“Living too together?”

Back in mid-July, after more than four months, I (re­luc­tantly) set foot in the city of Barcelona. I also made the mis­take of dri­ving in the cen­tre, hav­ing wisely used pub­lic trans­port in the past.

I love the place and al­ways get a thrill out of going there – we live on the edge of Barcelona province in a small town – but walk­ing through crowds of peo­ple in the midst of a con­ta­gious pan­demic, it was im­pos­si­ble to relax and enjoy my­self as I’d al­ways done be­fore.

Yes, most peo­ple were wear­ing masks cov­er­ing the nose and mouth but around 20 or 30 per­cent of those in the street were not. Plenty of them ap­peared to be tourists. The fol­low­ing day, reg­u­la­tions were changed so that it was com­pul­sory to wear a mask in all pub­lic places across Cat­alo­nia.

I have to say though, the re­lief I felt when I es­caped the ab­surdly nar­row traf­fic lanes of Gran Via and got the car out near the space and moun­tains sur­round­ing Josep Tar­radel­las Barcelona–El Prat Air­port was a wel­come one.

It seemed al­most claus­tro­pho­bic and un­nat­ural to be in a city of 4.8 mil­lion on the day that a city with the same pop­u­la­tion (Mel­bourne in Aus­tralia) had just been locked down in Covid quar­an­tine for six weeks.

It might also have been in my sub­con­scious but in the days be­fore my un­usu­ally dis­qui­et­ing visit, I’d read an ar­ti­cle about Barcelona hav­ing Eu­rope’s most densely pop­u­lated square kilo­me­tre in Eu­rope. More than 53,000 peo­ple in­habit this sin­gle 1km² area. (France also has a place with more than 50,000 peo­ple in a sin­gle km², in Paris.)

The urban zone that breaks this very du­bi­ous record lies just south of Barcelona Foot­ball Club’s Camp Nou sta­dium. Un­like older city lo­cals who often refer to places (pub­lic squares) as ref­er­ence points, for me as mainly a trav­el­ling teacher, I use Metro sta­tions and recog­nised this ultra-dense area is be­tween the Coll­blanc and Tor­rassa sta­tions on one side. The other cor­ners run along the old N340 na­tional road to near Badal metro stop and down to Santa Eu­lalia sta­tion.

It’s true that tech­ni­cally speak­ing this com­pressed cube of hu­man­ity is in the “city” of L’Hos­pi­talet de Llo­bre­gat but in re­al­ity it was orig­i­nally agri­cul­tural land, sub­sumed by the Cata­lan cap­i­tal and (as some­one who has spent time work­ing around there) it cer­tainly feels to me like it’s a ex­ten­sion of Barcelona, being only eight stops on the Metro from Barcelona’s cen­tre. When com­bined, the two “sep­a­rate cities” make up the sec­ond most dense urban area in all of Eu­rope.

It hardly needs say­ing but this par­tic­u­lar part of Barcelona is one the poor­est. It has a high num­ber of low-in­come im­mi­grants but res­i­dents say that rent­ing an apart­ment can still cost 800 or 900 euros a month, which can only en­cour­age over­crowd­ing. This is made worse by the fact that a grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple liv­ing there are not reg­is­tered with the local coun­cil. This leads to un­der­fund­ing of so­cial and other ser­vices.

Other prob­lems in the area are a sim­ple, nat­ural re­sult of this ex­treme den­sity: major lack of park­ing, an al­most com­plete lack of green spaces and re­lated high lev­els of pol­lu­tion. Re­cently, this square kilo­me­tre and sur­round­ings have also been a cen­tre of a wider out­break of Covid-19 in L’Hos­pi­talet de Llo­bre­gat.

As a re­sult, I ask the ques­tion: If liv­ing in each oth­ers’ pock­ets is such a good thing then why aren’t the very rich­est in so­ci­ety doing it?