Cell of Vitality

Children’s perspective often brings us back to the simplest and most essential sense of things. It happens with objects, for example, when they give them an unexpected use, or with language, when they attribute an incorrect meaning to a word through similarity or intuition.

One day, I received a message from my young daughter that said, “Dad, Mom says to remind you about Gemma’s ‘cell of vitability.’” Sometimes, I admit, I don’t correct my children’s mistakes; I feel they’ll stop being little, and I hold back in a futile attempt to stop time.

The “certificate of habitability” she was referring to is a document most people are familiar with. It has become a required certificate for selling or renting a home. It has lost all its value and original meaning—if it ever had one—judging by the ridiculous price at which it is offered in the market, often reduced to a simple piece of paper, produced with little rigor, and serving only to meet bureaucratic requirements.

However, the confusion of words, beyond bringing a smile, opens up a deeper reflection. Our friend Gemma’s home isn’t bad at all. It more than meets the minimum requirements dictated by the Habitability Decree. It’s a large penthouse with two terraces, reasonably well-oriented and ventilated, with spacious rooms and two bathrooms. No one would reject such a flat at first glance. But she doesn’t want to live there.

The neighborhood, she says, is lifeless. It grew rapidly, and there still isn’t a school nearby. She’s tired of taking her daughter to temporary classrooms and fears that, as things stand, she’ll end up studying there all through primary school. There’s no health center, no grocery store, or bakery nearby either. The closest one is four blocks away, and she admits she’s afraid to walk back alone because there aren’t many people on the street. The flat is habitable, but the neighborhood lacks life.

The current Habitability Decree is a law of minimums, confined within the walls of the home, as its title makes clear. Its wording suggests that the intent is to prevent the abuses and tricks that many property owners use to pass off something as housing that common sense says isn’t.

It’s not a law that addresses design recommendations for greater comfort, nor does it mention the views we might have from our window. In fact, the views that concern the Decree are those pedestrians might have of our laundry. As Rigoberta Bandini might say, I don’t know why our underwear scares people so much; without it, there would be no humanity in our Mediterranean cities.

We need a new Vitality Decree that monitors the habitability of our homes, but also the vitality of our neighborhoods.

It’s true that other laws and plans deal with “programming”—as they call it—the territory and the growth of cities. But that doesn’t prevent a home from being considered as such in a neighborhood with no schools or bakeries, as long as it meets the minimums dictated by the Habitability Decree. The challenge is often to synchronize residential growth with urban plans.

During the migration waves of the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of people arrived in Catalonia, and especially in Barcelona, from southern Spain to work and settle down. Dozens of residential “polygons” were created to address what was called the “housing emergency.”

The southwest Besòs polygon, Canyelles, La Guineueta… The emergency was so significant that, in many areas, buildings arrived before streets, and they remained that way for years. It’s moving to hear the neighbors of Mina de la Ciudad street, in the Roquetes neighborhood, recount how they joined forces to build the central sewer line with their own hands, working on it every day after their jobs. The photos of that effort are an open history book of the city—real history. Today, these neighborhoods have sewers, buses, and schools thanks to the unity and struggle of their neighbors. The plans came later.

One might think this doesn’t happen anymore, but not long ago, we labeled as the “real estate crisis” the abuse of building more houses annually than France, Germany, and Italy combined. And we all remember hectares of homes without schools, health centers, or transport in Buniel or Sanchinarro, for example—places now abandoned because no one can live there.

Habitability, in its most basic sense, is the capacity of a place to be lived in sustainably and comfortably. This should also apply to the neighborhoods of our cities—neighborhoods with schools, sports centers, or community spaces within reasonable distances of homes, promoting the abandonment of cars out of lack of necessity rather than repression. The Generalitat’s 2004 “Neighborhood Law,” which the Barcelona City Council wisely adopted, is already addressing these deficiencies. It’s a reparative law meant to fix what wasn’t done right in the first place.

Still, the Habitability Decree is central to this debate. It shouldn’t remain confined within the walls of the home, as it plays a fundamental role in the development of new neighborhoods and the improvement of existing ones.

A more holistic approach to the Decree could address the space between the rooms of the house and the spaces in the neighborhood. A law where views, schools, or bakeries have a place. Just as we wouldn’t live in a house without a toilet or power outlets, we shouldn’t accept living in a neighborhood where the school is built when our children are already grown.

A law of maximums, not minimums. And this has nothing to do with square meters. A Decree that monitors the habitability of our homes but also the vitality of our neighborhoods. A new Vitality Decree.