Housing Morals and Policing Migrants in Fascist Spain

While the countryside remained the arcadia for the fascist regime of Francisco Franco, the industrial development that sustained the dictatorship in the 1940s and 1950s pulled many from the country to the city, migrants who gathered informally in the outskirts of cities and in a version of what Engels had defined, some eighty years earlier, as a“fluid population:” the uprooted country-city migrant who, freed from both law and land, lacked a legal and an economic status. This paper presents how, in the context of mid-century Barcelona, State and Church officials summoned architects’ and their expertise to provide for the urban infrastructure that could select, police, and shepherd this emerging working class— specifically by means of slum clearance and the provision of modernist housing. The process framed the designer as a regulator of migration and a problem-solver, and the problem as one of civic and religious “degeneration.” The episode thus provides for a historical referent of the ways the which hygienist and technocratic discourses of urban development and housing provision have fed into politics of religious, ethnic, and national essentialism.