From there, it proposes to read Poblenou through that which is normally unseen but permeates everything: air as a dense, historical, and political substance. In this neighborhood, the air has been laden with factory smoke, demolition dust, metropolitan traffic, urban transformation projects, and new economies that promise innovation while unequally redistributing space, land, and even the ability to breathe. Walking through Poblenou is, therefore, walking through a conflicted ecology where working-class memory, industrial heritage, touristification, urban design, and contemporary artistic practices intersect.<\/p>\n
Poblenou was one of Barcelona\u2019s great industrial landscapes. The concentration of textile, flour, metallurgical, and chemical factories led to the neighborhood being known as the \u201cCatalan Manchester,\u201d and this productive density not only transformed the land but also shaped an atmosphere, living conditions, and a social fabric made up of cooperatives, workers\u2019 associations, and forms of neighborhood solidarity. Later, deindustrialization, the textile crisis, and large-scale urban development projects, especially since the 1992 Olympic Games and then with the 22@ urban redevelopment project, profoundly altered this ecosystem. This route stems from that continuity: from the atmosphere of the factory to the atmosphere of urban branding.<\/p>\n
La Escocesa<\/b><\/p>\n La Escocesa, as the starting point of the route, is especially fruitful because it encapsulates many of the layers the route will unfold: industrial memory, the neighborhood\u2019s transformation, the factory\u2019s enduring presence, and the cultural reappropriation of the space. La Escocesa is a repurposed former factory, and this fact alone is enough to highlight one of Poblenou\u2019s central tensions: what happens when a production landscape becomes a cultural landscape while still being permeated by speculation, the loss of context, and the fragility of working-class memory? The factory doesn\u2019t disappear entirely; it changes its regime, its narrative, and its users.<\/p>\n The case of Poblenou clearly demonstrates that many urban transformations showed little respect for industrial heritage and that, in numerous cases, only isolated chimneys or fragments remain, preserved as visual emblems.<\/p>\n Contemporary criticism of this process is clear: maintaining a vertical element can serve as a heritage pretext while the complexes, processes, and stories of work that gave them meaning disappear. Arriving at La Escocesa at the start of the route allows us to formulate the crucial question: can art and culture repair this loss of context, or do they merely aestheticize it? Can they cultivate a new sensitivity to the air, the dust, and the shared breath, or are they integrated into the very machinery that transforms the neighborhood into a brand?<\/p>\n Transit and Green Axes: Pere IV \/ Crist\u00f3bal de Moura \/ Diagonal \/ Bilbao \/ Badajoz<\/b><\/p>\n This stop doesn\u2019t focus on a building, but rather on a stretch of the city. And that\u2019s important, because the theme of the route demands walking through the real atmosphere of the neighborhood, not just its cultural institutions. Pere IV, in particular, retains some of the contradictory density of Poblenou: it\u2019s a diagonal street, over three kilometers long, that cuts across Cerd\u00e0\u2019s grid, was a historical exit from Barcelona, \u200b\u200band continues to function as a traffic corridor. Narrow sidewalks, busy roads, workshops, restaurants, tech companies, and remnants of a repurposed industrial landscape coexist along it. It\u2019s a good place to understand that air isn\u2019t abstract: it\u2019s made of speed, friction, combustion, logistics, and unequal uses of space.<\/p>\n The recent transformations of Poblenou have turned these streets into a battleground between daily life, consumption, tourism, innovation, and social displacement. The literature on the neighborhood insists that improvements to public space can be accompanied by gentrification, privatization, and new forms of exclusion. In that sense, walking these streets is also about understanding how the city distributes mobility, noise, investment attraction, and visibility, while relegating the material conditions of everyday life to the background.<\/p>\n The stop at Hangar introduces a shift in perspective. If the street confronts us with air as both infrastructure and conflict, an art production center allows us to question how to make perceptible what is normally unseen: particles, toxicities, atmospheres, vibrations, waste, or memories of work. In the route\u2019s documentation, Hangar appears precisely as a place from which to consider contemporary practices capable of making these invisible materialities perceptible. Its interest lies not only in the cultural program but also in what it allows us to experiment with: other forms of attention, other techniques of listening, other ways of making public what usually remains in the background.<\/p>\n This stop can also be interpreted in continuity with the material history of Poblenou. The neighborhood has gone from being a territory of industrial production to a post-industrial landscape where creativity and knowledge often function as new engines of urban development. Therefore, Hangar should not be interpreted naively. The question is not simply to celebrate cultural transformation, but to ask what art can do in the face of this ambiguous legacy: whether it merely accompanies the new narrative of the neighborhood or whether it can interrupt it, thickening the memory of the bodies, the work, and the waste that preceded it and inhabit it now.<\/p>\n Jiser<\/b><\/p>\n Jiser allows us to scale down and, at the same time, radically broaden the question of the route. In a smaller, more intimate, and non-hegemonic space, air ceases to be read only as an urban or environmental issue and also appears as a universal right and as a political condition of livability. Closely linked to Mediterranean and Palestinian imaginaries, this point on the route proposes pausing to collectively read Achille Mbembe\u2019s\u00a0\u201cThe Universal Right to Breathe\u201d<\/a>. In this text, published in 2020, Mbembe reminds us that humanity was already threatened with asphyxiation before the pandemic and proposes understanding breathing beyond its biological dimension, as something we have in common and that cannot be appropriated.<\/p>\n Thinking about air, then, means shifting the focus from the neighborhood to a broader political ecology. Breathing ceases to be a metaphor or an exclusively health-related issue, revealing itself as a concrete measure of justice: who can breathe, under what conditions, and who continues to be exposed to forms of material, military, environmental, or social suffocation. If at other stops the air appears laden with traffic, dust, industry, and unequal urbanization, here it also appears as a fundamental right to existence, inseparable from the possibility of a shared and livable life for all.<\/p>\n Pla\u00e7a de les Gl\u00f2ries \/ Museu del Disseny surroundings<\/b><\/p>\n Ending at Gl\u00f2ries allows us to immediately situate the metropolitan scale of the problem. Here, air is already perceived as the result of urban planning policy decisions, road infrastructure, and urban imaginaries. Gl\u00f2ries concentrates large flows of mobility, urban renewal projects, and an institutional will to transform a former traffic bottleneck into a more pleasant, greener, and more representative landscape. But this restorative image coexists with a less photogenic reality: persistent traffic, the pressure of major thoroughfares, and the continuity of an urban model that displaces conflicts without fully resolving them: the 1,300 deaths per year in Barcelona due to air pollution (Barcelona Public Health Agency, 2024).<\/p>\n Furthermore, Gl\u00f2ries is part of a sequence of transformations that have redefined contemporary Poblenou: the urbanization of the lower Meridiana section, the opening of Diagonal Avenue towards the sea, the renovation of the ring road, and the general reorganization of the surrounding area. Taken together, these projects show how the city has tried to suture its industrial past through grand gestures of redesign. The question that opens this first stop is uncomfortable but necessary: \u200b\u200bcan urban planning produce more breathable air without simultaneously questioning traffic congestion, speculation, and the inequalities that generate it?<\/p>\n Museu del Disseny \u2013 DHUB<\/b><\/p>\n At DHUB, the air itself becomes an institutional narrative. The museum functions as a device from which to consider how design has participated both in the promise of better futures and in the normalization of certain forms of progress. Design has contributed to imagining comfort, hygiene, efficiency, mobility, and well-being; but it has also been part of the material systems that have made some worlds breathable at the cost of making others more toxic. Making a stop here means shifting the environmental question to the realm of material culture: what objects, infrastructures, and aesthetics have produced the air we inhabit today?<\/p>\n From this point, the museum also connects with the rest of the neighborhood as both a showcase and a symptom. Nearby, the tension between industrial memory and the post-industrial city becomes visible: preserved buildings, isolated chimneys, new offices, cultural facilities, and large-scale renovation projects. Design is not outside of this process; it is part of it. Therefore, this stop serves to delve deeper into the topic: it is not enough to simply make the ecological crisis visible: we must also question the languages \u200b\u200bthat have made it acceptable, manageable, or even attractive.<\/p>\n As curator of\u00a0Matter Matters<\/i>\u00a0at the Museu del Disseny-DHub Barcelona, \u200b\u200bI am interested in concluding this exploration by returning the question to the air we share. Marx and Engels wrote in their Communist Manifesto that \u201call that is solid melts into air,\u201d but read literally from our current ecological perspective, that phrase takes on a different weight: the city does not disappear; it persists in its emissions, its waste, its infrastructure, and the particles it releases during its production, use, and disposal. Perhaps that is why asking again, \u201cLove is in the air?\u201d is not a lighthearted irony, but a way of gauging the extent to which we are capable of imagining a more just city, one more conscious of its materials and truly more breathable.<\/p>\n \u2013 This route has been developed in collaboration with Olga Subir\u00f3s<\/a>, curator, architect, and exhibition designer. Her projects adopt an integrative perspective on 21st-century culture and the transformations of the digital age.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/a-desk.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/OlgaSubiros_Loveair_01.jpg\")
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\nA*DESK and GRAF present themed routes focused on critical reflection on content from the A*DESK magazine repository, based on its interpretation by a specialist (historian, artist, curator or critic) and relating it to the territory. The routes, which are conducted in person, include both spaces belonging to the GRAF community and other types of places and spaces, cultural or otherwise, for public or private use, which reinforce the discourse and artistic proposal, taking advantage of the opportunity to visit certain places that are usually closed or inaccessible.<\/p>\n