The Pratense historian James Codina, in the decade of the 70s of the last century, he coined the attribute referring to the Baix Llobregat of ‘martyr region’ attacked by land, sea and air. Years of developing without democratic control and projects that responded to a strict logic of accumulation of capital They had destroyed the middle. a crowd of disasters: overexploited and salinized aquifer, floods and spills of all kinds in the Llobregat, decline of the peasantry as a result of expropriations for the construction of polygons households expensive and without any services (how many working lives are spent paying for a roof) and occupation industrial foreign to a respectful management of the territory. ways to make a dictatorial regime represented by the civil governor, who protected the big businesses of the Barcelona elites by appointing the executing mayors of the speculative operations in each of the municipalities. Obviously, from the Kisses A similar sentence could have been formulated regarding Sant Adrià, Santa Coloma, Badalona and other towns in the metropolitan area, converted into the backyard from Barcelona.
With the approval of General Metropolitan Plan of 1976 it was intended to put an end to mess and provide the territory with a plan that can be useful for a democratic stage who knocked on the door. However, the fathers of the project, belonging to the same elites, were not subtracted from the previous dynamic, so that throughout the last decades, substantially, despite the advances of the democratic municipalism, the same growth model survived. Three deficits contributed to this. On the one hand, the competition established between the pujolian nationalism elevated in the Generalitat and the PSC hegemonic in the municipalities and, consequently, entrenched in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area. Two political realities whose ground zero was located on both sides of Plaça de Sant Jaume, and more interested in neutralizing each other than in becoming galvanizers of a more innovative and protective. A second deficit: the endemic underfinancing of town hallsunable, therefore, to face the day to day without resorting to the Benefits of urban activity, which normalized actions designed with a strictly local perspective. And, finally, a third actor: the difficulties of the neighborhood movements contestation to obtain results, because, despite the contradictions between the CiU and the Socialists, after all, they defended a developer similar. They competed, certainly, but at the same time closed ranks when things went wrong. Proof of this is a long list of examples, including the joint project to make the Eurovegas casino complex a reality, aborted by the action of the popular protest movement, or the subsequent PDU (Urban Master Plan) Delta to compensate the municipal governments of Sant Boi, Gavà and Viladecans, or that of Gran Via in L’Hospitalet, today canceled by the TSJC.
Even more. They are currently running Projects in the whole of the metropolitan area that should have been canceledreviewed, questioned or subject to a resounding moratorium because they contemplate thousands of new houses in the framework of an enormous shortage of Waterof crisis in terms of biodiversity and climate change, the reduction of agricultural land and natural habitats within the framework of an evident lack of food and energy sovereignty. urban plans that will end the still empty spaces that surround the most dense demographically or within cities.
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It hurts, at the same time, that they come back expired arguments that turn homelessness into the magic formula to justify the continuityforgetting that the increase in supply has never meant a drop in prices, that the social housing continues to be scarce and inaccessible to the most disadvantaged, that rent is residual and that in the metropolitan area as a whole there are 225,000 empty homes and hundreds of thousands amenable to rehabilitation.
If on the one hand the Generalitat does not assume responsibilities (the AREs, such as the Ribera-Salines, which includes 2,700 homes in the last virgin area of Cornella, were his initiative). If, on the contrary, the expected PDU of the AMB does not propose canceling, reconverting or relocating the outdated projects. If all this, unfortunately, ends up happening, then the political forces, all of them, those who ruled before and rule now (CiU/Junts and PSC) and those who now also govern (ERC and En Comú Podem) will hardly be the ones who urge us to build a better future.