Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation by Stavros Stavrides;

Author:Stavros Stavrides;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

5.2 Destroying a rich commoning neighborhood tradition (Bon Pastor, Barcelona)

The logic of the project is based on a neoliberal reasoning which considers the Bon Pastor houses as “obsolete” (Col.Lectiu Repensar Bonpastor 2016) and aims at giving the residents the opportunity to become homeowners of small buildings. The “cleared” land resulting from the demolitions and the replacement of existing one-story houses with multistory housing buildings (which would be “affordable” housing rather than social housing) is to be used, according to the project, for land speculation (houses and shops for sale).

For some of the tenants (the old houses are owned by Barcelona’s City Council) the promise of homeownership seemed alluring. However, those who followed the proposal scheme (willingly or not) soon discovered that the loans they had to get in order to pay for their houses were becoming an unbearable burden (added to housing taxation obligations), which was way more difficult to carry than the rents they had to pay before.

Responding to the competition’s call for the proposal of “new alternatives for Bon Pastor’s transformation” we indeed tried as a group of architects to suggest ways to rehabilitate the casas baratas without ignoring the “architectural, historical and ethnological value of this housing typology” (Col.Lectiu Repensar Bonpastor 2016, 7–11). Thus, as a first move, we actually proposed the redrawing of the housing block limits in the area. The “new housing block” considered as a “new urban unit” will consist of two neighboring blocks and the street that used to separate them. The resulting block will contain a common space to be used by the block’s inhabitants as shared outdoor space and as a common courtyard which will be connected to the network of surrounding streets and to the neighborhood’s small squares. Through this design strategy, diverse spaces of common use are to be created, in which small groups of inhabitants may organize a shared everydayness. Open spaces will thus constitute a network of interconnected urban thresholds which will create permeable boundaries between different spaces of shared use.

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