However, a large part of the people who live there come from the rural world and carry within them worldviews and knowledge linked to the care and cultivation of the land. Moreover, the city of l’Hospitalet itself is very close to the Parc Agrari del Baix Llobregat.
The development of modern societies and the market economy demanded the annihilation of peasant culture and, ultimately, of all those life-worlds in which the activity of human beings was still linked to specific territories and their natural rhythms. The split between society and nature, non-existent in peasant cultures and economies, constitutes the epistemological foundation of the unlimited depredation of resources.
The annihilation of the peasant world involves placing its knowledge, ways of life, and worldviews outside of what can be thought. In part, this operation is carried out by integrating any difference into the illusion of a liberal society formed by a “universal middle class” (male, white, bourgeois, and with normative abilities, gender, and sexuality) made up of individuals who think of themselves as autonomous instead of recognizing the relationships of interdependence between them and with their physical environment.
L’Hospitalet and the metropolitan area of Barcelona, like all conurbations, are the result of large population movements, from the countryside to the city. The inhabitants of rural environments, peasants, have been forced to abandon the land to sell their labor in industrialized cities. In l’Hospitalet, the migratory flows initially came from the rest of the Spanish State, in the 60s and 70s, and from Latin America, Africa, and Asia from the 90s onwards. These populations share the fact of having been the object of two interrelated processes: precariousness and stigmatization. Thus, substandard housing, overcrowding, or labor exploitation, palpable signs of this precariousness, translate in turn into the stigmatization of the peripheries and their inhabitants, represented as a social danger and a focus of civic degeneration. Faced with this stigmatization, there are a multitude of reactions: on the one hand, acculturation, that is, the denial of one’s own social and cultural origin and assimilation to the values of an idealized urban middle class; on the other, the forms of opposition and dissidence that have been imagined, organized, and put into practice by those who, from the outset, were destined to occupy a subordinate place in history.
Barcelona, its metropolitan area, and the Parc Agrari del Baix Llobregat constitute a single socio-ecosystem whose metabolism is currently unsustainable. We understand that the social, economic, and biological spheres are interdependent and that, therefore, it is necessary to create imaginaries and cultural practices, and to put into practice ways of life and economies that are desirable, but require a lower flow of resources and generate less waste.
In LaFundició we cultivate the land of the peripheries, taking care of the lives that inhabit them, building the good life in common.
