It's Thursday morning. The Barceloneta neighborhood is slowly waking up as shutters are raised, uniformed dockworkers make coffee in a bar, the market is already open, and crates of fish are piled high in the stalls. The butane delivery man, who has parked at the entrance to Pescadors Street, acts as an alarm clock by banging the gas cylinders with a hammer, in case someone needs to refill them. This week, these streets have been in the headlines of all the media outlets so that Barceloneta is already the most gentrified neighborhood in the entire country. According to the latest study by the Center for Demographic Studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). When asked about this issue, most residents don't react with surprise: "Gentrification has been out of control here for a long time," they agree resignedly. ARA visited the neighborhood to talk to residents—both newcomers and long-timers—and see firsthand what it's like to continue living in a neighborhood where the machinery of the system tends to push you out.

Gentrification in a neighborhood means that there are increasingly more residents with high purchasing power—often from wealthier countries—forcing those with more modest incomes—often long-time residents—to move to areas further from the city center to find affordable living conditions. It's no secret that Barcelona has been experiencing gentrification for years, but a report from the Center for Demographic Studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) has now quantified it. The conclusion is that the Catalan capital is the Spanish city experiencing this process most intensely and has the two most gentrified neighborhoods in the entire country.

A court clerk tormented by guilt after carrying out an eviction stars in Kontinental '25The magnificent new film by Romanian director Radu Jude (Bucharest, 1977) is now in theaters. The author of Don't expect too much from the end of the world and of An unfortunate fling or crazy porn (Golden Bear at the 2011 BerlinaleHe is one of the key figures in contemporary European cinema, and his films explore, in a striking way, the dilemmas and everyday absurdity of characters searching for their place in a society without a moral compass.

Today, the political use of disjunctions that present concepts that until recently seemed complementary as antagonistic, without any proof, is common. This is a useful formula for discrediting political adversaries and avoiding the commitment to make positive proposals for the community.

The Catalan capital is a unique demographic case study. "It's the epicenter and magnet of attraction, but instead of growing significantly, it has remained more or less stable over the last decade," explains Arlinda García Coll, a doctor in human geography at the UB and an expert in internal and international migration and residential mobility. "Barcelona is flat due to the replacement component," explains the demographer. In short: it's not growing as much because the people who arrive end up replacing—or expelling—those who already lived there.

Last November, Catalonia surpassed the 8 million population mark, and projections indicate that the number is growing. Where have these nearly 700,000 additional people who have arrived in the last ten years settled? How has this impacted public services, mobility, and municipal housing, not only the arrival of immigration but also the internal migration that has occurred? For more than two months, we have been analyzing the demographic data, municipality by municipality, to interpret and analyze it with the help of experts. We have also selected thirty significant municipalities and spoken with mayors and other experts to understand how they have managed it. The result is this Sunday's dossier, a bold approach to what has already been described as the second demographic boom of the 21st century.

In an article published in The Vanguard It was claimed that the Sónar boycott is harmless because the pro-Israeli investment fund that owns the supergroup that brings the festival together only invests a small portion of its vast wealth in music. That is: only invested 1.3 billion of its 582 billion euros in the purchase of Superstruct, the current owner of the festival. rich will be rich"These financial giants are soulless and immune to criticism," he argued. The article's conclusion was shocking: it quoted a supposed friend who was a fan of the techno who, despite feeling bad about all this genocide, will attend anyway, with "melancholic resignation." As if to say: to contradict oneself is human.

Housing is a problem that exists in our society: if you don't suffer from it, your children, your nephews, or your neighbors do. With this idea, the ARA and the Institute of Catalan Studies (IEC) sought to address one of the issues that most concerns citizens and for which governments are most in demand for answers and solutions. Housing: Technically feasible solutions. Is it time to build new cities from scratch? Solutions that, as geographer and IEC member Josep Vicent Boira and architect and IEC member Ferran Sagarra explain, must primarily involve moving away from a municipal urban planning perspective and instead begin finding solutions on a metropolitan scale. In an event moderated by ARA Deputy Director Carla Turró, the geographer and architect attempted to identify—but also rule out—possible solutions to the housing problem facing Catalonia, but also many other European countries.

"If you ask, some will tell you this is the Penedès, others that it's the Camp de Tarragona, but there are also those who will tell you it's the metropolitan area of Barcelona." Jon Olano is a sociologist and professor at the URV (University of Valencia). He knows El Vendrell very well. He has lived there since he was ten years old, when his family emigrated from a village in the Basque Country. He also wrote his doctoral thesis on this municipality. We listened to him and asked the mayor himself, Kenneth Martínez: "No, no, we are clear about it! We are Tarragona. For practical purposes, we are part of the Barcelona metropolitan area, and everything that happens in Barcelona affects us directly, but by tradition and culture, we look to Tarragona and the Penedès, of course. We are in the middle of everything," he concludes.

As soon as we entered the mall, we ran into a large group of girls getting excited over a doll that was simply a furry brown rectangle with eyes. I felt old and embarrassingly analog in front of all these young women who behaved as if this pile of synthetic fibers were a rock star or a genie who granted wishes. "Jellyfish!" they shouted, "Jellyfish!" I suddenly became an innocent anthropologist before a primitive culture that was completely incomprehensible to me. Why were these people so excited about an object with no objective value that the observer could grasp with the naked eye? Did it perhaps have healing or magical properties? It was evident that the product contained some kind of value that went far beyond reality. All civilizations and cultures have created things to which they have attributed an invented symbolic charge, from religions to everyday superstitions. The novelty in these times of ultra-liberal and digital capitalism is that useless objects are bought and sold en masse, and the meaning given to them is volatile and changing.

The collateral effects of the covid-19 pandemic, still painfully among us, are like ivy covering the entire façade of our cracked social edifice. The metaphor is pertinent because housing is, right now, one of the greatest weak points. We had already come from a precarious situation, the result of the economic crisis of 2008, which had become bogged down and has now only worsened due to the economic ravages also caused by the coronavirus. The moratorium on evictions for people in social emergency situations has managed to stop the blow, but if, as planned, it ends with the end of the state of alarm on May 9, we will come across a new wave of homeless people difficult to manage. Many families will face the threat of becoming homeless with the end of the furlough scheme and the self-employed aid, measures that, if there is no further extension, will expire around the same time, on May 31.