Camping who can

A camping tent pitched near Barcelona’s Ronda Litoral immediately sends us back to a scenario of marginality. In all likelihood, the person who pitched it and lives there is someone without a roof. Well, at least without a hard roof. Next to it, a shopping cart that probably contains all their belongings, near the remains of a foam mattress, chopped up with their hands or with some imprecise tool to adapt the other part inside as a bed.

However, who among us has not lived like this at some point? Who has not gone camping and slept in a tent or in an igloo like this? Or in a caravan… Who has not used the canvas roof as a makeshift drying rack to dry a towel or who has not spent wonderful afternoons at the table with friends sitting in a folding fabric chair like the one in the photograph? We associate these moments with holidays, at the beach or in the mountains, but not in the city.

In a city we expect to see more solid constructions aF5:I6s homes, although, looking at the streets, let alone how solid we have made them, too. Returning to the photograph, we see that the tent was pitched on the asphalt, despite having a generous vegetated surface next to it, perhaps looking for a flatter place, without humidity and without bugs to bother. And that is how our cities are, increasingly artificial.

The truth is that cities are increasingly more impermeable, and I don’t just mean water. More and more people are being expelled from them. Young people are looking for other smaller cities, near the provincial capitals, which are the ones with the highest prices, in an endless spiral that ends up swallowing up the entire territory. What the Constitution puts on the right to housing seems unattainable after so many years of democracy. Let those who can fight.

What the Constitution says about the right to housing seems unattainable after so many years of democracy

Curiously, one of the architects who built the most homes in Barcelona during the last century was particularly enthusiastic about a project he had in hand in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They say that Francesc Mitjans, while designing the Camp Nou for F.C. Barcelona, ​​took time out of his day to work on a much smaller project: the La Ballena Alegre campsite. The site, located in the pine forest between Gavà and Viladecans, was not just any place. Back in the 1930s, it was the site chosen by GATCPAC, the Group of Catalan Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture, to build the City of Rest and Vacations. A project that never materialized, but that established the theoretical foundations of a light architecture, at the service of people, who could finally enjoy paid vacations thanks to the conquests in terms of social rights. A century ago, no one had vacations.

It is not surprising, then, that Mitjans had a special interest in the project. La Ballena Alegre was a small city, with some buildings such as reception facilities, a supermarket or public bathrooms. A configuration that anyone who has been camping will immediately recognize. There were also some solid houses as small accommodations, but the residential fabric was mostly empty plots waiting for tents or caravans. A city where a good part of the spaces that usually make up a home were shared, including bathrooms and laundry rooms. The La Ballena Alegre campsite was followed by El Toro Bravo, also from Mitjans, and many other campsites by unknown authors on the coastline between Castelldefels and Barcelona and in other places not only in Catalonia, but also in other parts of Europe and the world. A way of inhabiting the territory that, without a doubt, reflected the yearnings for peace and harmony of a society that was leaving behind two world wars and embracing the hippie movement, with communes and camping, such as the Woodstock Festival in the summer of 1969.

Looking at cities 50 years later, we can see how we have come to complicate the fact of being able to live there. The cadastral value of the land and buildings, the IBI, access to mortgages or an almost non-existent public rental compared to other European countries end up expelling many people.

The recent announcement by the president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, of the construction of 50,000 homes over the next 6 years makes us wonder if there are not other ways of living in the city that are less expensive in many ways. Less expensive in material resources, but also in bureaucratic procedures and time. Among the measures that Illa explained to be able to carry out this project is to reduce the time for granting licenses and permits by half. Certainly, it would be something that would help. The desperate bureaucratization of the administration and its processes full of guarantees have accustomed us to the fact that any procedure related to construction takes forever.

But it will continue to be a long and costly process if we don’t open the door to imagining other, more agile ways of building and inhabiting the city. Maybe it’s time to break some rules and camp it out freely.