Utopian mission: revive La Rambla

Hardly any­one lives on Barcelona’s Ram­bla. Few more than 80 peo­ple are res­i­dents of the fa­mous boule­vard that has be­come a sym­bol of how mass tourism has trans­formed the city cen­tre. Yet this num­ber was un­known until 2018, when the Km-Zero team led by ar­chi­tect Itziar González found it out by going from door-to-door talk­ing to those who are often over­looked in cities in the grip of preda­tory cap­i­tal­ism.

This stu­dio made up of pro­fes­sion­als from dif­fer­ent fields won the com­pe­ti­tion to de­velop a re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion plan for La Ram­bla (also known as Les Ram­bles), and six months later they de­liv­ered the pro­ject. Build­ing work has al­ready started and is fore­cast to cul­mi­nate in 2030.

Yet the idea of the for­mer coun­cil­woman for the Ciu­tat Vella neigh­bour­hood was never about just pro­vid­ing an aes­thetic facelift for La Ram­bla. The real change will occur, González says, when local cit­i­zens reap­pro­pri­ate it: “Les Ram­bles must go back to being a street, an ex­pres­sion of re­volt,” she says.

At the end of La Ram­bla, in the Santa Mònica arts cen­tre, an ex­hi­bi­tion not long opened shows reimag­in­ings of the fa­mous street and calls on the pub­lic to be­come par­tic­i­pants in its restora­tion. For the ex­hi­bi­tion, Km-Zero has re­sorted to the same col­lab­o­ra­tive method­ol­ogy it used when it de­vel­oped its plan for La Ram­bla. Some 44 artists have been in­vited to em­ploy their cre­ativ­ity in putting flesh on the bones of the re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion pro­ject.

“Les Ram­bles don’t exist, they’ve been stolen from us,” the writer Ortésia Cabr­era, who is part of the pro­ject, lamented dur­ing the ex­hi­bi­tion’s pre­sen­ta­tion. Yet every­one, in one way or an­other, can take part in this “ex­er­cise of rad­i­cal imag­i­na­tion”, ac­cord­ing to the di­rec­tor of Santa Mònica, Enric Puig.

The ex­hi­bi­tion runs until May 21, but for now vis­i­tors to the top floor will find only walls full of wishes scrib­bled on post-its. These are the con­cepts that have gone through the heads of the 44 artists charged with turn­ing a utopia into a re­al­ity (the ex­hi­bi­tion is ti­tled ’Utopia Ram­bles’).

“Often the only thing that mat­ters to the au­thor­i­ties is the fin­ished work, and they for­get about the non-ma­te­r­ial val­ues,” points out González, who is en­thu­si­as­tic about this sec­ond chance to serve the local area. “This is the real pro­ject,” she in­sists.

Vis­i­tors will be able to fol­low the progress of the artists’ work in real time, and they can get in­volved. The re­sults, or “pro­to­types” as the cu­ra­tors (González, Puig and Elena Blesa) call them, will be un­veiled in May.

An­other floor houses archival ma­te­ri­als, some un­pub­lished, which record the ap­pear­ance La Ram­bla will have a decade from now. They re­veal the at­ten­tion to de­tail shown to the trees or the street­lights. The 80 or so res­i­dents in­ter­viewed talked about the light and dark as­pects of liv­ing in this iconic space that many in Barcelona no longer con­sider their own. “The work has started but the lo­cals are wor­ried,” says González. If they get their street back, it may ease their anx­i­ety.

Fea­ture Art