"The worse house in the worse district ". Districts of immigration and marginality in the urban periphery of Barcelona. The case of Badalona

Abstract

In the Serra d'en Mena, in the bordering zone with the town of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, are some of the districts with more degraded areas of Badalona; those are the districts to which the immigrants coming from other Spanish countries, had fixed their residence in half-full 20th Century. Today this zone is one of the most saturate places of extracommunitarian immigrants, which are occupying the spaces leaved by the people who was moved towards other points of the city. In parallel with this process of substitution, a native speech has been organized betraying the degradation of these urban spaces, perceived as violent spaces, of confinement, estigma and social disorganization. In these discourses, a series of physical, economic, political and social factors interact in a dynamics of vulnerability and exclusion that aims in the sense of a new urban poverty, a poverty spatially concentrated and unlinked with the social and macroeconomic dynamics of the rest of the city.