Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the temporality of neighbourhood politics that are being crafted in a post-industrial and peripheral neighbourhood of Barcelona which is undergoing deep urban transformation.

Paper long abstract:

In a peripheral neighbourhood of Barcelona an ambitious Project of transforming an ex-industrial zone into a commercial-residential one is taking place, effectively doubling its current population. It includes the construction of more than 10,000 flats, roads, parks, schools and medical centres. Assuming that the neighbourhood, el barri, is not something given but an actively generated reality on the ground, I consider how urban transformation and its projections produce “temporal reasonings” (Jansen 2015) in the neighbourhood. El mentrestant, that is the meantime in Catalan, appears as a significant emic temporal category to denote the period of time that the Project is going to be underway, a timespan of around 20 years. In the meantime of urban transformation, while waiting for the newcomers to arrive and the new infrastructure to be completed, people engage in different sorts of time-tricking activities (Ringel 2016) that conjure and imagine the past and the future, and inform the ways space is produced. During more than a decade of protracted economic and social crisis in the country, the realm of the neighbourhood has re-emerged as a site of political participation and sociality. In this context, a temporally-informed neighbourhood politics appears that brings together Memory -contested accounts of the past- and Promise -desires for a more just and inclusive urbanism.