Informal Barcelona

The residues of informal Barcelona are only a few hundred metres away from Parc Güell, Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece visited by up to 14,000 tourists per day. El CarmelFootnote ¹ east of the park is a working-class neighbourhood, which has largely retained its quietness and modest everyday life, despite signs of beginning gentrification. Perched against the steep slopes of the Turó de la Rovira (Rovira Peak) overlooking the city centre and the harbour, it consists of winding roads and solidly built, small, two- to three-storey houses interspersed with occasional tower blocks. Few people would guess that in the 1950s informal settlements built up by impoverished migrants from rural southern Spain merged with the few weekend mansions existing at the time in the hilly area and converted El Carmel into a densely populated neighbourhood that did not look very different from the barriadas of Lima or the favelas of Rio de Janeiro (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1.

Plan of Barcelona with El Carmel neighbourhood (authors).

Figure 2.

El Carmel, c. 1970 (authors).

This article traces the architectural history of informal residences in El Carmel from the mid-twentieth century to the present. It also points to the contributions of the architectural profession to this form of urbanization and to the role of architects engaged in the licensing of buildings erected by ‘autoconstruction’. The article is based on construction documentation from Barcelona archives, on recent publications and on interviews with inhabitants.Footnote ² The article shows that throughout this period formal and informal elements and actions went hand in hand in the city’s urbanization process, to the extent that it questions the validity of the term ‘informal’.

This is already reflected in the variations of informal housing, that is, buildings that were self-built by the inhabitants and unauthorized by the municipality and/or the landowner. These include barracas and coreas. Both terms have been used in Barcelona and elsewhere in Spain for decades, although the term corea now feels dated.Footnote ³ Barracas were what corresponds most to the stereotype of an informal abode. They were squatter settlements erected in irregular compounds mostly without the landowner’s permission, often on non-parcellated public land, and usually consisting of one-storey buildings assembled from wood or brick with a tiled or tin roof. Coreas looked more orderly: they were one- to three-storey brick buildings lined up on a street like terraced houses; they were mostly built on parcellated rural land on the margins of the city.Footnote ⁴ The term corea (‘Korea’) for these buildings is of unknown origin; some relate it to the images of wasteland, battlefield or exotic ‘other’ connected to the Korean War that took place roughly at the time when these neighbourhoods evolved.Footnote ⁵ Corea neighbourhoods are also referred to as urbanizaciones marginales (marginal urbanizations). In contrast to barraca settlements, they were mostly built with the landowner’s consent through sale or rent of land, which gave the builders–inhabitants greater protection against eviction, even if their construction was not authorized by the planning authorities and often violated land-use regulations.

While some barracas and coreas/marginal urbanizations were shoddy and run-down, others were well built and quaint looking, as many self-building inhabitants were building tradespeople. Some had bright whitewashed walls and red tiles, and some had ornamented façades and adorned windows. The visual distinction between barracas – scattered huts – and coreas – slightly larger buildings with regular street fronts – did not necessarily reflect the legal status. But the strong perception of barracas as a disturbance, connected with the fact that they were often built on squatted public land, including parks and beaches, led to their gradual eradication in the 1970s and 1980s. Coreas, in contrast, were more prone to morph into formal parts of the city, not only because they visually fitted better into the urban fabric, but also because of their greater degree of compliance with ownership and planning regulations. They were renovated, extended or partially replaced, attaining more and more formal shapes that were often retroactively legalized and no longer recognizable as formerly unauthorized portions of the city.

Barcelona has a long history of informal urbanization, dating back to the early twentieth century. The city almost tripled from 0.6 million inhabitants in 1910 to 1.7 in 1970, with the largest waves of in-migration in the early twentieth century and in the decades after the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).Footnote ⁶ Already in 1914, there were about 5,000 people living in substandard huts, mostly on the Montjuïc hill south-west of the Old Town. Later informal settlements include Camp de la Bota and Somorrostro on the beaches north-east of the Old Town, which were only cleared in the 1980s and are now upmarket waterfront areas cherished by locals and tourists.Footnote ⁷ After the Civil War, Barcelona once again became Spain’s economic powerhouse, and rural migrants from all over Spain flocked to the city in search of work, often defying restrictions against domestic migration, and often ending up in self-built huts and shacks. In 1949, an estimated 60,000 people lived in about 15,000 informal abodes, about 5 per cent of the city’s 1.2 million inhabitants.Footnote ⁸ Likewise, throughout the twentieth century the city had a history of slum clearances, often tied to large events such as the 1929 International Exhibition, the unrealized 1982 Universal Exhibition and the 1992 Olympic Games.

El Carmel is a typical case not only for Barcelona. It aligns with many European cities that in the decades after World War II experienced country-to-city migration, rapid industrialization and economic upturn. They responded to the growth with watered-down functionalism interspersed with both pre-modernist and post-modernist elements carried out on a small scale with multiple actors. During that time, municipal governments in Barcelona and elsewhere promoted both eradication and upgrading of informal housing, and often both strategies co-existed. Our research suggests that there was never a clear-cut difference between ‘informal’ and ‘formal’, but always a hybrid development with pragmatic decisions. Likewise, implementation of functionalist top-down planning was never purist, but, mostly out of necessity, always mixed with a certain degree of tolerance for bottom-up informal construction.

The blurring of formal and informal urban practice stands in opposition not only to the aspirations of municipal bureaucrats who at the time were aiming at slum clearance and an orderly functionalist city. It also amplifies the significance of the ‘pro-autoconstruction’ attitude of architects and sociologists from John F.C. Turner to Janice Perlman, who in the 1960s and 1970s celebrated the informal as liberating and enfranchising.Footnote ⁹ Along similar lines, the architect Joan Busquets in 1974 praised the flexibility of Barcelona’s coreas. Footnote ¹⁰ This approach also informed recent historiography of informal architecture in the Global North, which included Barcelona as well as other European cities.Footnote ¹¹ In Barcelona, the topic has recently gained popularity, as evidenced in the 2011 exhibit Barracas by the Museu d’Història de Barcelona (MUHBA) or in the attractiveness of the Turó de la Rovira ruins among locals and tourists. These informal houses, spectacularly located on the hilltop, had fallen victim to slum clearance in the 1980s, and in 2014 became part of a historical site after MUHBA had the remainders of their tiled floors and partially destroyed walls musealized and signposted.Footnote ¹² Likewise, views on the informal as a concept related to modernization ideologies and particular to the mid-twentieth century are recently gaining more and more ground.Footnote ¹³

Informal housing in El Carmel evolved in a particular context: an economically booming region under a politically repressive and at the same time stable regime in southern Europe; groups of immigrants that were ethnically similar to the resident population (although speaking Spanish rather than Catalan) and thus comparatively easy to integrate; and an urban agglomeration that at the time still had comparatively large land resources available. At the same time, El Carmel reflects some of the most significant forces that during the post-World War II period applied in many parts of the world: a wide-ranging wave of modernization that raised standards of living and introduced new lifestyles for large parts of the population; extensive country-to-city migration that transformed both urban and rural areas; and the only partially successful efforts to manage these changes through reactive planning by modern and powerful (welfare) state institutions that had not yet been transformed or dismantled. In this sense El Carmel is typical of similar areas around the world that increasingly elude the categories of formal and informal.

Corea/marginal urbanization: Carrer Pasteur

Carrer Pasteur on Rovira Peak’s south-western slope forms the southern fringe of El Carmel and the border with the Can Baró neighbourhood (see Figure 3). The street exemplifies the evolution of coreas/marginal urbanization at the intersection of legal and illegal. The plot Pasteur 64–66 is typical of the area’s complex construction history. A 1960 block plan shows a street front that is not yet fully built up, and an inner part of the block that contains select buildings, as well as patios and orchards, somewhat complying to the image of ‘intensive garden city’ that was the official designation in the municipal master plan.Footnote ¹⁴

Figure 3.

Pasteur 64–66 and surrounding plots in 1960 (AMCB, Q-132, 53284).

Pasteur 64–66 currently features a formal six-storey front building (four storeys on top of the street level and two storeys below the street level) with 12 self-contained two-bedroom flats on each floor, a three-storey back building with four two-bedroom flats and a two-storey side wing with two two-bedroom flats (see Figure 4). The back building and the side wing are situated in the inner part of the block. They are accessible from the street through a covered pedestrian passage. The front and back buildings are inconspicuous modernist structures with unadorned concrete façades and balconies on every floor, architect-designed and built by skilled workers.Footnote ¹⁵ The side wing, at first sight similar to the back building, nonetheless originated from unauthorized construction, carried out by a family of committed inhabitants, starting at the height of Barcelona’s economic growth in the 1960s.

Figure 4.

Pasteur 64–66, survey plan from 1970. A: front building (designed 1954?), B: back building, designed 1957 by Francisco Sanllehi Pont, C: ‘sobrante’ with Eliseo Sarabia’s building (AMCB Q-132, 53284).

The builder-owner-occupier of the side wing in the courtyard is Eliseo Sarabia Vico. He was born in 1937 into a family of impoverished peasants in Granada province, Andalusia region, and grew up in a traditional single-storey hut without power or running water. Having received only a few years of schooling, he came to Barcelona in 1961 aged 23 in search for a better life, accompanied by his newlywed wife Josefa Lozano (see Figure 5).Footnote ¹⁶

Figure 5.

Eliseo Sarabia and Josefa Lozano posing on their self-built balcony at the back side of their house around 1964 (personal archive of Eliseo Sarabia).

Their experience of personal advancement from the beginning was tied to the modernization of the city and the long-term economic stability that the Fordist economy would afford even to unskilled workers. Josefa secured a job as a cleaner and household worker for the family of industrialist Joan Recasens and his wife Carme Marimón, with whom she remained for over 30 years. Recasens, in turn, gave Eliseo a job in the Philips Lámparas Z factory on Plaça Espanya, where for the following decades he would spend six days a week from 6am to 2pm assembling lightbulbs and TV sets, first walking an hour to work and back, and later, from the 1970s onwards, commuting in his own car. The six-storey extension of the factory in the Sants- Montjuïc neighbourhood (1959, designed by Josep Maria Soteras i Mauri) would become one of Barcelona’s modernist icons.Footnote ¹⁷ Eliseo’s gilded 25-year work anniversary certificate of 1987 still hangs in their living room. Their two sons both ended up completing higher education. At the same time, the couple would spend every spare peseta on their home. The back building evolved in stages over years as a result of their work during afternoons, evenings and Sundays.

What sounds like a success story from a textbook of free-market ideology – a disadvantaged rural family rising to modest wealth in the city through entrepreneurialism, self-discipline and hard work – was in fact an accomplishment favoured by very particular socio-economic circumstances: unprecedented and continuous economic growth over three decades and an extraordinary stability of the manufacturing industry. It also relied on the opportunities of formal and informal activity afforded by Barcelona’s urban morphology and the implementation of municipal regulations.

Sarabia’s and Lozano’s improved life started with the opportunities of the El Carmel neighbourhood in the 1960s. Carrer Pasteur, like the surrounding streets, was unpaved and had patchy water supply, but was situated reasonably close to formal houses and factories, and inhabited by working-class families that supported each other through neighbourly and kinship ties. The young couple found their first abode through Sarabia’s aunt Juana who had moved up from the south a few years earlier. It was a windowless almacen (storage shed) with no water supply, situated on the slope on the very plot Pasteur 64–66 beneath the landowner’s dwelling. The owner was Alfonso Pascual Casellas, a tradesman of modest wealth, who inhabited the house towards the street together with his wife, five children, pigs and chickens. It was also aunt Juana who would engineer the deal that in 1962 changed Sarabia’s life. Sarabia remembers his landlord ‘señor Alfonso’ as a clever businessman involved in a variety of enterprises. At some point, he needed money, and thus consented to selling a sobrante (‘leftover’), a portion of his plot that was considered unfit for construction because of its irregular triangular shape.Footnote ¹⁸

The terms of the transfer were particular to the time. The price was established at 34,000 pesetas, for which Sarabia gave his family’s savings of 8,000 pesetas as a down payment. For the remaining sum Pascual gave him an informal loan backed exclusively by the trust of a neighbour and fellow community member. A contract was signed, but no bank was involved and no interest charged, making the deal immune to the fluctuations of the financial industry. For years, Sarabia would pay 500 pesetas every month to Pascual, about a quarter of his salary of 2,000 pesetas, cash and against hand-written receipts that he would keep in his drawer.Footnote ¹⁹

Sarabia completed the first inhabitable structure in 1964, two years after the sale. The house was simple enough to be built by a semi-skilled worker like Sarabia with the help and consultation of neighbours and family members. It was a single-storey two-room building on a trapezoid plan. Walls were built from tochos (hollow bricks) and mortar, uninsulated, but subsequently plastered and built without foundations directly on the solid rock ground. Non-load-bearing walls were 15 centimetres thick, load-bearing walls 30 centimetres thick. The ceiling was made from hollow bricks forming a bóveda catalana (Catalan vault), a low arch resting on concrete beams. These beams were lifted by two to three people without the help of a crane. Windows were single-glazed and made from wood. Plumbing and electricity were carried out by professional tradesmen, who were all acquaintances and residents in the neighbourhood. Materials were purchased at a local shop and carried over by hand, sometimes aided by a van that Sarabia would hire from a neighbour on an hourly basis.Footnote ²⁰

The necessity to ask for an architect-backed planning permission was acknowledged in theory but, as was the rule in El Carmel at the time, ignored in practice. Applications were often handed in after construction had started, and aparejadores (surveyors) frequently signed that a building was constructed according to the plan even if it was not.Footnote ²¹

It appears that landlord and tenant were complicit in ignoring or circumventing building regulations. At least three fines were issued for ignoring building regulations on Pasteur 64–66, referring to both Alfonso Pascual and Eliseo Sarabia. The first was handed to Pascual in 1958 before Sarabia’s arrival, for building an abode of 3.0 by 3.90 metres without permit.Footnote ²² After payment of the fee, however, Pascual was allowed to keep the structure.Footnote ²³ The second was given to Sarabia in 1961, after which he took action, and received a building permit in 1963.Footnote ²⁴ The preparation for the building permit was worked out by architect Francisco Cañellas Vidal in August 1963, asking for an amplification of the existing one-storey building.Footnote ²⁵ A memorandum specifies the structure of the additional floor: ‘Walls of massive brick, covered with prefabricated reinforced-concrete joists and vault, insulated with cellular concrete slopes and asphalt roofing paper and rasilla de Vendrell tiles. Plastered and painted with tempera. Power fixtures and plumbing of good quality.’Footnote ²⁶ The plans are shown in the 1963 application for a building permit.Footnote ²⁷ An inspection note from April 1970 confirms the plan, showing a triangular outline of 50 square metres labelled ‘C’ – Sarabia’s ‘leftover plot’.Footnote ²⁸

A third complaint was handed to Pascual in 1963, after which he applied for a building permit that was granted in 1964. He still would receive a further complaint in 1967. A 1970 memorandum by the municipality painstakingly lists the permits Pascual applied for in 1954, 1957 and 1964, and concludes that none of them complied with what he had actually built. Plans were different and several extra dwelling units were added. The municipality threatened demolition, but still gave the option of retroactive permission if Pascual were able to prove that he complied with building regulations.Footnote ²⁹ It must be assumed that he was, as two of the three structures on the plot mentioned in a 1969 inspection are still standing: the back building and the side wing erected by Sarabia.Footnote ³⁰

Alfonso Pascual was not alone with this practice. The municipality regularly issued complaints for unauthorized building construction, extension, or non-compliance with the granted permission. For example, Vicente Navarro, owner of the building on Pasteur 70, was threatened with a 15,000 pesetas fine for adding an unauthorized third storey to his building. This case confirms that not all landlords in El Carmel were also residents – Navarro lived in a wealthy city centre neighbourhood, and was possibly a professional landlord.Footnote ³¹

It would be wrong, though, to imagine construction on Pasteur 64–66 as chaotic and makeshift. Both Alfonso Pascual and Eliseo Sarabia employed a number of professional architects, both to draw plans that were to support construction permits, and to guide retroactive legislation of unauthorized structures. In 1954, Pascual commissioned the architect Aurelio López Puyuelo to design a building on Pasteur 64 (see Figures 6 and 7). The plans show a traditional single-level house with a symmetrical façade, a central entrance and an accentuated cornice.Footnote ³² The plan was executed over the following years.

Figure 6.

Pasteur 64, designed in 1954 by Aurelio López Puyuelo, façade (AMCB Q-132, 53284).

Figure 7.

Pasteur 64, designed in 1954 by Aurelio López Puyuelo, section (AMCB Q-132, 53284).

In 1957, he commissioned a plan for a back building drawn by architect Francisco Sanllehi Pont.Footnote ³³ The legalization of Sarabia’s building was backed by architect Francisco Cañellas Vidal (see Figures 8 and 9). And the 1974 plans for the six-storey building that was eventually erected on the street front were drawn by architect Ramón Canosa.

Figure 8.

Pasteur 64, back building, 1954 plan by Francisco Sanllehi Pont, and view in 2022 (AMCB Q-132, 53284).

Figure 9.

Pasteur 64, back building in 2022 (authors).

Marginal housing typologies

Much of the semi-formal construction in both barraca and corea areas reproduced dense small-town or rural typologies, in particular the traditional single-level terraced house, which was, for example, exemplified in a design from 1917 by José Mancha for owner Pablo Badia on carrer Mariano on the Turó de la Rovira hill (probably not executed) (see Figure 10).Footnote ³⁴ It has a symmetrical façade, two or four window axes featuring vertically elongated windows with lightly ornamented pediments, a pronounced cornice and a roof terrace secured by cast-stone balustrades. The central entrance leads to a short hall with four approximately equally sized rooms: two bedrooms towards the front, and a bedroom and a living room towards the back. There is a terrace or patio on the back. The small kitchen is either integrated into the living room or attached and protruding onto the terrace, but accessed through the living room. The toilet is attached on the backside of the building and accessed through the terrace/patio. Buildings following this typology were often designed by a licensed architect. They were the rule for El Carmel as well as other marginal areas up to the 1960s. This typology also was the basis for a later design that had a more modern appearance (unornamented façades and iron banisters on the roof), and allowed for higher density through additional floors with self-contained flats.

Figure 10.

José Mancha, design for a house on carrer Mariano on Turó de la Rovira, 1917, unbuilt (AMCB Q-127, 131).

In a variation of this plan, the entrance and hall are designed on the right side and the two rooms next to it on the left, achieving an unsymmetrical façade. This was used, for example, on the plot Pasteur 20, designed in 1955 by architect Ignacio Brugueras for owner Vicente Valero Martínez.Footnote ³⁵ Between the front rooms and the back rooms, a small patio is added, which allows the toilet to be accessed from the inside of the house, nested between the back bedroom and the patio, and featuring a window towards the patio.

Variations on this theme were also the result of particular architects adapting to the requirements of the plot. On the passatge del Dipòsit, a steep flight of steps leading down the slope from carrer Pasteur towards carrer de Josep Serrano, the architect Francisco Sanllehi Pont designed three similar buildings. Number 10 on the east side of the street (see Figures 11 and 12), owned by Sebastián Arguello Cuenca, was designed in 1953 on a symmetrical plan with an identical four-room flat on each side of the entrance, situated behind four window axes under a roof terrace.Footnote ³⁶ Number 11 directly opposite, designed by Sanllehi Pont in the same year for owner Ana Caña García, mirrors this design on half the amount of floor space, featuring a single four-room flat behind two window axes (see Figure 13).Footnote ³⁷ Number 13, also designed by Sanllehi Pont in 1953 for Francisco Martínez Mañus, has the same design (see Figures 14 and 15).Footnote ³⁸ Sanllehi Pont redesigned the building on number 11 in 1955 only two years after his first design through the addition of an extra storey with a self-contained flat that could be entered from the street (see Figures 16 and 17).Footnote ³⁹ The plot now had a new owner, Manuel Palacios.

Figure 11.

Passatge del Dipòsit 10, design by F. Sanllehi Pont (1955) (AMCB Q-132, 49554).

Figure 12.

Dipòsit 10 in 2023 (authors).

Figure 13.

Passatge del Dipòsit 11, first design by F. Sanllehi Pont (1953) as a single-storey building (AMCB Q-132, 49471).

Figure 14.

Passatge del Dipòsit 13, design by F. Sanllehi Pont (1953) (AMCB Q-132, 49435).

Figure 15.

Passatge del Dipòsit 13, view of the building in 2023 (authors).

Figure 16.

Passatge del Dipòsit 11, second design by F. Sanllehi Pont (1955) with an added first floor and an added street entrance for the first-floor users (AMCB Q-132, 49471).

Figure 17.

View of the building in 2023, more or less as in the 1955 plan (authors).

Over the years, these buildings were altered and extended, most likely resulting from similar combinations of authorized and unauthorized construction. Windows were modified, upper storeys were added to single-level buildings, and entrances to a shared corridor, as in passatge del Dipòsit 10, were replaced by separate street doors for every property. The differences are visible if compared to a mid-twentieth-century building with few modifications: passatge del Dipòsit 14, which still looks like Sanllehi Pont’s designs (see Figure 18).

Figure 18.

Passatge del Dipòsit 14, possibly also designed by F. Sanllehi Pont and barely modified, 2023 view (authors).

Architect-designed and architect-signed unauthorized construction

Marginal urbanization did not occur outside the architectural profession. Since any building application required an architect’s signature, it was architects who designed the buildings that were then illegally transformed or extended, and it was architects who took care of retrospective legalization. Many of them specialized in housing, and although none was widely known some appear to have had some standing in the profession.

Francisco Sanllehi Pont was already mentioned as the architect who drew the 1957 plan for Alfonso Pascual’s first house. He was the author of several designs in the area, not only the buildings on Passatge del Dipòsit 10, 11 and 13 (all 1953), but also amplifications of Gran Vista 106 (1965) and Pasteur 72–74 (1967). In the 1960s, he also designed the now demolished Trinidad Cinema on vía Favencia 404 in Barcelona’s northern periphery. Aurelio López Puyuelo, the author of the 1954 design for Pascual’s house on Pasteur 64, also designed the neighbouring house on Pasteur 62 (see Figure 19). Born in 1913 and in his forties at the time, he probably was an established architect, which is also suggested by the fact that he later designed residential buildings in the city of Cáceres, some of which are now listed.Footnote ⁴⁰

Figure 19.

Pasteur 62, design by Aurelio López Puyuelo (1953), not realized (AMCB Q-132, 450303).

Joaquín Puchades Cortés, who authored designs for Pasteur 62 (in 1951) and Pasteur 72–74 (in 1960), must have had a similar standing in the profession – he later worked as municipal architect in the small town Santa Eulàlia de Ronçana. Also, Vicente Pascual Ocheda, the author of designs for Pasteur 68 in 1953 and Josep Serrano 50 (in 1951 and 1964), was not an unknown person: he designed several buildings in Barcelona including the Fitó Seed Factory (1952–56). He was also involved in industrialized design, participating, for example, in the Concurso sobre la industrialización para la vivienda en España, an influential competition on the industrialization of housing in Spain organized by the Madrid-based Instituto Torroja in 1949.Footnote ⁴¹

The intermingling of formal and informal construction is also evidenced in the building Pasteur 62. Design by licensed architects and orderly building applications were mixed with improvisation and unauthorized construction. A first design for a building was submitted in 1953 under owner-occupier Carlos Fuentes Moreno (architect Aurelio López Puyuelo).Footnote ⁴² The design comprised four attached single-storey buildings, staggered on the slope between carrer Pasteur at the top and carrer Josep Serrano at the bottom. The three lower ones were accessed through a flight of stairs leading down from carrer Pasteur. Each contained three bedrooms assembled around a small patio, a kitchen–living room and a small bathroom/toilet. The architect mentioned in the documents that the four units would yield about 150 pesetas per month (probably for each).

However, the following construction on Pasteur 62 proceeded without permission. The new owner-occupier Eleuterio Vela González was reported in 1958 for building a flight of stairs and preparing the addition of an extra storey to the front building. He was fined 150 pesetas, the equivalent of a month’s rent. In 1959, he commissioned the architect Joaquín Puchades Cortes to supervise retroactive authorization, which was probably given.Footnote ⁴³ In 1963, Eleuterio Vela González added two storeys on the front building (plans drawn by architect Francisco Beltrán Roca), this time with permission.Footnote ⁴⁴ But only two years later, in 1965, the plot was targeted again by the authorities. Now a certain Ana Travé was denounced for having illegally built a back building, and asked to either tear down or ask for retrospective legalization within 15 days, while being fined a sum three times the building permit fees.Footnote ⁴⁵ He received a further report in 1967.Footnote ⁴⁶ The front building is still standing, featuring a run-down façade that was subsequently altered to convert the ground-floor bedroom into a garage.

The municipal office responsible for building permits was the Agrupación de Servicios Técnicos (Technical Services Group), of which the subsection Servicio de Edificación Particular (Individual Construction Service) dealt with private homes. There is little information about the size and staffing of this office, but one can imagine that in light of the sheer number of newcomers they must have been overwhelmed and unable to deal with large numbers of unauthorized buildings – only in the five years 1961–65 about 288,000 migrants came to the Barcelona metropolitan area.Footnote ⁴⁷ The scarcity of resources is also evidenced in other details: in 1969, the Technical Services Group still used Catalan language-forms that had been printed before 1939 – sometimes ‘hispanized’ with a red stamp that read ¡Arriba España! (Long live Spain!).Footnote ⁴⁸

Adaptation, extension, redesign

Population pressure, in line with the owners’ attempt to increase revenue through additional structures and storeys, seems to have been the main driver of incremental and often haphazard construction. At the same time, the sheer amount of construction was the most influential factor for the lenience of the authorities. Possibly overwhelmed by the number of complaints, they mostly tolerated the violation of building and zoning legislation, and pragmatically issued retroactive permission if the unauthorized building complied with the rules. For example, the building on carrer de Josep Serrano 50 was altered repeatedly. A design was submitted in July 1951 by owner Tomás Gómez Belda (architect Vicente Pascual Ocheda). Four months earlier, he had submitted a plan for a single-storey building (architect Juan Echeverría).Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1959, he received permission for adding a first storey built with reinforced concrete and wood (architect Ramón Masferrer).Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1964, Gómez Belda submitted a proposal for remodelling and adding housing in the basement of the back building (again by architect Vicente Pascual Ocheda).Footnote ⁵¹

Along similar lines, the owner Gonzalo Manjón Martínez submitted a design for his plot on Pasteur 3 in 1953, signed by architect L. Durán Reynal. The building featured two window axes on a façade with ground-floor rustication and first-floor brickfacing, a roof terrace and a shop at street level.Footnote ⁵² Manjon wanted to extend his property in the early 1960s and was promised a building permit in 1966.Footnote ⁵³ He nonetheless started without, and in 1967 was denounced for unauthorized construction.Footnote ⁵⁴ The building is still standing; the ground floor is now clad in black stone.

In some cases, owners allowed for self-built informal structures on their premises. For example, in 1967, Bartolomé Santiago de la Rosa, the owner of the house on Pasteur 31, was denounced for building a barraca of 7.2 by 3.6 metres without permit.Footnote ⁵⁵ The fine was issued not to Santiago but to a certain Francisco Soto, which suggests that Santiago had rented out his land for construction. Both formal building and barraca were later replaced; the plot now features a modern four-storey building with a garage and commercial premises on the ground floor.

A typical example of extension and modernization is the building Pasteur 68 (see Figures 20 and 21), the adjacent building to the east of Eliseo Sarabia’s and Alfonso Pascual’s plot Pasteur 64. The structure was originally built to a traditional geometrical single-level design with a symmetrical façade, submitted in 1953 by owner Daniel Martin Picaso (architect Vicente Pascual Ocheda).Footnote ⁵⁶ A decade later two upper storeys were added by the new owners Teresa Valella and José Antonio Serrano, designed in 1962.Footnote ⁵⁷ The building now features a modern façade. Only the slightly different colour scheme and not-matching window axes show that ground floor and top floors were built at different points in time.

Figure 20.

Pasteur 68, one-storey building, design by Vicente Pascual Ocheda, 1953 (AMCB Q-132, 53284).

Figure 21.

Pasteur 68, extension and redesign, 1962 (AMCB Q-132, 453284).

Over the years, Eliseo Sarabia’s and Josefa Lozano’s two-storey house on the leftover plot has undergone a series of small modernizations – also done by the family. The younger son, also named Eliseo, has, after living some years elsewhere in the city, moved back into his birthplace and accommodated the lower storey for himself, well aware of the high quality of life of the El Carmel neighbourhood. Since Josefa’s death in 2021, father and son share the house, and Eliseo son has ideas for future transformations and further improvements.

The barraca settlement: Francesc Alegre

Intermingling of formal and informal aspects is also characteristic of barracas settlements such as Francesc Alegre (Francisco Alegre in Spanish) at the border of El Carmel and Can Baró, which from the very beginning was perceived as a disturbance of rather than an addition to the urban fabric (see Figures 22, 23, 24, 25 and 26). Francesc Alegre was a settlement of huts and shacks that dated back to the years of the Civil War. They were situated north of the carrer Francesc Alegre (calle Francisco Alegre in Spanish), a cul-de-sac ending on the slope of the Turó de la Rovira. The mansions on its eastern side as well as the 12-storey towers added on its western side in the early 1970s contrasted with the ramshackle sheds that started to appear there in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1943, the first shacks were built in the ‘Los Cañones’ area on top of Turó de la Rovira, and subsequently in the sectors El Hoyo and Raimon Casellas on the south-east slope of the mountain. ‘Los Cañones’ (the cannons) around carrer de María Labernia on the hilltop, was named for the anti-air-raid cannons that were placed there during the Civil War (1936–39) and taken down immediately afterwards. When municipal officers surveyed the area in 1956, they counted 570 shacks.Footnote ⁵⁸ A 1972 survey still counted 317 shacks in the wider area. Of these, 187 were situated near carrer de Francesc Alegre on land owned by the heirs of a certain Diego Molina Matamoros and 59 were situated on the eastern side of carrer de Tenerife on municipal land.Footnote ⁵⁹ Both areas are now parks.

Figure 22.

Francisco Alegre settlement in 1972, landownership plan (AMCB Q-108, 29509).

Figure 23.

Aerial view of the Francisco Alegre settlement in 1972 (AMCB Q-108, 29509).

Most of them were single-storey structures constructed from wood or brick, with roofs from cardboard, uralite or tiles, some with a single room, and some with divisions into kitchen, living room and bedrooms. A few dwellings were also accommodated in the subterranean locales of the anti-air-raid cannons.

The municipal definition of a barraca – a self-built hut of no more than 18 square metres, 2.2 metres ceiling height, and 5 square metres per person – reflected the substandard facilities.Footnote ⁶⁰ Nonetheless, the definition acknowledged that some of these abodes were structures far beyond the bare minimum: up to two storeys, brick walls, tiled wooden truss, cement floor as well as electrical wires and fittings to power radio and television sets. While the majority lacked sanitation services, running water and proper woodwork and metalwork (as well as ‘aesthetic pretensions’ as the municipal report put it), the variations were considerable, and in the best cases the huts were not different from formal construction. The quality of a shack dwelling was directly related to its distance from formal portions of the city, as a 1972 report pointed out, since infrastructure, as well as social networks, could more easily be extended than built from scratch.Footnote ⁶¹

The same report described poverty, but not utter deprivation. Virtually all shacks had electricity and most were equipped with radio and television, some also with telephones. There was a regular postal service and two bus lines. The sanitary situation was still precarious, but the municipality had built communal toilets and bathrooms. All approximately 150 children were bussed to school and adult literacy campaigns had reduced the number of people unable to read or write.Footnote ⁶²

Unlike the marginal urbanizations on carrer Pasteur and elsewhere in the neighbourhood, the huts around carrer Francesc Alegre and on Turó de la Rovira were not upgraded and integrated into the neighbourhood. The shack dwellers were resettled in several waves, starting with 123 families relocated to the Canyelles estate in 1977, and ending with 87 families moved to Can Carreras estate in 1990.Footnote ⁶³ The huts were cleared and the area was converted into a park. Around the same time, the inhabitants of the Los Cañones area were resettled and their buildings demolished. The reframing of the ruins as an open-air museum occurred in 2014.

Planning for both clearance and upgrading

Histories of informal architecture frequently point to shifting policy, from the widespread ‘slum clearance’ strategies in the mid-twentieth century to the upgrading policies connected with the UN Habitat Conference of 1976 and the World Bank’s ‘slum upgrading’ programmes of the 1980s. Indeed, also in Barcelona, municipal policy in the beginning was almost exclusively geared towards clearance, at least officially. Measures to end informal construction were discussed from the late 1940s. A 1949 memorial by Francoist deputy mayor Carlos Trías Beltrán outlines slum clearance strategies.Footnote ⁶⁴ Subsequent steps were the establishment of the Servicio de Intervención de Barracas (Shantytown Intervention Service) in 1949 and the passing of the Plan de Urgencia Social (Social Urgency Plan) in 1958. The big wave of clearances happened after 1961, when the Spanish Housing Ministry passed a programme of replacement housing for shack dwellers, and Franco, during his 1963 visit to Barcelona, expressed his support for putting an end to the barraca areas. This was to be achieved through mass construction of modernist polígonos de vivienda (tower block housing schemes) which in the following years significantly reduced the pressure on the housing market. By 1972, the number of shacks had been reduced to 3,227.Footnote ⁶⁵

As in other parts of the world, the authorities legitimized the ‘repression of barracas’ (this was the term used for clearance and building prevention policies) as being in the inhabitants’ own interest, for example to prevent situations in which shacks cave in after heavy rain (probably not a common occurrence).Footnote ⁶⁶ At the same time, just as in other parts of the world, those affected by these policies increasingly resisted them, which led to the slowing down of slum clearance from the 1970s onwards.Footnote ⁶⁷

And yet, it seems that the standard modernization narrative does not sufficiently explain the events on the ground. Barcelona’s paternalistic policies, which replaced substandard dwellings by standardized mass housing blocks, for example, were not universally criticized. They did, in some cases, retain patterns of marginalization, but in other cases led to well-accepted solutions. Much criticized, for example, was the ‘vertical slum’ La Mina (1969–72, Galán Martínez), a system-built tower block development of 2,700 units north-east of the Old Town. Much better reputed was the Canyelles neighbourhood (1972–74, Guillermo Giráldez, Pedro López Iñigo, Xavier Suías i Fages), with a total of 3,500 units in eleven-storey buildings, which was praised for retaining the neighbourhood relations in close proximity to the former barracas site, as it bordered the hills north of El Carmel.Footnote ⁶⁸

Similar ambiguities can be detected at the level of individual actors. A good example is the architect Joan Busquets (born 1946), already mentioned as a pioneer of pro-informal housing attitudes, who directed Barcelona’s Urban Planning Department from 1983 to 1989, at a time that saw many clearances. Subsequently, he became a key figure in the preparations for the 1992 Olympics, an event that kick-started the displacement of poorer residents from the city centre and the conversion of Barcelona into a pricey magnet for international business and tourism. In his doctoral dissertation written two decades earlier, he hailed the city’s coreas as casas-piel (‘skin houses’), their flexible structures that were easily adaptable to changing needs, and thus at many levels superior to normal casas-cáscara (‘carcass houses’), which were formal houses that are rigid and hard to adapt.Footnote ⁶⁹ Busquets republished these views in 1999, a few years before he became a professor at Harvard.Footnote ⁷⁰ His positive assessment of coreas reflects the reframing of informal housing across the globe. But it would not restrain clearances connected with redevelopment and gentrification in Barcelona and elsewhere.

The El Carmel neighbourhood shows that from the inhabitant perspective upgrading and clearance/relocation strategies have always been intertwined. From the very beginning, the residents of both marginal urbanizations and barracas engaged in the improvement and upgrading of their abodes. At the same time, the perspective of being resettled into a modern block was an attractive option for many once it became available.

This double strategy is reflected in the activities of the area’s most prominent community organization, the Asociación de Vecinos del Carmelo (El Carmel Neighbours’ Association). Founded in 1970, the association fought for better water, power and garbage removal and at the same time pushed for increasing social housing by the municipal authorities.Footnote ⁷¹ It also led the protest against the controversial Rovira road tunnel from 1972 to 1987, which cut through the neighbourhood and led to the displacement of scores of inhabitants. In 1974, it organized the influential mobile exhibit El Carmelo – ¡Ignorado! (El Carmel, ignored), an activity that was particularly noteworthy since it took place under the repressive Franco regime that only ended with the dictator’s death in 1975.

Eventually, the association settled for a solution that involved both infrastructural improvements and relocations. The 1973 meeting between community representatives and Mayor José María de Porcioles was a milestone in the relocation of shantytown dwellers to the Canyelles towers in close proximity to the neighbourhood, where they became homeowners at affordable prices. Relocations from the Raimon Casellas section of the Francesc Alegre settlement started in 1978, after the neighbours’ association successfully lobbied for further social housing in Canyelles and the adjacent La Guineueta area. The last barracas in El Carmel were demolished in January 1991 in the presence of Mayor Pasqual Maragall, and celebrated as a success not only by the municipal authorities but also by neighbourhood activists.