THE SPACE OF CARRER DE JOAQUIN COSTA by Meyitula Longkumer

What is sense of place? This should be the starting point of the discussion. Sense of place is a subjective feeling evoked by a place for people who reside or visit the place. It can be a way of seeing and framing the world according to what and who is said to belong where. The term is used in daily conversation which highlights the social and cultural significance (Creswell,2004). The space of Carrer de Joaquin Costa is an exquisite street which other neighbourhoods in Barcelona does not have, whose existence dates to the year 1819. It’s forces of dynamism can be felt when one enters the street from Ronda de Sant Antonio with different faces passing by the avenue and shops such as Paseo a la India run by an Indian.

The entry of the street welcomes with the Teatre Goya where the flags of European Union, Catalunya & Spain are hanged out and to the left from a distance, you can see the mosque. This tells us that space and place itself is not concrete rather varied across Barcelona. As history tells us that the street is in El Raval, a neighbourhood in Barcelona – we refer to it as a poor and criminal activity place where distinctive mixture of race, gender, class, culture factors have rooted in the space and acquire certain fixity which can be seen in the organization of the space (Smith). Such as people tend to make locational and ethnical choices based on it for recruiting on the suitability of the business and kinds of task. This explanation of place is visible at Carrer de Joaquin Costa in the following section of the article.

We often see that people are grouped in one place which have been influenced on the material basis such as income factor, social markers. Although these spatial arrangements reflect social division should not be taken for granted because characters of social differences vary across physical places and the residential context matters for the construction of social life. It can also influence the social processes & integration of the people living in the place.

The street slices through different layers of identities and societies which has led to the reconstruction of El Raval. Such as the Ashiq Mobil located on every side of the street which are run by Pakistani – Kashmiri brothers. Naishek and Raja Nazim. Naishek arrived four years ago, who feels very comfortable, confident living in Barcelona and there has been no problem in the process of paperwork. Like majority of the Pakistani men working in Barcelona, he left his family in the village to earn a better income in Spain and send money to home.

When we refer to shops, the term Paki or Xinos are used to define that work practises are organized around race and class division. The spatial construction of race is formed by material basis leading to residential segregation where there is over-representation in the inner areas of the city. This can be called as “Power geometry” which is concerned about the power relation to the flows and movement – different social groups have distinct relationships to mobility where some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned (Massey ,1994). There are group who does a lot of physical moving to grab a chance of better life at the other end of the world which can be seen in the alleys of El Raval.

The realization of the street’s bucket of identity comes upon when entering Nou Bazar shop which is run by Bangladeshis. It came as a surprise because Pakistani and Chinese stand out the most amongst the immigrants, but we often mistake them for another nationality due to their appearances which happens the same with me – people associated me as Chinese or other East Asian nationality when I’m an Indian.

Rishabh, a 25-year-old Bangladeshi arrived 6 months ago to work with his relatives who have been living in Spain for the past 20 years. When asked upon his social interaction with the people, he says that the only time he interacts with people who are not from his community are the customers. He doesn’t feel the need to socialise with the locals because the Bangladeshi community is quite huge where he feels like home.

There has been a hype about Carrer de Joaquin Costa as the trendiest bar street in town with different sorts of shops and people, sometimes it’s been considered as the fashionable street in Raval and crowds from various corner of the world passing by. According to Rishabh, despite the street being weight by huge presence of different nationalities, he doesn’t feel international because he knows that everyday he will be going to the place i.e. Nou Bazar where he works and stays in the same circle of people as if it was Bangladesh and not any other foreign country. Thus, the greater the degree of difference between the spatial distribution of groups within an urban area, the greater their social distance from each other (Peach,1926).

The reconstruction of Raval in terms of urban planning and cultural development, the concept of space has become highly complicated and densely varied, with a sense of dislocation, for the locals, facilitated by succession of cultural imports lined up and the time-space compression where movement and communication across space, to the geographical stretching out of social relations, and to our experience of all this (Massey,1994). Space and place are not just containers in which people's social lives develop rather where people are places has a direct bearing on those lives (Smith). We have been taught to expect that the image of the inner city accompanied by immigrants. This should be challenged and unpack the taken for granted assumptions - what has duped us - into thinking it is somehow 'normal' for the immigrants to be always located in Raval. 

“La Cobra”, a bar run by a Chilean man named Ricardo thinks that Carrer de Joaquin Costa has converted to a bar street. He lived in the neighbourhood for 4 years and was aware that the location of the street was a good choice for the bar business due to the proximity of grocery shops and points of attraction. The term “Ravalajent” which means “Raval State of Mind” in Catalan, shows that the street in corporate with the neighbourhood makes it alive. He says that one needs to live there to get the feeling and meaning of the street.

“Fantastik”, a shop where goods from all over the world are sold in the street of Joaquin Costa, would get anyone’s attention which was opened in 2005. According to Joan, the owner of Fantastik, the street is a complicated area with a strong character where all the people are immigrants, it doesn’t matter if you are Spanish or Pakistani or Filipino or Columbian. The area has been gone under huge change and is still under constant transformation. Although there have been challenges such as drug trafficking, shoplifting and the current housing price peculations in the locality. 

The above two examples of La Cobra and Fantastik shows that there is another way to look at space asstrategic locations and resources on which new identities, new politics, new economies perform. In the case of Rishabh and Naishek, space has become a source of community, and a revised by new practises of identification for others. Carrer de Joaquin Costs highlights “Hybrid Identities” where the meetings of different identities, each one can never be the same after the encounter, thereby leaving behind the fixed categories and opening of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed hierarchy (Bhabha,1994).

The above picture state the argument that the time-space compression changes the sense of place when local communities seem to be increasingly dissecting, when you abroad and find the same shops, the same music at home and when everyone has a difference experience of this – how do we think about locality? (Massey, 1994). As I’m from India, to see shops and restaurants run by Pakistani and Indians, gives me a feeling that I’m at home when the place is in a foreign country. Hence, the shift in the “sense of place” differ from person to person. It can produce feeling of insecurity and vulnerability to the one’s who are alien to such cultural imports. This has resulted to forms of protest in the streets of El Raval for quietness, housing price, drug trafficking.

There is geographical fragmentation day by day and it is a concept which can address the contemporary tension between the local and the global directly. The sense of place develops from every aspect of individuals’ life experience which are infused with meanings and feelings. Place has been created by people which then results to identity. Geographers suggest that the meaning of place maybe so strong that it becomes a central part of the identity of the people experiencing them in a social relation. Human geography is unstable, shifting, uncertain and contested always (Rose, 1993).

References

1.     Peach, C. (1975). Urban social segregation. London: Longman.

2.     https://wsimag.com/economy-and-politics/6395-rebranding-of-raval-iconic-barcelonas-district

3.     Creswell, T. (2004). Place: a short introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

4.     Massey, D. (1994). Space, place and gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.

5.     Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography. Cambridge: Polity Press.

6.     Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.

7.     Smith, S. (). Chapter 2: Society-Space.