Laundry city

I remember that, as a child, my grandmother would lift me up to the dining room table in the house on Passeig de Sant Joan, in Barcelona, ​​to grab the hem of my pants. The same table where we had lunch, where we had coffee and where I did my schoolwork in the afternoons.

With the help of some of my aunts, they would turn me around like a postcard display, placing pins, marking the clothes with chalk and doing the first stitches, some on my ankles – “It’s you moving” – while they chatted animatedly about different family matters. It was an exclusively matriarchal environment where all kinds of gossip and confessions were shared and which I, as a man, had the privilege of attending just because I was little.

In the book Sapiens. From Animals to Gods, its author Yuval Noah Harari states that gossiping has made us human. People, he says, are above all social beings who share networks of trust in order to survive and cooperate. It is true that we communicate to transmit knowledge and objective data, but much more often we do so to weave a tangle of gossip that allows us to know who hates who, who is honest or who is a cheater.

The word xafardejar has its origin in an Arabic word that, in Catalan, derives precisely from the public place in towns and cities where women used to wash clothes: the laundry. Like wakes on the sea, etymology clearly shows us the path that words have taken to reach us.

Fer xafardejar alludes to this necessary social action of explaining rumors, suspicions of infidelity or gossip. In the laundromats, women, mainly, have strengthened community ties and woven new ones, establishing networks of communication and individual and collective knowledge. What is city-making, if not?

The laundromats of the cities, seen in this way, have been a true political agora where matters of vital importance for community life were discussed. In the words of the activist and anthropologist Yayo Herrero, the things that truly sustain life. Things, Herrero explains, that have traditionally been done by women, such as washing, cooking or caring for children, the elderly or the sick.

Cities, like people, have a public face and a private face. One life to show and another to hide, often making invisible the actions that truly make life possible

Cities, like people, have a public face and a private face. A life to show and another to hide, often making invisible the actions that truly make life possible, the ordinary, the common. A facade on the street and another hidden, domestic one, some say, as if domestic things were not what gives meaning to the city. As Javier Pérez Andújar explained in a press article a few years ago, “Barcelona is a city of almost symmetrical communities, with stairs where clothes are hung out where they cannot be seen and flags are put up where they can be seen”.

It is no less symptomatic that the current Habitability Decree prohibits hanging clothes directly on the street, corroborated by the municipal ordinances for the use of public spaces. It is not even allowed for clothes to be seen hanging out, even if they are not hung directly on the public road. All this turned the interior of the block and the celoberts into spaces inherited from the old laundries, where you could tune in to “patio radio”.

But if nowadays no one takes the hem of their pants and the ordinances make us replace laundry rooms with dryers, where will we do our laundry? What spaces does the city offer us today to gossip and generate a sense of community? Where will we get to know our neighbors well enough that one day they will look after our children or help us with the shopping?

It seems that the answer lies in a necessary slowing down of our lives, although some call this an economic slowdown. In other words, a return to calm that allows us to redesign the meeting spaces of our homes and our cities with the necessary perspective.

Recently, on the television program Objectiu Planeta, presenter Lorenzo Milá discussed the issue of deceleration with guests Antonio Turiel and Fernando Valladares, both renowned scientists from the CSIC and disseminators of the fight against climate change and the energy transition. Valladares confessed that urban life has taken so much of our time that we have had to outsource domestic tasks that our mothers and grandmothers used to do. And he called for making time to spend the afternoon with our children to sew their pants hems.