Guerín and Vallbona: the uncomfortable mirror

There is a moment in José Luis Guerín's film Stories from the Good ValleyIn this film, Barcelona appears on the horizon as a distant promise, or perhaps as a threat. From Vallbona, the city's silhouette seems like something happening elsewhere, in another time. And yet, you are there, within it, treading on land still irrigated by the Comtal irrigation canal as it has for centuries, amidst orchards tended with a patience and tenacity that the fast-paced city has forgotten how to practice. It's a neighborhood that's difficult to reach. This isn't a metaphor: it's truly difficult to get there, physically, amidst trains and highways that cut through it without stopping. And perhaps that's why it has preserved something that the rest of the city has been losing without realizing it. In fact, an earlier film, Little IndianMarc Recha's film already introduced us to a little-known space that maintains its unique personality in an overflowing metropolis.

We live in a time when the feeling of losing control has become commonplace, almost climatic. Prices rise due to decisions made in places we can't even name. The future has become opaque. And in the face of this, the response is often retreat: shutting oneself away with "yours," building small bunkers of affection in a world that seems increasingly hostile. The problem is that it's becoming harder and harder to know who "yours" are. Community, when it exists, is no longer an inheritance: it must be reinvented every day.

Guerín films a community in Vallbona that hasn't been easy to create and maintain. The neighborhood grew up in the 1960s alongside the few isolated houses scattered among the fields. It was built by those who came from the south, driven by necessity, in an irregular fashion, under cover of night, making use of spaces amidst hills and riverbeds. Now, families from India, Morocco, Portugal, Eastern Europe, and countless other places live side by side with the evicted and the remnants of those first settlers. A few apartment blocks have been built, but little else, as there is little space left amidst highways, roads, and railway lines, now undergoing extensive renovation and expansion. It's uncertain whether the agricultural area of ​​La Ponderosa will be preserved or if a wastewater treatment plant will ultimately be built. It is not a community with shared values ​​or a common identity. It is a community of circumstance, built upon what no one chose: marginalization, the difficulty of reaching it, and a nature that stubbornly persists—the Besòs River, the Rec River, the orchards, the trees—as if unaware that it was within a 21st-century metropolis. The water continues to flow. The orchards demand time, not profit. And around what belongs to no one in particular, what belongs to everyone is silently woven.

But is the Vallbona that Guerín filmed over three years a romantic exception? Perhaps it is rather an uncomfortable mirror that poses a question we should ask ourselves more often: what drives us to form a community? To step outside of "me" and "my" closest to us? Is it shared precarity, and not shared identity, that builds community? If so, then the usual discourse on social cohesion—which tends to imagine communities of equals, of those close to one another, of similar people—doesn't quite work. And it forces us to value initiatives like Barcelona's Neighborhood Plan, now in its third edition, which is making it possible to live in an environment that fosters contact and coexistence, and demonstrates that focusing on the neighborhood as a scale of intervention isn't nostalgia: it's civic effectiveness in a world where it's increasingly difficult to explain where you're from.

The neighborhood, as seen in Guerín's film, is not just a constructed space, it is a space inhabitedIt is where everyday interaction takes place, where identity is forged, where public facilities—schools, libraries, community centers—can act as anchors during times of accelerated mobility and change. In a world where everything is accelerating and becoming more expensive, proximity is not a sentimental value: it is a political infrastructure. And its erosion is not inevitable. It is a choice we make collectively when we decide it is not worth preserving.

The truth is that Guerín doesn't lecture on any of this. He shows, and quite a lot: the Rec, the faces, the diversity of ages and backgrounds that coexist without having chosen to, Barcelona far off on the horizon. Perhaps the film's lesson is precisely this: that places that are hard to reach are also hard to get lost in. And that at a time when it seems that everything worthwhile evaporates quickly, it would be worthwhile to learn, once again, how to reach the places that require effort. In a time of great change, of profound upheavals and disruptions to traditional ways of living, working, and relating, it's wise to take stock and understand who we are and where we come from. Beyond the film's details, all of them rich and significant, I think we should focus on things and attitudes like participation, coexistence, commitment, caring for one another, and ultimately, the understanding that without caring for what we share, we cannot enjoy what is our own.