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An Imagined Geography: Ideology, Urban Space, and Protest in the Creation of Barcelona's “Chinatown”, c.1835–1936

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2005

Chris Ealham
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Abstract

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Henri Lefebvre famously seized upon the duality of the modern city: how for some it is a space of play and liberation, and for others a centre for power and repression. This article explores this duality through an analysis of the changing historical geography of Barcelona's Raval district, an inner-city working-class community and the birthplace of Catalan industrialization. From the 1920s onwards, elite groups and social commentators defined the Raval as Barcelona's “Chinatown”, an imagined geography that continues to influence historical representations of the area. Through a social history of the Raval, it is argued that the “Chinatown” myth served specific political ends, that it formed part of a cultural project to impose a slum myth on Barcelona's most important and most rebellious working class district. The article concludes with an analysis of how this “moral geography” culminated in far-reaching plans for the moral and physical reordering of the Raval for the benefit of urban elites.

Type
ARTICLE
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , December 2005 , pp. 373 - 397
Copyright
© 2005 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis

Footnotes

My interest in the study began during the two-year period when I lived in Barcelona as a doctoral student. For some of this time I resided in the Raval, where I witnessed the beginnings of “gentrification” ahead of the 1992 Olympic Games. In subsequent trips to Barcelona, I discovered that growing numbers of my favourite haunts in the Raval had disappeared under the pencils of the city planners and the bulldozers of the construction companies. I'm grateful to Helen Graham for her comments on an earlier draft of this paper.