The ugly Catalonia

I'm traveling on the medium-distance train from Barcelona to Girona. I'm content with the delay; we're used to it by now. Before I start reading, I look out the window and am mesmerized by the sight. Desolate.

Rows of derelict buildings, like matchboxes, surrounded by swarms of cars in wastelands. Now, as before, a dusty, scraggly green area. A solitary pine tree, a stray cat, graffiti galore on peeling walls. Abandoned fields, exposed brick warehouses and aged asbestos roofs. Shabby advertising posters. Schools in shacks with boys and girls skidding behind chain-link fences. Mobile homes in gigantic, half-empty asphalt parking lots. Old, abandoned factories, with the occasional slender, historic chimney still standing, shelf-stable. Patches of stunted forests with more dry trees than green ones. Lifeless quarries like bites in the mountains, silent witnesses to a feast that ended in a real estate bubble. Dog-colored streams, like a runaway, with more dirt than water. Concrete walls that seemingly serve no purpose, like fences in the countryside. Scattered with shacks, vegetable gardens, and illegal recycling centers. An inextricable web of poles and electrical cables from different eras, old and young. Clothes hanging on blocks with no interior patio. Air conditioning units sticking out like infectious protuberances on facades. Thousands of neglected party walls, the result of poor planning. Lilliputian balconies where no one has ever left, with empty flowerpots. Every now and then, a heroic surviving geranium. Damaged plastic greenhouses. Graveyards of cars and scrap metal. Skeletons of unfinished buildings. Labyrinthine developments of steep streets and winding sidewalks where vegetation struggles to emerge.

This is the ugly Catalonia. The one of non-places out in the open (there are also the supposedly glamorous non-places) theorized by Marc Augé. What have urban planners done for years? And the architects, the engineers, the builders? What have the mayors been up to? What has the Generalitat regulated? Are we Catalans really lost in aesthetics, as Unamuno said? What would the poet Maragall, so inspired by the landscape and nature, respond now? Given this panorama, I think Oriol Bohigas was wrong when he said that 90% of the architecture being done in Catalonia was mediocre. The photographer Jordi Bernadó would discuss so many possibilities for cultivating his anti-postcard images. Another possible exercise would be to travel the entire Catalan coast from the sea and note down the construction botches. I think we would also be terrified.

During the 20th century, we have plundered the territory. And so far in the 21st century, there hasn't been much, if any, correction in the shot. Of course, demographic pressure has played a role, but things could have been done better. Much better. We're left with a country that, in its most populated and exploited areas, has very poor landscape and urban quality, a sort of every-man-for-himself kind of situation. It's shameful. In France, the peri-urban landscape is much cleaner and more regulated. It doesn't have the neglected appearance of ours. Good urban planning also generates civility. Good territorial planning generates pride in the territory. A well-maintained environment encourages people to take care of it, both public and private. We're gregarious, for better or worse. In Piedmont, they have the program. Io agisco (I act), in which the population does things to improve the rural and urban landscape.

Empty, mountainous Catalonia has been saved from the chaos, but I'd say more by the enemy's absence than by its own merits. The towns have been living life to the fullest, frozen in time. In many cases, it's not as if the few new buildings have stood out for their quality: you often find town halls of a supposedly modern design that have ended up being the ugliest building in the place. In any case, in this deep Catalonia, the landscapes, of course, generally retain their grandeur, although the advancing forest—mostly unmanaged—is ripe for fires.

The only way to contemplate a beautiful Catalonia is from the air. When your feet are on the ground, you see all its imperfections. We'll always have the drones.