Fenómenos de Miscelanização Cultural: O Raval de Barcelona

Abstract

During the twentieth century, the Raval's neighbourhood in Barcelona crossed a period of profound changes in its urban structure and in its cultural identity. Historically marked by activities related to leisure, illegal immigration and prostitution, the Barrio Chino (famous name that remained for almost the entire century) suffered the reverberations of wars, crises and addictions, vanished with hard legislatures and transfigured in the light of urban reforms. Today, the neighbourhood is synonymous of multicultural society, sharing and mixture, not always free from frictions intrinsic to so heterogeneous social compositions. The settlement of numerous immigrants, from various origins, was accompanied by a phenomenon of 'culturalization', or, more specifically, by a formation of an artistic/cultural identity, responsible for defining the Raval as the epicentre of contemporary art production in Barcelona. These phenomena have provided it a multicolour character that has attracted a lot of people, but some lamentable wounds of the extinct Barrio Chino still persist. Gathering synergies of these two factors, this thesis proposes to study the validity of cultural buildings as engines of strategies for urban and social renewal. Examples of success like CCCB (Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture) and MACBA (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art), both located in the northern area of the Raval, are the starting point for a theoretical essay and for a proposal of project/draft for a 'key-building' to promote the renewal of the south area of the neighbourhood. We don't understand these devices - or cultural anchors - as isolated interventions, but as 'keys' to a more extensive and ambitious process, that pretend to generate events, urbanity, centrality and polarity. We question whether their role in city development and in its process of 'urban rebuilding'.