The first working sessions with the students of the
Institut Bellvitge
in the
Cartografies en moviment
project were planned as exercises with the aim of introducing the idea of cartography as a tool for representing and constructing territories, geographical but also affective, political, cultural, identity-related… etc. as we explained in the previous summary.
The methodological proposal for this third session was identical to that of the previous one, but in this case, instead of starting from a personal object with which each student identified, we proposed analyzing objects or images that they identified with the Bellvitge neighborhood.
A common trait quickly appeared among most of the students: not belonging to the neighborhood. This led to a discussion about the meaning and differences between expressions such as “being from” or “living in” a certain neighborhood. Many students claimed to be completely unaware of the neighborhood beyond the places they travel daily during the journey from the metro stop to the institute and its surroundings. This gives an idea of the separation that exists between what happens inside educational centers and their immediate environment.
This “outsider” character of the students in the neighborhood also highlighted that the image that these students had of Bellvitge was marked by common prejudices and stereotypes that we believed were largely overcome: the images provided by the students referred to dirt, delinquency, drugs and a “cani culture” that we could well understand as the contemporary version of “quinqui” in the 70s.
In addition to these elements, the students also pointed out the markets, the architecture of the blocks, the presence of a large number of elderly people, the green areas, the train, the Bellvitge Hospital and the schools as significant.
Using a simple table, we discussed the function of these “objects”, their relationship with other urban elements, subjects, contexts and processes in the territory. During the conversation, we wrote down the key points on the whiteboard, trying to complicate the analysis. For example, the elderly were seen by the students as a group that monopolized the public space of the neighborhood, however we introduced the care work that grandparents, and especially grandmothers, do as an aspect to take into account. Likewise, we commented on how older people constitute a source of memory of the neighborhood.
In the second working group (remember that we divided the class into two groups to be able to work better) some elements were repeated, such as the blocks (almost unavoidable for the view of Bellvitge) or the hospital, but some different elements also appeared, such as the Pirulo (a small kiosk located in an adjacent square and in which, according to the students, “the canis and chonis” usually meet), the Hesperia hotel, the library, the flea market, the Club Rojo or the fair.
Once the elements proposed by the students had been analyzed, we went on to look for characteristic categories, labels and criteria that would allow us to elaborate a conceptual map of the neighborhood. Several ideas emerged that reduced the analysis to binary oppositions of the good-bad, old-new type that excessively simplified the multiplicity of issues that had appeared. Different formal solutions were also proposed: in the first group, the idea of using a single block of flats and the surrounding inter-block space to represent the whole neighborhood as a “diorama” was reached. In the second group, a more “conventional” solution was reached: to create a set of icons that represented the various data generated during the analysis and place them on a map of the neighborhood.
Both maps remained as simple conceptual sketches.