About Catalina Gayà i Laia Seró

Journalists of the SomAtents group

The battle of the city’s iconographic symbols

Photo: Camilla de Maffei.
The window of a patisserie on Carrer Princesa, with Barcelona souvenirs and merchandising.

Barcelona is currently the scene of a battle between its exportable symbols, the ones that make it a consumer product, and its communitarian symbols, which are threatened with extinction due to from the impact of tourism. A colonial past and international image also play a part in the debate.

This battle is a place where the iconographic symbols that make up the image of the city and give it its symbolic identity live, multiply, die and come back to life. Some of these symbols, the ones that suit the official discourse of the day, are obvious and extraordinary: those that show up on postcards, t-shirts and selfies, recognisable the world over. But then there are other more silent and conventional symbols that are woven into daily life and reveal the different ways in which Barcelonians make the city their own.

On Sunday 21 February 2016, Mark Zuckerberg uploaded a series of photographs on his social media pages while going for a run in Barcelona. “Good morning, Barcelona! We kicked off our visit with a run around the city, from La Sagrada Familia up to Castillo de Montjuïc. Best way to see a city before meeting with partners on our journey to connect the world”, he wrote. In between jokey comments about whether he was visiting the city “because of the ham” or the Mobile World Congress, he made public (and viral) a 16 km route that took him around picture postcard Barcelona, the city that is seen – and sold – in souvenir shops and on TripAdvisor.

Zuckerberg’s run got more than 421,000 likes from his 61 million Facebook followers. All the locally-sold newspapers (El País, La Vanguardia, El Periódico de Catalunya, Ara, El Mundo, El Punt Avui, Vilaweb) ran the story on their websites or in print the following day. What do Zuckerberg fans around the world see in the backdrop to this young American’s route, and what are they looking at? How do Barcelonians themselves see and look at this backdrop? And, above all, why did Zuckerberg use the verb to see?

Nowadays visitors recognise cities before they have even visited them, and when they do experience them they broadcast them as a series of selfies, visual captions written in the first person. These selfies, which are almost always uploaded on the Internet, differ only in the faces that appear in the foreground: a Japanese man, a Danish family, a group of French people. Everything behind them is always the same. Giandomenico Amendola, professor of Urban Sociology at the University of Florence and Director of CityLab, a multidisciplinary urban research centre, commented the following in La ciudad postmoderna (The Postmodern City): “We travel, attracted by these images of cities and places, often only to find in these experiences the confirmation of the familiar image and the opportunity to give an account of the city that has already been written.”

This symbol-filled narrative creates a scenario – partly political, partly private and partly the product of the local government marketing machine – that sets in stone a particular way of understanding the city and dilutes the vast range of narratives that could result from each person’s own experience.

Exportable symbols versus communitarian symbols

Photo: Camilla de Maffei.
The cat sculpture by Fernando Botero, a landmark of the Rambla del Raval, both a tourist sight and a meeting point for locals.

Barcelona is currently witnessing a struggle between its exportable symbols, the ones that make it a consumer product, and its communitarian symbols, which are threatened with extinction in a city whose neighbourhoods are undergoing gentrification. This battle is a place where the iconographic symbols that make up the image of the city and give it its symbolic identity live, multiply, die and come back to life.

Some of these symbols, the ones that suit the official discourse of the day, are obvious and extraordinary: those that show up printed on t-shirts, rulers, bags and posters and give a selfie or postcard-like reading of the city that is one-sided in nature.

On the revolving postcard racks at any stall on La Rambla the selfie backdrops, the official symbols, are on sale: La Sagrada Familia, the Collserola tower, the Agbar tower, the Calatrava tower, the Columbus monument and the Hotel Vela (all together, a nice skyline). To these we can add Park Güell, Montjuïc, Camp Nou and the Boqueria market. In the postcard-shop windows of the museum gift shops, the symbols change but they are still a series of separate, public and private objects that now make up the physical features of the slightly more “cultured” Barcelona: Rebecca Horn’s sculpture L’estel ferit (The wounded star) on the beach at sunset; the flower-patterned paving stone (one of the five winning designs in the competition held by the City Council in 1906 to decorate the pavements) as the sole subject of a postcard; the Hotel Vela once again, but this time as a Polaroid; Fernando Botero’s Gato (Cat) among the palm trees of the Rambla del Raval; Keith Haring’s graffiti at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA).

These are isolated objects: L’estel ferit could be in Palma de Mallorca, but it is obvious (and well known) that it is in Barcelona. Haring’s mural is obviously on a wall of the MACBA, but no mention is ever made that it was once on a dirty wall in Plaça Salvador Seguí, in El Raval, and that Haring’s assistants were the lads of the Barrio Chino, some now dead because of the devastating effects of heroin in Barcelona in the 1990s.

To these hypervisible symbols that are official, exportable and recognisable the world over, we must add others that are more silent and conventional. The latter form such an intrinsic part of the identity of the city and its residents that they owe their existence to local residents and become visible when they disappear or are conquered by some official monument: the squares of Barcelona, the grid-like pattern of El Eixample, the taxis, the buses, the street names, the Pakistani hairdressers, the sandwich shop on Plaça Sant Jaume.

These are changing and fragile symbols, and they expire when they succumb to the trivialisation of the tourist industry and appear in guidebooks, on TripAdvisor, in low-cost airline magazines or on lists published in international magazines. They are also the social footprints of the different ways in which residents take ownership of their city. Marta Rizo, an academic at the Autonomous University of Mexico City, writes, in her Imágenes de la ciudad, comunicación y culturas urbanas (Images of the City, Communication and Urban Cultures): “The main virtue of a public space is that it is at once a space for representation and a space for socialisation, in other words, of the co-presence of citizens.”

From the intimate symbol to hypercommercialisation

We interviewed Álex Giménez, architect and lecturer at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB), near the Rambla del Raval, for which the current symbol is Botero’s Gato. In the fifteen minutes before the interview begins, the sculpture is photographed by nine tourists. Tariq and Mohammed, two local boys, like to use it as a slide, and the Gato is now a meeting point for Barcelonians the way Café Zurich on Plaça Catalunya was until ten years ago.

This enormous black solid feline arrived on the Rambla del Raval in 2003, having strayed around half of Barcelona; first, it lived in Ciutadella park; then, for the Olympics, it was moved next to the Olympic Stadium on Montjuïc; and, before coming to El Raval, it spent some time on a pedestal at Portal de Santa Madrona. When it came down to El Raval in 2003, the residents of this neighbourhood, despite the disappearance of several streets to make way for the Rambla, welcomed it with open arms and made it one of them: another neighbour. They socialised it.

Photo: Camilla de Maffei.
Plaça Reial is a paradigmatic urban symbol of a way of “making” a city based on understanding the needs of people, according to architect Álex Giménez.


Photo: Camilla de Maffei.
La Sagrada Familia, an “extraordinary” urban landmark.

That is how Álex Giménez explains how the city’s symbols have historically been born: “Barcelona is conceived on the basis of gaps. In the DNA of Catalan urban planning, even before the Cerdà plan, the empty space as a place of collective expression is extremely important, in all its dimensions. So its symbols journey from intimate beginnings to the street; they are built on an understanding of the most personal needs. Premodern Catalans had a great way of creating a city: for example the Plaça Reial, the Plaça de la la Boqueria.”

When it comes to the later evolution of this model, the ETSAB lecturer feels that “in the 1980s, the periphery of Barcelona was monumentalised, something that wasn’t being done anywhere else in the world. Quality was brought together with the formal appearance of various public spaces that democratised the city. What they were doing on Passeig de Gràcia was just as important as what was being done on Via Júlia”. But, he points out, “that rationale no longer exists; now we move from the general to the specific. Everyone is very concerned with building great collective symbols that ignore the needs of the people.” Giménez prefers “the city that is the sum of conventional things – because when you encounter it, extraordinary things happen – as opposed to a city made of a sequence of extraordinary things with gaps in between that are repetitive, sterile, tedious, expensive to maintain, unpopulated, depressing, unsubstantial and alienated”.

This sequence of extraordinary things is the iconic landmarks. But according to Giménez, it is precisely when the city decides to incorporate an iconic landmark as such that it stops working. He gives the example of La Sagrada Familia, which is in the wrong location for its size, making it incompatible with the surrounding buildings.

The hotel whose outline we can see during the interview and that is lit in fuchsia tones by night has not become a postcard, meeting point or tourist photo: it is not a symbol of Barcelona, neither for foreigners nor for locals.

Three phases in the production of symbols

Miquel de Moragas i Spà, Professor of Communication Theory, has just published a book entitled Barcelona, ciutat simbòlica (Barcelona, symbolic city). He claims that Barcelona has had three historical periods in which it produced a great number of symbols: the Universal Exposition of 1888, the International Exposition of 1929 and the Olympic Games of 1992. Moragas argues that the iconic landmarks of the three phases converse with each other and even create a mosaic of symbols that are hard to associate with any particular period. He gives as an example the monument to Columbus erected in 1888. “Who relates it to that date? Almost nobody”, he both asks and answers.

He explains that in 1888 European cities were desperate to become monumental, following in the footsteps of Paris (Josep Puig i Cadafalch wrote that Barcelona could become the “new Paris of the south”) and to give public recognition to the city elders as a form of urban propaganda. The monuments to Joan Güell, on Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, and to Antonio López, at the end of Via Laietana, belong to this time and are the public representation of the hegemonic, political and economic power they both had.

Photo: Camilla de Maffei.
The bust of the painter Pepita Teixidor (1917).

In 1929 the monumentalisation of the city embodied a message somewhere in between the artistic movements of Catalan modernism and Noucentisme. It is at this time that depictions of nature and female bodies start to appear, albeit still in an abstract representation and the only sculpture bearing an actual woman’s name in the whole of Barcelona is the bust of the painter Pepita Teixidor, sculpted by Manuel Fuxà in 1917, which has remained in Ciutadella park ever since.

“The symbolic pieces of 1929 include the Magic Fountain of Montjuïc, although the Exposition of 1888 already had a magic fountain. The one from 1929 was built to promote the electricity industry, capitalising on the “look” of Montjuïc, a look that was to be reused in 1992”, explains Miquel de Moragas.

Photo: Sebastià Jordi Vidal / AFB.
Evening view of the site of the International Exposition of 1929, with the Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina illuminated and the Magic Foundation, in a photograph from the exposition album.


Photo: Fundació Barcelona Olímpica / Barcelona City Council.
The Olympic Stadium on Montjuïc during the opening ceremony of the Games in 1992.

The third era of symbol production was the Olympic era, which was to give rise to what is known as the Barcelona Brand. “The 1992 period”, reflects Moragas, “witnessed the defence of the public space”, and it was that abstract symbolism that emerged in the Cultural Olympiad. Then came the Forum of Cultures phase in 2004, with the building of the 22@ technology district. Moragas characterises that period as one of “commercialisation of the city”, which led to the citizens’ rejection of the system of property speculation. It was then that, in the districts most assaulted by speculators (at that time Barceloneta, Ciutat Vella and Poblenou), graffiti reading “the city is not for sale” appeared.

We ask Miquel de Moragas what has changed on the city’s map of symbols from 1888 to now. “What changes is the influence of advertising, which, from 1910 and 1920 onwards, came to occupy an extraordinary space in the urban fabric right up to the present day”, he replies. “The city has turned into one big advertising billboard and the public space is being privatised and hypercommercialised.”

Façades and advertising: the case of the ‘megabanners’

Photo: Italo Rondinella.
During the 15-M protest camp on Plaça de Catalunya, the neutral tarpaulin that covered the Bank of Spain building, when under construction, was replaced by advertising for a sports footwear brand and FC Barcelona.

It was May 2011 and the whole of Barcelona, part of the international media machine andsocial media in particular were all watching closely as to what was happening in Plaça Catalunya: the 15-M protest camp. For months the Bank of Spain building had been under refurbishment and was covered by a tarpaulin depicting its façade, as city regulations require. With all the media attention focused on the square, after a few hours a giant advertising banner appeared for a brand of sports footwear, depicting the FC Barcelona team. It featured on the front page of half the world’s press.

In those days, Barcelonians were still taken aback by these megabanners. In just five years they have been gaining ground on traditional façade illustrations. This new prêt à porter iconography has now been joined by surprise publicity actions (Columbus wearing the FC Barcelona shirt in 2013, the Nike logo on the front of the MACBA building for a few hours); secret publicity actions (the announcement of who would be headlining Primavera Sound 2014 was given one day in November 2013 on Avinguda del Portal de l’Àngel); mobile publicity actions (Vodafone is on all the public hire Bicing bicycles); and flat screen publicity (the metro started to fill up with advertising TV screens in 2011).

These new advertising landmarks adapt to their settings: they visit the monuments that until now took us back to the past and to memory, and they talk to an ephemeral entertainment society, as Gilles Lipovetsky calls it, or to a liquid society, to use Zygmunt Bauman’s concept.

Miquel de Moragas points out that, despite all this, Barcelona has not yet reached the level of commercialisation of public space that is seen in other cities: during Ana Botella’s term as Mayor of Madrid, Line 2 of the metro incorporated a telecoms brand into its name. It was recently announced that this contract would not be renewed when it expires this summer.

For the time being, Camp Nou, one of Barcelona’s symbolic landmarks, has not yet adopted the name of a bank or airline as other sport stadia in Europe have done: since 2006 Arsenal’s ground has been the Emirates Stadium and in 2011 Manchester City’s home became the Etihad Stadium.

Cobi killed Snowflake

© Carmelo Hernando.
El mono blanco, photomontage on the white gorilla Copito de Nieve, a symbol of the city that concealed a colonial past.

Andrés Antebi is an anthropologist, a member of the Research Group on Social Exclusion and Control (GRECS), and we meet him at La Principal, a café-bar on the border between El Raval and El Eixample, a landmark for anyone crossing Plaça de la Universitat. In April 2016, La Principal is teeming with hipsters (beards, Macs, iPhones, looking for sockets) and passing tourists. A French couple takes a selfie with a beer and some patatas bravas. One click and it’s on the Internet. A friend comes to their table: a Frenchman who lives in Barcelona. “This is my bar”, he says.

We meet with Andrés Antebi to talk about iconography and the monumentalisation of the colonial past, and what starts to emerge is the debate on the city’s official image, the policies and motives behind this narrative and how a monument changes when it is thought about from a historiographical perspective that takes into consideration the interplay between urban planning and the production of symbolic landmarks.

Antebi states that the political and cultural interests that explain the city’s imagination have always been the objects of careful consideration, criticism, change and political intervention. The appearance or disappearance of monuments in the public space or changes to street names are examples of this. One of the most symptomatic examples is the whirlwind of names given to Avinguda Diagonal, as it has been called since 22 June 1979, which replaced the name “Generalísimo Franco” that it was imposed on it on 7 March 1939. This latter name had, in turn, replaced the name “14 d’abril” by which it had been known since 16 April 1931. Prior to that, since 13 January 1925, it had been called “Alfonso XIII” and, if we go even further back in time, its original name of “Gran Via Diagonal”, bestowed on it in 1865, would be changed for the first time in 1874 and, at one time or another, part or all of Avinguda Diagonal has also been named “Argüelles” and “Nacionalitat Catalana”.

Another example was the proposed street names for the new city neighbourhood, El Eixample, put forward in 1863 by the journalist and politician Víctor Balaguer, at the request of the Barcelona City Council, in his book Las calles de Barcelona (The Streets of Barcelona). Balaguer argues that the streets should honour “some of the great acts of bravery, righteousness, virtue, self-sacrifice and patriotism that can be presented as examples and models for future generations”. He proposes Pau Claris (proclaimer of the Catalan Republic in 1641), Lepant (after the Battle of Lepanto), Entença (a 13th century expedition captain), Roger de Flor (13th century military adventurer). This is the A to Z of El Eixample, the book based on the marble street plaques we know today.

At La Principal, while Antebi takes us on a journey around the naming and the monumentalisation of the city, the French couple snap another selfie, this time with their friend. Antebi points to the monument on Plaça de Goya, on the other side of the café window. It is dedicated to Francesc Layret i Foix, a local nationalist and republican politician, lawyer and defender of the workers’ movement, who was murdered by a gunman of the Catalan employers’ Sindicato Libre in 1920. Who remembers him? The sculpture, by Frederic Marès, was officially unveiled in 1936, taken down at the end of the Civil War and re-erected on the same site in 1977. Who knows this? Buses, taxis, passers-by and tourists go by, brushing past it. It seems that no one sees it, or at least no one stops to see it.

“Barcelonians don’t remember the person depicted on this monument. A monument is always a failed attempt: it is doomed to oblivion despite the political intentions of those that erected it”, says Antebi.

Photo: Camilla de Maffei.
The monument to the businessman Antonio López (1884).


Photo: Camilla de Maffei.
The sculpture that Frederic Marès dedicated to Francesc Layret, a lawyer and defender of workers (1936).

We talk about Antonio López (a Spanish colonial shipping magnate), about the battle of the iconographic symbols in Barcelona that, according to Antebi, has to do with the city’s past and what it aspires to be. “Some groups are critical of the colonial past and do not want the city to acknowledge this leader; instead, they want to turn the site of his monument into a space of remembrance, while others want to keep it”, he explains.

Antebi is part of a research group on Barcelona’s relationship with Equatorial Guinea. The research has resulted in an exhibition entitled Ikunde. Barcelona, metrópoli colonial (Ikunde. Barcelona, colonial metropolis), which can be seen at Barcelona’s Museum of World Cultures. “We asked ourselves what significance Copito de Nieve (Barcelona Zoo’s albino gorilla “Snowflake”) had towards the end of the dictatorship and into the 1980s. And we wondered about the forgetting of the colonial system, this system that led to the albino gorilla ending up in Barcelona. In the late 1950s, the Barcelona City Council had set up a mining and business system in Guinea.”

Also on the subject of the city’s iconographic narrative, in September 2014 the MACBA organised a collective exhibition called Nonument, inviting twenty-eight artists to think about the proliferation of symbols that have colonised Barcelona’s real and virtual spaces. On the website that explains the project, it says: “Behind monuments lies a certain appropriation of the collective space, an abduction of social memory, as well as the difficulty in embracing pluralities without stereotyping them, and the need to cast out any doubts or uncertainties.” And it asks: Who supports a monument? Who legitimises it? How does it emerge? How does it become rooted in the community and the public sphere?

Architect Álex Giménez was one of the artists invited to take part in Nonument. In the interview he gave us in El Raval (next to the hotel that is lit up in fuchsia tones at night) he also talked about Antonio López and the fact that Barcelona still has a square that bears the name and has a statue of someone who made his wealth through human trafficking. The monument to the first Marques of Comillas can be found at the end of Via Laietana, very close to Roy Lichtenstein’s Barcelona Head, one of the abstract sculptures erected for the Barcelona Olympics.

Despite the fact that in the summer of 2015 the City Council announced that it would rename the square, the sign still reads “Antonio López y López de Lamadrid, Marquess of Comillas (Comillas, 1817 – Barcelona, 1883). Trader, shipping magnate and banker”.

In October 2014, Giménez formed part of a group of activists and artists who stuck a sheet of paper onto the square’s marble name plaque and under Antonio López’s name they wrote “Slave trader”. On the plinth that supports the sculpture, they rolled out a manifesto explaining the context around the figure of the Marquess. In Nonument, he explains, “we created a giant condom that was meant to cover the pole of the Catalan flag outside the Mercat del Born. We arranged it to coincide with World Aids Day”. In the end, they couldn’t cover the flag because of the wind but “it was a real spectacle. A form of protection”.

How do we portray ourselves?

Foto: Camilla de Maffei.
The giant golden fish by Frank Gehry at the Port Olímpic.

Maria Luisa Aguado, head of Barcelona City Council’s Historic and Artistic Architectural Heritage Department, says that it is impossible to define a single symbolic or iconographic itinerary of Barcelona: there are as many as there are visitors, just like in other European cities.

Foto: Camilla de Maffei.
L’estel ferit (The wounded star), by Rebecca Horn.

“Barcelona is a staunch supporter of contemporary art”, she highlights as something that sets the city apart. “These are pieces that have caused controversy but we’ve taken the risk. For example, L’estel ferit, Rebecca Horn’s sculpture on the beach.”

The city has even forgotten the controversy and L’estel ferit has in fact become a landmark of the more “cultured” side of Barcelona, as are Frank Gehry’s fish, Claes Oldenburg’s matchsticks, Botero’s cat, Jaume Plensa’s enormous suitcase, James Turrell’s play of lights, Mario Merz’s neon digits and Lothar Baumgarten’s Rosa dels vents. All these works, and others, form part of the Cultural Olympiad of 1992.

“How do we portray ourselves?” is a question that is taken up by the current debate. In recent months, La Virreina has been hosting an exhibition entitled Barcelona. La metròpoli en l’era de la fotografia, 1860-2004 (Barcelona. The metropolis in the age of photography, 1860-2004), which looks at symbolic landmarks and how photographic depictions of the city have evolved since the time of the first iconographic photographs in the 20th century to the period of urban marketing and new social movements between 1992 and 2004.

Photo: Pere Català Pic / AFB.
Photomontage of the Barri Gòtic for the Societat d’Atracció de Forasters, 1935.

In 1935 Pere Català created a photomontage with all the official symbolic landmarks of the 1930s for the Sociedad de Atracción de Forasteros (Society to Attract Visitors): it includes the gargoyles of the Barri Gòtic, Hadrian’s Column, the Church of Santa Maria del Pi, the main cathedral, the building of the Catalan Regional Government, and so on. In 2016 both foreign and local eyes are able to recognise that this photomontage represents Barcelona, even after 81 years. Nevertheless, the composition shows how difficult it is to choose an isolated landmark: no single object can explain the fabric and the fusion of the city.

Columbus, always Columbus

In all the interviews there was only one landmark that kept appearing: the monument to Columbus. This naval explorer is there on the postcard racks. He’s a souvenir, a gift bought in the museum shop and a t-shirt. He’s always there on the changing, fuzzy skyline, in the tourist’s selfie, on the roundabout, on TripAdvisor and at the airport, in the institutional advertising and marketing. His monument is visited by 130,000 people every year. He is a look-out point, an advertising medium for the city’s football club and a part of this colonial Barcelona now under discussion.

The Columbus look-out column arose on the initiative of a city bigwig in 1852. In 1881 the competition to design it was won by the architect Gaietà Buïgas, and there were more competitions for each figure on the monument, which was inaugurated on 1 July 1888, twelve days after the opening of the Universal Exposition.

Photo: Antoni Esplugas / AFB.
The monument to Christopher Columbus under scaffolding during its construction in 1887. In the bottom left-hand corner of the photograph, Les Drassanes, just about visible.

Will Columbus survive the battle of the iconographic symbols? Will there be a debate about the discoverer like there is about Antonio López?

The exhibition at La Virreina includes a photograph by Antoni Esplugas, dated 1887, of the construction of the monument to Columbus, which we show here on page 101. In it, we see the seafarer surrounded by scaffolding, but the city is hardly visible because the camera lens, the voyeur, is seeking out the new, what was not there before, what will change the urban landscape until something even newer appears and replaces it.

Zuckerberg, by the way, didn’t go near the Columbus monument, nor did he put it on the Internet: it fell outside his 16 km route.

A history of the self-portrayal of Barcelona

Photography as a language of portrayal cannot be decoupled from a city’s symbols: neither the image it projects to the outside world nor the image that the public builds of its own city through the media. The exhibition Barcelona. The metropolis in the age of photography is a history of the self-portrayal of Barcelona.

Photo: Joan Guerrero.
Santa Coloma in 1970: an image that conveys the urban planning undertaken during the Francoist dictatorship in the Barcelona metropolitan area. The photograph is by Joan Guerrero and it is the opening illustration of the catalogue for the exhibition on the image of the city from 1860 to 2004, organised by the Institute of Culture’s La Virreina Centre de la Imatge.

Photography as a language of portrayal cannot be decoupled from a city’s symbols: neither the image it projects to the outside world nor the image that the public builds of its own city through the media. Barcelona. The metropolis in the age of photography, 1860-2004 is the title of the exhibition produced by Barcelona City Council’s Culture Institute and curated by Jorge Ribalta at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge. Along with its catalogue, it revisits 144 years of images produced in and by Barcelona. The exhibition compares and contrasts the official image of the city (ever since Ramon Alabern immortalised the Pla del Palau on daguerreotype) with the way it presents itself to the outside world and with the protests made by members of the Group of Catalan Architects and Technicians for the Advancement of Contemporary Architecture (GATCPAC), neighbourhood movements and photojournalists.

In seventeen sections it explains the six major periods in which Barcelona has produced iconic landmarks: the go-ahead for Cerdà plan’s for the city’s extension and the Universal Exposition (1860-1888); the rise of the illustrated press, the construction of Via Laietana and the landscaping of Montjuïc and the early days of architectural and artistic Modernisme (1888-1929); the thirties and the Spanish Civil War (1930-1939); the predominance of the humanist paradigm and the new photojournalism of the transition to democracy (1940-1970); the birth of the new topographical documentary style and its link to the city’s recovery and the rise in neighbourhood association movements (1970-1992); and, finally, the new social struggles, where the image took on a new central role in both municipal management and social conflict (1992-2004), with the arrival of local government marketing and citizens’ movements to processes such as the redevelopment of El Raval.

The exhibition takes us on a journey though the sedimentary layers of the city, shedding light on the symbols of Barcelona that surround us today, both as local passers-by and as tourists.

Institutional commissions are what draw the lines of the first graphic image of “official” Barcelona. “Souvenir of the visit of Her Majesty’s visit to the city of Barcelona”, reads the footer in a large open album that was a gift for Isabel II on her first visit to the city. Then, electricity and the Universal Exposition of 1888 would come and with them a new injection of urban landmarks with which to export “the Paris of the south”, as was the aspiration of the architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch and of which the most famous example is the Columbus monument. At the beginning of the exhibition and the book, one can see the scaffolding that surrounded the sculpture in 1887.

Later on, the boom time of the mass media would come, bringing these urban symbols into the living rooms of every home in Barcelona. The pioneering magazine La Il·lustració Catalana (Catalan Illustration) was launched and became the principal medium for disseminating Catalonia’s emerging photojournalism. And between 1908 and 1939, the Societat d’Atracció de Forasters (the Society to Attract Visitors) was at work, generating an iconography of Barcelona that aimed to make it a stop on the travellers’ circuits of the day.

Photo: Pérez de Rozas / AFB.
Altar built in the square of Pius XII in Diagonal, on the occasion of the Eucharistic Congress of 1952.

In the 1930s, social documentary photography burst onto the international stage, and in the section on the Civil War visitors to the exhibition can see the first audiovisual testament: a report on the revolutionary movement of 1936. In the second half of the 20th century, the Francoist dictatorship’s propaganda stranglehold led to the 35th Eucharistic Congress, which set out to depict Barcelona in symbols as the city of a Catholic and anti-communist regime.

Photo: Jordi Pons i Secall.
Protest against the Forum of Cultures, in 2004, from the series Barcelona on Barcelona, by Jordi Secall. Image included in the exhibition of La Virreina.

This trend continued until the transition to democracy took hold, when neighbourhood association movements found a space for their discourse in neighbourhood magazines, the “poor press”, as Maria Favà called it. Up to fifty titles were published in the 1970s. This continued until 2004 and the controversial urban development project of the Forum of Cultures.

Barcelona. The metropolis in the age of photography explores the inner workings of an iconography that is sometimes invisible to people who walk with their eyes to the ground, but very present in the imagination of the real and the virtual Barcelona with “the explosion of digital technologies, the Internet, mobile telephony and social media”, as the text of the exhibition states, all of them new producers (and reproducers) of city symbols.

The social challenge. Building a barrier against inequality

A neighbourhood meeting descended from the 15M movement, in the Plaça de la Vila in Gràcia.
Photo: Dani Codina

Barcelona is experiencing a blossoming of group initiatives and citizen selfmanagement. This begs the question of whether these initiatives are replacing the obligations of the public administration. A barrier against inequality can only be built if the public administration takes its role seriously and helps to construct a dialogue with an organised citizenry. 

In October 2015, the University of St Andrews in Scotland published the report Socio-Economic Segregation in European Capital Cities, which recognised a widening gap between the rich and poor in eleven of the thirteen most mportant European cities between 2001 and 2011, which it claims could be “disastrous” for social stability. It does not mention Barcelona, but reveals Madrid to be the city where inequality grew the most over the ten-year period. The study identified four pillars which prop up what it refers to as segregation: globalisation, inequality, the restructuring of the labour market and property speculation.

All four of these pillars are currently prominent in Barcelona. In fact, one of the first measures approved by the new municipal government, just one month after taking office at the City Council, was to assign 2.5 – 4 million euros to an additional child benefit payment for vulnerable families. In 2013, the Federation of Organisations for the Care and Education of Children and Adolescents (Fedaia) reported that 25% of children in Barcelona are living on the verge of poverty. How did it come to this? What is more, the

outlook continues to worsen. On 20 October 2015, Agustí Colom, the councillor for Employment, Business and Tourism, published a report revealing an increase of lowincome households from 21% in 2007 to 41.8% in 2013, while the proportion of people on middle incomes fell 14.3% to 44.3% over the same period. In other words, the crisis is increasing the number of people on low incomes and reducing the proportion of middle-income households, or, to put it another way, those with work are getting poorer and inequality is increasing.

From outrage to protest and mobilisation

Tourist Barcelona and social marginalization are evident in this picture, taken on the Rambla del Raval.
Photo: Dani Codina

The year in which the academics who conducted the European study concluded the fieldwork for their report was the same year in which Barcelonians began to vent their anger. In March 2011, Stéphane Hessel visited the city to present Time for Outrage!, a brief but conclusive book that acted as a trigger for many young (and not so young) people to start to see the crisis as the business of a financial system that rewarded profit regardless of the means and which funded political corruption so that nothing would stand in the way of business. Also in March, Ada Colau, the current mayor of Barcelona, answered questions about the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) in the dining room of her home, with a blue plastic curtain acting as the door to her kitchen. Colau was an activist for a movement that was gaining momentum, which has arguably become the most important movement in 21st-century Spain. In her home, Colau warned: “One day, thousands of people that are building local alternatives may occupy the streets”.

From 15 May 2011, people started to occupy the squares: the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona, the Puerta del Sol in Madrid… It was in these squares that some of the answers and actions to address the problems of globalisation, inequality, the restructuring of the labour market and property speculation were first formulated, in what was known as the 15M Movement.

A protest in favour of public education and against the policies of Minister Wert, in October 2013.
Photo: Dani Codina

Ancor Mesa Méndez, in 2011 a Social Psychology PhD student at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), has lost count of the number of times he crossed the Plaça de Catalunya during this occupation. He had become fully engaged in association activities one year previously, as a consultant for the Federation of Neighbourhood Associations of Barcelona (FAVB) where he still works, and the 15M Movement struck a chord with his twenty-something mentality. During those days and nights in May, Ancor, like many of his fellow citizens, began to wonder about these collective, cooperative, self-managed and horizontal movements that suddenly emerged as a response to globalisation, the restructuring of the labour market and property speculation – all pillars of the St Andrews report. Inequality had yet to make an impact on public discourse in Spain. What is more, in 2011 the Partido Popular (People’s Party) abolished the teaching of Education for Citizenship, replacing it with a study of the world’s conflicts.

A PAH demonstration against evictions in February of the same year.
Photo: Dani Codina

Ancor, who was born in Tenerife, had never experienced anything like a neighbourhood group. In Barcelona, working on his thesis and living in temporary accommodation (due to the price of rent, belonging to a generation at risk and as a consequence of living in a city defined by its demographic mobility), he also failed to lay down roots in any particular neighbourhood. This occupation, this “conclave without boundaries of free people coming from different places”, as Ancor defined the 15M Movement, really spurred him into action. “I began to wonder how to use all the energy that was being pooled to formulate collective policies daily at a grass roots level from the neighbourhoods”, he recalls from the FAVB meeting room situated behind the Plaça Reial, in what today is a valuable library of books on popular and neighbourhood struggles of the seventies and eighties, which fought for and won cultural centres, schools, public transportation and hospitals. 

A sleep-in at the Hospital Clínic in December 2012 against austerity measures and the privatization of the health system.
Photo: Dani Codina

The role of neighbourhood associations

“No-one was better at challenging the way daily politics are conducted in the aftermath of the 15M Movement than the neighbourhood associations”, maintains Ancor, who is currently the sociological leader of the Barri Espai de Convivència programme, an analysis of Barcelona’s neighbourhoods compiled with the participation of all the neighbourhood movements. According to Ancor, this research project came about because “the groups see themselves as agents for their environment, with an open-minded and collective approach to problems”. 

“Pren els barris” [Take the neighbourhoods] was the slogan under which the camps in the squares were gradually dispersed. Sants, El Raval, Gràcia, Fort Pienc, Barceloneta, Horta, Nou Barris… they were all covered with posters announcing “popular assemblies”. The year 2011 laid the foundation for the following years: 2012, the year of deprivation; 2013, the year of protests against the cuts and austerity and of the democratisation of poverty; 2014, the year when even in Davos talk turned to the need to reshape capitalism. 

Firstly, in 2011, the major debates surrounding inequality in Barcelona were hitting the headlines: settlements, evictions, reform of Guaranteed Minimum Income benefits, childhood poverty and impoverishment of working people. IDESCAT (The Statistical Institute of Catalonia) reported that 1.5 million Catalans were living in poverty, one million of which in the province of Barcelona. 

Furthermore, the City Council itself reported that, since 2008, all districts with a household income greater than the city average had seen their wealth increase, whereas earnings fell in districts with a household income below the average. 

“Iaioflautes” banners in a protest for healthcare, education and housing in May 2012.
Photo: Dani Codina

Various groups have taken to the streets dozens of times over the last four years in what have been called “waves”: health groups protesting against cuts to healthcare (white T-shirts), education groups (yellow T-shirts), cultural groups (red T-shirts) and social services groups (orange Tshirts). Neighbourhood residents, as well as people affected by the same common problem, joined the groups and took the demonstrations to the squares and the streets. This led to the foundation of the Nou Barris Cabrejada campaign, which brought together multiple disparate entities from the district: Apropem-nos, Quart Món, the “iaioflautes” (a civil rights group comprised mainly of the older generation), residents protesting against the abolition of the Dependency Law and cuts to the Guaranteed Minimum Income. In the Plaça de Sant Jaume, no sooner had one demonstration ended than another would begin.

Cooperative movements that empower 

The financial services cooperative Coop57.
Photo: Dani Codina

Secondly, 2011 saw the birth of a citizens’ empowerment movement that turned Barcelona into an urban laboratory of cooperative groups and self-management. This represented another step away from the classic dichotomies between state and public and private and commercial, with the public revealed to be the common element.

The Observatori Metropolità de Barcelona (a Barcelonabased research group) recorded fifty self-managed initiatives across the city’s neighbourhoods in its Comuns urbans a Barcelona study. According to the study, “At a time of cuts to public services and welfare and a curtailing of rights, we wanted to see what kind of city model is being envisaged by community management practices”. The name if its website leaves no room for doubt about its nonconformist nature: Stupid city, an ironic name for a project to study a city built on collective intelligence, juxtaposed against the smart city, which, in their eyes, excludes many of its residents.

Germanetes community space, managed by the Eixample Neighbourhood Association and Recreant Cruïlles. This is one of the projects that already work as part of the initiative driven by the City Council to give a social and community function to unused municipal lots.
Photo: Dani Codina

These cooperative, self-managed or citizen-led movements concern themselves with such issues as energy (Som Energia), local ownership of public spaces (Germanetes in the Esquerra de l’Eixample neighbourhood, the Plaça de la Farigola in Vallcarca or the Pou de la Figuera in El Born), health (the Espai de l’Immigrant), telecommunications (Guifi.net), housing (buildings occupied by the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, or the La Borda squat in Can Batlló), public amenities (the former factory, Can Batlló, and the Ateneu de Nou Barris), care and finances. 

Coop57 defines itself as a “cooperative of ethical and solidarity-based financial services”, a para-banking entity independent of the Bank of Spain that invests the savings of its members into social projects, whether they be local associations, cooperative housing projects or cultural foundations, etc. Guillem Fernàndez, of the credit department, lists the requirements that an organisation has to meet to be approved for Coop57 funding, which sound like the Ten Commandments of the Indignados movement. “Projects must comply with social principles, have their roots in the area, have a highly-developed collective network, and with the difference between the lowest and the highest wages not exceeding a ratio of 1:2”. 

The fact that this in no ordinary financial institution leaps out at you as soon as you arrive at their branch in the Carrer de Premià, in the Sants neighbourhood. There are no screened glass counters, no queue number machine, and employees are not dressed in suit and tie. Their philosophy is assembly-based with a flat, commission-based organisational structure; principles that it shares with most 15Minspired movements. 

Germanetes community space, managed by the Eixample Neighbourhood Association and Recreant Cruïlles. This is one of the projects that already work as part of the initiative driven by the City Council to give a social and community function to unused municipal lots.
Photo: Dani Codina

For Coop57, founded by employees of the dissolved publishing house Bruguera, the camps of 2011 were not the beginning, but rather the peak of activity. Savers fed up with evictions and disgusted by the preference share institutions that took their savings to other types of financial institutions flocked to Coop57, just as they did in 2003 during the Iraq war protests. Throughout the seven years of economic crisis, Coop57 has designated more than 43 million euros to social economy and solidarity projects in 1,160 transactions. 

Fernàndez claims that the initiatives and entities that have recently been coming to Coop57 relate to the dismantling of the welfare state. He lists educational, housing, health and food-related initiatives. “To what extent should we fund projects if they continue to pick up the slack in spheres that State doesn’t enter, or end up undoing what remains of the welfare state?”, he asks. 

He is not the only one. To what extent are citizen-led movements replacing the State in the fulfilment of its obligations? This is the question that began to resonate in 2015. 

What do you need public services for?” 

The anthropologist Manuel Delgado is extremely critical of the space occupied by these initiatives. “If I were the State, I would ask: what do you need public services for if you believe so much in community initiatives?” This is a real sticking point for him. He has no doubt that all these selfmanaged initiatives allow society to function without the support of the State, and that they become a kind of substitute that neglects to complain, in the form of social struggles, to the Public Administration that it should be a “truly public” state. Is there any other way? “Decisive and clear actions, for example, concerning housing”, he proposes. “It’s complicated because it basically means doing the opposite of what we have always done until now: selling land, instead of buying it. And the same goes for fuel poverty”.

According to the PAH, in 2015 there are still 22 evictions every week in Barcelona and housing continues to be an unresolved issue in the city. There are 2,591 bank-owned apartments that have stood empty for more than 24 months. Only 2% of housing stock is social housing. In October, the City Council gave an ultimatum to the Company for the Management of Assets proceeding from the Restructuring of the Banking System (Sareb): either Sareb releases 562 empty apartments for social housing, as required by law, or the City Council would take them to court. The transfer of empty flats is provided for by article 7 of the law approved this year by Parliament pursuant to the Popular Legislative Initiative (ILP) pushed through by the PAH and the Alliance against Fuel Poverty. 

A few weeks ago, the SomAtents newspaper group published a debate on Housing, in which numerous social parties with an interest in housing in Barcelona were invited to take part. The debate took place in the Plaça de Joan Corrades, in Sants, opposite a building occupied by the PAH. The meeting went on for more than an hour beyond its end time and was opened with the following words from Josep Maria Montaner, Councillor for Housing for the Barcelona City Council and representative of the Sant Martí district: “After unpaid labour, the second element of public control inflicted by capitalism is the difficulty of accessing housing. We believe that over the next four years we can improve housing conditions in Barcelona: by tackling the housing crisis; by ensuring that empty apartments are made available for social use; by building new housing as sustainably and as fairly as possible; and by initiating a regeneration programme as part of neighbourhood improvement schemes. Innovation lies at the heart of our proposal, based in particular on new ways of life and new forms of ownership”.

Alternative ways of living 

The Can Batlló space, in the Bordeta neighbourhood, has been waiting to be renovated since 1976, when it was set apart for public facilities, social housing and green space. In 2011, the neighbours initiated an experiment in self-management in part of the space, which they dedicated to social and cultural activities. Social housing promoted by the La Borda cooperative is also planned for this space.
Photo: Dani Codina

Are there alternative ways of living in Barcelona? Carles Baiges is an architect and a member of the LaCol architects cooperative. He graduated from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) with the understanding that architecture is a form of social action/intervention, and since 2014 has been one of the sixty cooperative members of La Borda, the cooperative that provides housing under a cession of use scheme to be established in Can Batlló. 

It works as follows: the City Council relinquishes the property for 75 years and the asset is collectively owned by the cooperative legal entity. Each household (so-called “cohabitation unit”) invests 15,000 euros as share capital of the cooperative, and subsequently pays a membership fee below the market price: 450 euros on average and 500-600 euros for large apartments. Alternative funding for the estimated 2.4 million euro construction will be provided by the Coop57 cooperative. La Borda is following in the footsteps of the Danish model, established a century ago, and the Uruguayan Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives. In Denmark the model has been so successful that in Copenhagen alone there are 125,000 homes in the cooperative. As Carles Baiges explains, the initiative started from the grass roots level, by an organised citizens’ group looking for alternatives to the housing model. He talks about self-builds, about “living, not speculating”, about communal areas, getting to know your neighbour, the connection between the “cohabitation units” and Sants, and of course of the “replicability” of the model. “Like most young people in Spain, my financial situation is fairly uncertain and it is difficult to find adequate housing, but we also have the will to change the ownership model”, he declares. “I don’t want to move to the countryside and I believe that we can live more communally in the city. The apartments could be smaller than average, but the idea is that the people live in the communal areas”.

Did the 15M Movement influence the way the city and society are envisaged? “There are many of us who believe that the entire Can Batlló movement was greatly influenced by the events of 15 May, including the brutal removal of people. Rather than in the so-called new politics, I’m seeing the ‘They do not represent us’ concept in all the movements that progress from protest to action. They may not have come together as a group at the time, but they proved that they could do something. In my opinion, the legacy left behind is the realisation that we had the tools and the ability to do something”. 

On 24 May 2011, just three days before the violent eviction from the Plaça de Catalunya, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (died April 2015) wandered through the square. It was night time and his presence went unnoticed. A young person recognised him and in what he calls a chat, but what in reality became an 11-minute monologue, Galeano reflected into a camera, perhaps a mobile phone: “This is a crappy world which is pregnant with another”. This other world is happening behind the camera. Sometimes he looks at it out of the corner of his eye, sometimes the others look at him. There are young people with sleeping bags who have spent days shouting and arguing that politicians do not represent them, there are yellow T-shirts bearing the slogan “Take the street” on the front and there are green PAH T-shirts. Just before he finishes, he reflects: “I’m often asked what will happen and what will become of this afterwards. And I simply answer that I do not know what will happen, nor do I care; they only thing I care about is what is happening now”.

Access to health

The Espai de l’Immigrant on Passatge de Bernardí Martorell in the Raval.
Photo: Dani Codina

The Ciutat Vella neighbourhood completely reflects the four pillars referred to in the Saint Andrews study: a globalised neighbourhood, rife with inequality, with mafias that speculate with property and gentrified to the last cobblestone. For years, the Passatge de Bernardí Martorell has been excluded from El Raval’s popular streets and thoroughfares, despite the bar and the phone booth business, and despite the fact that it is actually not that different from any other street. The Espai de l’Immigrant [Immigrants’ Space] is located on this street. A group of healthcare professionals came together to oppose the approval of decree 16/2012, which would limit and restrict access to healthcare and leave 873,000 people without medical care due to irregularities in their administrative status. There is an old hotel on this street which is now a social centre and home to the Espai. For the last two years, whether in El Raval’s Carrer de l’Hospital or Carrer del Carme, you can always find people asking where the Passatge de Bernardí Martorell is. 

The Espai de l’Immigrant on Passatge de Bernardí Martorell in the Raval.
Photo: Dani Codina

Doctors attend on Fridays and lawyers on Wednesdays, at the same time that the collective’s weekly meeting is held in the apartment’s kitchen-dining room. The living room is almost a conventional waiting room. There is a landscape picture on the wall, chairs, people waiting with mobile phones, and a voice that calls them up. But the walls are fuchsia-coloured, the air is not close as there is a balcony overlooking the street, and the people speak loudly. The vocabulary employed in the waiting room can be recognised as the language of outrage and protest: colonialism, classism and integration; there is talk of a documentary film festival. 

It is Friday and the doctors are there, but they do not wear white lab coats, prescribe medication or ask for health insurance cards. They are volunteer doctors who, together with social workers, psychologists and lawyers, inform immigrants not in possession of the correct documentation of their rights and assist them in applying for a health insurance card – a process that can take days or weeks due to the language barrier and an ignorance of the bureaucratic system. “They often won’t see immigrants who come on their own, but will help immigrants who are accompanied by a Spaniard in a position of authority, which is borderline racism”, complains Estefanía, a doctor. Accompanying an immigrant means carrying a copy of the law with you, going to the Primary Care Centre (CAP) and sometimes arguing with the official behind the desk. 

They say that this is the “most punk” activity undertaken by Espai de l’Immigrant. “We are not trying to fill a gap that the State should be filling; we are simply providing users with the tools to access the public health system to which they are entitled as registered residents”, explains Elvira, resident doctor at Hospital Vall d’Hebron and volunteer at the Espai de l’Immigrant. 

The Espai de l’Immigrant on Passatge de Bernardí Martorell in the Raval.
Photo: Dani Codina

María (this and the names that follow are not their real names) lives in El Raval and found out about Espai in the same way that most people do: by word of mouth. The socalled Thursday Street Brigade roam the streets of Raval every week to ensure that word gets around, but they still complain that most people only attend after their situation has become serious. That is how María came to be there. She had known about its existence for months, but she only came because she had a broken thumb. She didn’t come because of the pain of the fracture, but because she did not have a blue health insurance card and because she could not pay the “more than 200 euros” that A&E charge for an X-ray and the placement of a splint. The doctors had to explain syllable by syllable that A&E “do not charge”.

At Espai de l’Immigrant they told María that she was entitled to a health insurance card because she is registered. Nobody had told her that before. “Most politicians will tell you that healthcare is for everyone and that they will treat everybody. And by law this is true, but there is a lack of information directed at migrants and foreign citizens about how to access it. This information is completely useless unless the Government invests money and introduces new policies to disseminate the information to the people that most need it”, points out Elvira. 

The Espai de l’Immigrant is working to recover María’s 200 euro payment: the lawyers meet every Wednesday. 

Three Barcelonas 

The three faces of Barcelona can be seen on the corner of the Passatge de Bernardí Martorell 7 days a week. The fourstar Rambla del Raval hotel, the homeless community that meet in the basement of the Comisiones Obreras trade union (there are an estimated 3,000 homeless people sleeping rough) and the constant flux of people with insecure employment: the unemployed, those in temporary work, people with a cart full of scrap in tow. Ciutat Vella has accommodated many of the young people who used to live in the abandoned factories of Poblenou; they now live in empty apartments on shady streets. 

The courtyard of the School of Geography and History on Carrer Montalegre, where many actions against social segregation have taken place.
Photo: Dani Codina

In October, Councillor Colom pointed out that Barcelona’s unemployment rate is 13.9%, rising to 27% among young people. 53% per cent of unemployed people are over 45 years of age and 44% have been jobless for more than a year, with unequal distribution throughout the city and some districts experiencing double the unemployment. The Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, Eixample, Les Corts and Gràcia districts all enjoy below-average unemployment, whereas Sants-Montjuïc, Horta-Guinardó, Sant Martí, Sant Andreu, Nou Barris and Ciutat Vella are above the average. 

Joan Uribe has just arrived from Argentina. Together with 24 other experts, he has been discussing the homelessness situation at the International Gathering on Homelessness and Human Rights. On his Twitter feed, words such as gentrification, exclusion, entitlement to the city and to the street, and the homeless are in every other tweet. He is the Director of Social Services at Sant Joan de Déu Hospital and teaches at the Faculty of Geography and History of the University of Barcelona (UB). 

In the notebook there is a vital question to help understand the upcoming years: Will the future be collaboration between associations and the State? “I’m delighted that you forgot the market”, he replies. “A positive vision of the future would be if social movements, organisations and associations were to work together with the State. There would certainly be friction, but it could be possible to come together to construct a barrier to counteract the logic of the market, thereby building better societies than we have today, at the very least achieving the minimum level that we had a few years ago, and perhaps even going further”.

Can you give an example of these barriers? “In Latin America, some groups started working together to fight for the right to land, housing and the city. After twenty, thirty or forty years, they have not only succeeded in changing the legal framework, but they are also represented in the very forums of decision-making on public policies. In Finland, collaboration between associations and the administration has brought an end to the phenomenon of homelessness”. 

Outside the Faculty of Geography and History and opposite Barcelona’s Centre of Contemporary Culture (CCCB) is an information panel about the dozens of talks which, in their different ways, are helping to lay the foundations of this barrier. There is a shared vocabulary: selfmanagement, ethical finance, responsible consumption, cooperative movements, housing and, of course, the big enemy to defeat, social segregation with its four pillars: globalisation, inequality, the restructuring of the labour market and property speculation.