"Living too together?" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

 

Back in mid-July, after more than four months, I (reluctantly) set foot in the city of Barcelona. 

I also made the mistake of driving in the centre, having wisely used public transport in the past.

I love the place and always get a thrill out of going there – we live on the edge of Barcelona province in a small town – but walking through crowds of people in the midst of a contagious pandemic, it was impossible to relax and enjoy myself as I’d always done before.

Yes, most people were wearing masks covering the nose and mouth but around 20 or 30 percent of those in the street were not. Plenty of them appeared to be tourists. The following day, regulations were changed so that it was compulsory to wear a mask in all public places across Catalonia.

I have to say though, the relief I felt when I escaped the absurdly narrow traffic lanes of Gran Via and got the car out near the space and mountains surrounding Josep Tarradellas Barcelona–El Prat Airport was a welcome one.

It seemed almost claustrophobic and unnatural to be in a city of 4.8 million on the day that a city with the same population (Melbourne in Australia) had just been locked down in Covid quarantine for six weeks.

It might also have been in my subconscious but in the days before my unusually disquieting visit, I’d read an article about Barcelona having Europe’s most densely populated square kilometre in Europe. More than 53,000 people inhabit this single 1km² area. (France also has a place with more than 50,000 people in a single km², in Paris.)

The urban zone that breaks this very dubious record lies just south of Barcelona Football Club’s Camp Nou stadium. Unlike older city locals who often refer to places (public squares) as reference points, for me as mainly a travelling teacher, I use Metro stations and recognised this ultra-dense area is between the Collblanc and Torrassa stations on one side. The other corners run along the old N340 national road to near Badal metro stop and down to Santa Eulalia station.

It’s true that technically speaking this compressed cube of humanity is in the “city” of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat but in reality it was originally agricultural land, subsumed by the Catalan capital and (as someone who has spent time working around there) it certainly feels to me like it’s a extension of Barcelona, being only eight stops on the Metro from Barcelona’s centre. When combined, the two “separate cities” make up the second most dense urban area in all of Europe.

It hardly needs saying but this particular part of Barcelona is one the poorest. It has a high number of low-income immigrants but residents say that renting an apartment can still cost 800 or 900 euros a month, which can only encourage overcrowding. This is made worse by the fact that a growing number of people living there are not registered with the local council. This leads to underfunding of social and other services.

Other problems in the area are a simple, natural result of this extreme density: major lack of parking, an almost complete lack of green spaces and related high levels of pollution. Recently, this square kilometre and surroundings have also been a centre of a wider outbreak of Covid-19 in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.

As a result, I ask the question: If living in each others’ pockets is such a good thing then why aren’t the very richest in society doing it?

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Sept. 2020.]

"Lockdown loaded" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[People outside after easing of health restrictions. O. DURAN..jpg]

The decision to send at least four million “non-essential” workers back to their jobs on April 13 strikes me as an extreme mistake. A dangerous one. 

This was a Spanish government move and was opposed publicly by Catalan president Quim Torra. He (and little ol’ insignificant me) will have been proved to a significant degree, right or wrong by the time you are reading this article a few weeks later.

If I’ve been shown to be mistaken then I humbly apologise to Mr Sanchez and that means you can stop reading my words from here on in. But in my opinion, which is also the opinion of countless medical and scientific professionals, the risk of so many people returning to workplaces, public transport, cafes, restaurants, street pavements, parks and everywhere else in between, is too many million risks to take.

This is because Mr Sanchez’ decision is highly likely to lead to another jump in coronavirus cases, including the numbers of people needing specialised medical treatment. That, as we have already seen this spring, puts unbearable stress on those masked heroes we have been applauding (and grossly underpaying) in the public hospital system. Again, they too are facing possibly being infected and even dying themselves.

Going back to work ‘en masse’ simply means that new cases of Covid-19 infection here are added to the existing ones, multiplying and magnifying the pandemic’s devastation. This is easily avoidable by continuing the quarantine period. That’s my argument.

Tragically, countries across southern Europe, and most especially ours, have failed to learn from the much more successful strategies used in places such as Korea, India, and New Zealand. There, they tested huge numbers of the population and applied more restrictive quarantine measures a whole lot faster, sooner (now longer) and comprehensively.

In essence, they took the threat of this invisible killer extremely seriously and their cautious-minded leaders were not afraid to act in the entire public’s interest. They put people’s health ahead of any concerns about costs to business or the national budget.

Meanwhile, as the virus ebbs and flows across the globe, one thing that will not be saved is the living conditions of so many in Catalonia and wider Europe. Unless of course the historical idea of spreading wealth more fairly and collectively takes off again and our representatives see the merit in it. There are plenty in the shrinking middle class and suffering working classes who are desperately hoping for genuine economic change as a result of these troubled times.

Unfortunately, we can seemingly forget that the European Union will really help out. As progressive pan-European DiEM25’s Yanis Varoufakis recently commented, the Eurogroup’s underlying message to a large majority of Italians, Spaniards, and Greeks ,etc (given that 97% of the €500bn “stimulus” package is new national debt) is that it must all be repaid through further austerity via new cuts to each nation’s budgets and services. This burden of course falls most harshly on the very citizens who can afford it the least.

Out here though, in Penedès, where I live, the farmers in the vineyards continue to go about their business of being in the “business of pleasure,” as I heard a French wine producer call it. After all, the grapes don’t know how to self-isolate. They don’t understand the gravity of the spring they have just sprung up in. And it seems to me that this year their leaves seem bigger and greener, earlier than I’ve ever seen them.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2020 and is dedicated to the memory of Theresa-Eunice “Terry” Parris (1926-2020).]