Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses state-making and state-imagining through housing and urban regeneration in Barcelona, in a context of contestation of the state and delegitimisation of the political system.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses everyday statecraft practices and discourses through housing and urban planning in the global city of Barcelona. In a peripheral neighbourhood which is undergoing deep urban re-generation and gets ready to welcome 30 000 new residents, memorial practices with regards to its industrial past become central in the way that people envision and 'feel' the state. I contend that these kinds of stories construct in the everyday the past Francoist state at the same time that they also construct the current democratic state (with its deficiencies), by creating a narrative of the transition between the past and present, and by producing the difference between what was dictatorship and what is democracy. Through memorial practices and the city-as-archive, abstract concepts such as authoritarianism, paternalism, and democracy, acquire specific meanings and particular contestations in everyday relationships in the neighbourhood, within people and in their relationship with the institutions.