a thoroughfare than anything else. The most likely busy address is that of the Parc Tecnològic, located in a building also from '95, managed by Barcelona Activa, which supports companies related to technology and innovation, and which also houses the Ateneu de Fabricació Digital, the Cibernarium and a programming campus, 42 Barcelona.

But this is Nou Barris and here there are also other needs. The alley that links Marie Curie and Albert Einstein is a place closer to social services than to innovation and science, although many of the people who are there have experienced Newton's theory of gravity on their own skin, they know what it's like to fall very low. They are the users of the municipal services that are also found at this address named after a female scientist. A soup kitchen, a reception and care center for homeless people, and also a care service for victims of gender violence.

Marie Curie Street is the back of Plaça Major de Nou Barris, but it gains in signage over Albert Einstein Street: eight plaques for the scientist, one for the mathematician. There is no record that Marie Curie ever visited Barcelona, but Einstein did. He came in 1923, invited by the Mancomunitat de Catalunya and the Institut d'Estudis Catalans. From what is known of the trip, nothing indicates that he set foot in Nou Barris. If he had gone to the place that now bears his name, he would have found himself in the middle of the Hospital Mental de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, a place where people with mental illnesses were cared for, surrounded by fields worked by the patients themselves.

Now, around Albert Einstein street there is also green, that of the Parc Central de Nou Barris, inaugurated in 2003, and that of Plaça Major de Nou Barris, which also crosses this street, where things keep happening: a group of women practice tai-chi, children play ball, there are barking dogs and people resting. Albert Einstein street is a blurred street that is hard to follow, in the middle of this park and the square.

Like Marie Curie street, it is not a conventional residential street either, but there is a lot of life. It has the comings and goings of all the municipal facilities it leads to and the activity of several tapas, sandwich and pizza bars, grouped in a kind of boulevard, one next to the other. All with terraces that, on sunny and good weather days, are full to overflowing. Here, the passage of time, as Einstein said, also seems very relative.