Bringing life to rooftops: lights and shadows from the perspective of neighborhood communities. The case of the Ciutat Vella district (Barcelona)

Contemporary cities face several challenges, including the need to create environments that promote active and healthy ageing for an increasingly ageing population, as well as the humanization and renaturalisation of urban life. In this context, the communal rooftops of vertical properties are revealed as an ideal space for the construction of urban sustainability and the generation of socially inclusive environments that promote active ageing, providing important benefits for physical and mental health and personal and collective wellbeing.
Based on a participatory diagnosis, developed through qualitative research techniques, this article aims to demonstrate and explain the results, derived from the first phase of a research project, which aims to investigate how the protagonists, neighbors of the neighborhoods of La Barceloneta and El Raval (Barcelona, Spain) understand and perceive the use of community rooftops, essentially identifying potentialities, limitations, and conditions.
The main results achieved are the following: firstly, in both study contexts, which concentrate indicators of social vulnerability, particularly among the elderly population, they coincide in pointing out the main potential of the rooftop as a “meso” space, intermediate between the home and the public space, privileged for sociability and community building, as well as the greening and development of environmental sustainability. Secondly, the residents’ associations see the need for a series of conditions and requirements for neighborhood use of the communal rooftop; these include on the one hand, technical improvements to the space (accessibility, comfort, safety and durability), and, on the other hand, improvements in collective uses, through the drafting of and compliance with a map of uses and rules of coexistence. In relation to this last group of conditions, the data show that, in the case of the Raval, the protagonists of the map of uses are owners and tenants, while in Barceloneta they are neighbors, owners of tourist housing and tourists. And, thirdly, despite sharing a similar vision of the potential of neighborhood use of the communal rooftop and its conditions of enjoyment, the visions of the neighbors in relation to the tensions and difficulties derived from this use are significantly different in the two neighborhoods studied. In the Raval, the main difficulties identified are the maintenance of the space, as well as its management and rules of use, to avoid neighborhood conflicts of coexistence, especially between owners and tenants. Meanwhile, in the case of Barceloneta, they unanimously expressed how the pressure of mass tourism, manifested through a constant emergence of illegal tourist flats in the neighborhood, makes it unfeasible to promote the neighborhood’s use of the communal rooftop. In this way, the tourist pressure suffered by the neighborhood is a determining limiting factor for the collective use of the rooftops, and tensions are focused between neighbors, owners of tourist housing and tourists.