A few days ago I was chatting with one of the old cats in my neighborhood (more feline than old-fashioned) and he told me that Ciutat Vella is slowly dying because the latest municipal administrations -be they convergent, pseudocommunist or socialist in that way- have condemned it to be little more than a tourist showcase, with the consequent depersonalization. In fact, most Barcelonians who reside in the old center of the city, people who stubbornly refuse to leave, when they identify their home usually say that they "still" live in Raval, in the Gothic Quarter, and so on. I was thinking about this militant fatality while reading the Pact for Ciutat Vella, a strategic document that the City Council has promoted to rethink the neighborhood with a horizon of 2030, a report coordinated by Ivan Pera, a tadpole by birth (with a very theatrical and illustrious surname) but a good connoisseur of the state of this wild little piece of land of ours.
Like any document of this type, the administration opts for poetry when, after talking with every entity and convening a group of recognized experts, it reaches conclusions such as "guaranteeing affordable, safe and sustainable housing for all stages of life is essential to maintain the right to live in the district." In turn, this pact essay often falls into the the PSC's familiar 1990s rhetoric which, avoiding any tension between citizens of diverse origins, places the ideal of the neighborhood - in the expression of my beloved ethics professor and neighbor Begoña Román - in a kind of calm and serene "patchwork blanket": "perhaps not a slow city uniform, but a city with a plurality of rhythms." I'm all for philosophical reflections into it and to use every Anglicism that lends itself, but I would say that less poetry and more action are needed.
To be fair, this municipal document includes measures such as "Elaborate the Ciutat Vella Rehabilitation Plan 2035" (In plain English: stop the neighborhood from collapsing!); "Increase affordable housing with the incorporation of new flats in the coming years"; "Open a special education center to increase (ugh) comprehensive care for children with specific needs", among many progressive talking points with which everyone would agree, especially if they did not imply any further tax increase. But before letting imaginative pigeons fly, I would say that we need to focus more on objective data (which the report itself includes, and this should be celebrated) such as the fact that Ciutat Vella has 36.6% of its population at risk of relative poverty, a figure that doubles the percentage of the rest of Barcelona, and that the neighborhood has 54% of newcomers, compared to 26% for the city.
I know that engaging with the data or questioning those types of phrases that begin with "it is necessary to promote" or "increase" is somewhat problematic, but I would say that one cannot reflect on the future of Ciutat Vella (again, I use data included in the Pact report) without noticing the 73.6% of citizens per thousand who have suffered the sympathetic euphemism "coexistence incidents" -again, double that of the rest of Barcelona-, data that are not fixed with round tables at the CCCB, but with more police presence in a neighborhood where, at night, you won't see a single police officer. To put it more bluntly, the central problem of the old town is that every day we are poorer and, consequently, we feel more insecure. If we add to the fact in question that, instead of neighbors, butcher shops or bars, we live surrounded by more expats, KFCs and cheesecake museums, the anguish tends to skyrocket exponentially.
As expected, the Pact for Ciutat Vella includes measures for the conservation of lwhat the pretentious like to call "iconic local businesses"ematic shops and to keep alive the untransferable local retail ecosystem of the neighborhood; but I would dare to insist again on the fact that, in an environment castrated by precarious jobs, rising rents (which our European compatriots can pay with a fifth of their salary and still find cheap!) and tensions between communities that, whether we like it or not, will be growing... more than a pact, we need a real revolution. I am very happy to live in a diverse neighborhood with a millennial history, but if the experts who have signed this Pact expect problems to be solved with verses, they're kidding themselves. The difficulties experienced by Ciutat Vella could have been made evident without so much pomp and thus the City Council could have embarked on the path of solutions with much more effectiveness.
Councilors and authorities, abandon poetry and do us the favor of working because, if you keep indulging in lyrical rhetoric, the next election night there will be many tears and surprised faces due to the increase of those you already know; and it won't be because I haven't been warning you for years...