Barcelona City Council evacuates the Vallcarca settlement
Urban Guard officers and City Hall employees arrived in the area early in the morning.
BarcelonaBarcelona City Council began evacuating the shanty town in the Vallcarca neighborhood this Thursday morning. Early in the morning, a large force of Guardia Urbana officers, in collaboration with the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan Police), arrived at the top of Avinguda Vallcarca to dismantle the building. Tensions arose when the riot police arrived, with police pushing and shoving their way past some of the protesters against the eviction who were already in the settlement.
The operation comes after a person sleeping in one of the shacks was injured in a fire early Wednesday morning. Barcelona's First Deputy Mayor, Laia Bonet, explained that, as a result of the events, the fire department was able to determine "imminent risk to the people living there." "The fire has accelerated the process," she explained. Municipal sources also explain that prior to the firefighters' inspection, municipal technical and protection services had been prevented from entering the settlement on up to three occasions, the last time despite having a court order.
After 7:30 a.m., when the eviction was already underway, the first worker from the Barcelona Center for Social Urgencies and Emergencies (CUESB) arrived to assist the evacuees. For now, the only alternative offered to those evacuated this Thursday is to spend two nights in one of the accommodations managed by CUESB. So far, five people have already agreed to this solution, which the evacuees consider insufficient, as reported by Bonet. The City Council has not specified what other alternatives will be offered and has stated that the treatment will be personalized to the needs of each evacuee.
Later, City Hall cleaning service workers also entered the premises to begin dismantling the encampment, which had been in place for more than five years. All this under the watchful eye of the dozen evictees, who, with bags and suitcases in hand, were still demanding that the City Police officers allow them access to the settlement to remove some personal belongings.
The Vallcarca shanty town settlement was one of the most socially sensitive areas in the city. According to the latest census conducted by City Hall's social services, there were currently 17 people staying overnight at the site, two of them minors. Beyond the number of people sleeping there, the settlement was very crowded because it had become a space where scrap metal accumulates. However, this Thursday there were only 13 people at the site, none of them minors. In recent months, in fact, many had left to avoid being there when the eviction took place.
The presence of this settlement had caused division in the neighborhood, with neighbors demanding its eviction in order to move forward with the pending urban reform of Vallcarca and others demanding that they not be evicted without being given alternative housing. A division that was also felt this morning when a couple of neighbors challenged the hundred or so protesters.
Among the protesters was José González, from Som Barri, who in statements to journalists denounced that with Thursday's eviction, not only are the ten evicted people left without a place to sleep, but also harm nearly "200 people who depend economically on the site," since it was being taken over. Following Wednesday's fire, the Som Barri Neighborhood Association had called for a "real" solution to the settlements and had warned that evicting the people living there without offering them any alternative "will only shift the problem to another place."
The Vallcarca reform
Evicting the settlement was a priority for the City Council in order to implement the urban transformation plan for Vallcarca, approved in 2002, more than 20 years ago. This reform should ultimately involve the construction of approximately 520 apartments, 40% of which will be social housing, as well as the construction of a new stormwater tank and a service area, and the improvement of Vallcarca's central park.
Beyond the shack settlement, the City Council is also in the process of soon evicting a group of people living in three squatted municipal properties next door. In this case, social services data indicates 13 people staying overnight, including two families with two children each.
500 protesters
In the afternoon, half a thousand people marched through the streets of the neighborhood chanting "Social solutions, not police solutions," to denounce the City Council's failure to offer any housing alternatives for those evicted. During the march, they attempted to occupy a vacant, boarded-up building on Avenida República Argentina, ACN reports.