Migration and urban space in a small town in Catalonia: the contested neighbourhood

Abstract

While much contemporary analysis of social problems in disadvantaged neighbourhoods have ignored the deep connections between everyday interactions in space and the structural tensions due to ethnic, racial, class, and gender inequalities that underlie them, this article offers a critical analysis of the groupings put into practice locally in relation to space. Through an ethnography carried out in Salt, a semi-rural Catalan town, this article analyses the emergence and functioning of exclusionary visions on a super-diverse neighbourhood. It does so through a multi-dimensional analysis of the historical macro and micro processes of how resentment towards newcomers emerged in town. Through a mixture of method, such as a review of newspaper clippings from 2000 to 2013, 40 interviews, and participant observation carried out between 2011 and 2014, we see how the much-liked idea of a ‘welcoming town’ promoted by the city council, collides with the lived reality, where many Spanish nationals order the Centre neighbourhood in terms of ‘those from outside’ and ‘the ones from here’. These divisions might easily cross boundaries of ethnicity and culture, and mainly refer to the temporal settlement of the inhabitants. However, in this case they coincide with the grouping of the long-established residents, former migrants from other parts of Spain and Catalans, in contrast to the newly arrived ‘migrants’. This way, we see how social inequalities among residents foster internal divisions expressed through or in a competition over space, that is, residence and use of public space, while at the same time it structures the social understanding of them.