Have the cities' red-light district turned green?
El Raval, Barcelona (scroll down to read more)
Were Jean Genet, the French writer and connoisseur of low-life, to land in El Raval today, he would recognise little of the world of vagabonds, flea-bitten bordellos, transsexual prostitutes and rent boys he portrays in his 1949 work ‘A Thief’s Journal’ (though he may be chuffed to find a square now named after him).
Once the biggest red-light district in Europe, El Raval (which translates from the Arabic as ‘an area outside the walls’) has seen the most aggressive of the city’s urbanisation projects over the last decade: whole swathes of dank apartment blocks were bulldozed, making way for new plazas and boulevards and space for museums and hotels.
But venture below the Carrer Hospital to the lower portside streets of El Raval and a very different panorama unfolds. Dubbed Barrio Chino (or ‘Chinatown’) in the 1940s in a reference to the less salubrious districts of US cities, sex workers still gather by the dozen in the dark shadows of its narrow streets. Unlike Genet’s days, when El Raval was a magnet for the under-classes from other parts of Spain, these days the girls come mainly from West Africa and the old Eastern block. It’s not ancient stonewalls anymore that separate them from the city proper, but the barricades of EU immigration laws.
Writer: Suzanne Wales
Were Jean Genet, the French writer and connoisseur of low-life, to land in El Raval today, he would recognise little of the world of vagabonds, flea-bitten bordellos, transsexual prostitutes and rent boys he portrays in his 1949 work ‘A Thief’s Journal’ (though he may be chuffed to find a square now named after him).
Once the biggest red-light district in Europe, El Raval (which translates from the Arabic as ‘an area outside the walls’) has seen the most aggressive of the city’s urbanisation projects over the last decade: whole swathes of dank apartment blocks were bulldozed, making way for new plazas and boulevards and space for museums and hotels.
But venture below the Carrer Hospital to the lower portside streets of El Raval and a very different panorama unfolds. Dubbed Barrio Chino (or ‘Chinatown’) in the 1940s in a reference to the less salubrious districts of US cities, sex workers still gather by the dozen in the dark shadows of its narrow streets. Unlike Genet’s days, when El Raval was a magnet for the under-classes from other parts of Spain, these days the girls come mainly from West Africa and the old Eastern block. It’s not ancient stonewalls anymore that separate them from the city proper, but the barricades of EU immigration laws.
Writer: Suzanne Wales
- 03 of 08
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architecture 08 Jun 2009
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