Spatial reordering and social pathology in the periphery of Barcelona: the social impact of urban transformations. Stefano Portelli, Institut Català d'Antropologia Paper presented at the XXI annual meeting of the International Social Theory Consortium, Copenhagen, Copenhagen campus of Aalborg University, June 26-27, 2013 ABSTRACT. Anthropologists in the 70 described the collapse of the social order and the spreading of diseases in native societies as a consequence of the reordering of the population according to the rules of the frontier, or to colonial domination. In some cases, stress was given to the spatial modification fostered or imposed by colonial rule [Bourdieu 1972, Jaulin 1970]. But since the “spatial turn” [Soja, 1989; Warf, Arias 2009] and the discovering of the “new urban frontier” in the 80 and 90 [Smith, 1996], we have the means to observe similar phenomena of spatial reordering experienced by growing sectors of the contemporary urban population. These processes have a direct impact on the modification of the human landscape and shattering of pre-existing frames of meaning and habitus in the neighborhoods and communities affected [see Herzfeld 2010]. Both in emergency situations like those related to 2009 earthquake in central Italy [Casacchia et al. 2012], and in urban communities hit by contemporary urban renewal processes as the ones I studied [Portelli 2010], people suffer from a unitarian frame of social pathology, that is likely to be linked to the “military” restructuring of their vital spaces [Graham 2010; Weizman 2007]. Through data compiled during a long-term fieldwork in one of the most rapidly changing towns in Europe – Barcelona –, especially in a peripheral neighborhood that suffered partial demolition between 2003 and 2010, I suggest that the various diseases that appear at the individual level (i.e. depression, paranoia, obsession, addictions, psychosomatic disorders...) are consequences of the social impact of the spatial reordering (i.e.: disruption of neighborhood bonds, collapse of local techniques of social equilibrium). In cases as those reported, an ethnographic approach could be an essential contribution to diagnosis and therapy, not only as a mean for observation, but as a tool for intervention. Intro. This paper explores the social impact of contemporary urban renewal processes, in terms of inducing or unchaining collective and individual pathologies . It draws on the ethnographic data I compiled during various years of fieldwork with people who suffered or are suffering the consequences of violent spatial transformations. I expose some of the social and psychological consequences I observed during the development of a particular process of urban renewal: during the years between 2004 and 2010, I had the chance to follow the process of demolition of a low-income neighbourhood in the periphery of Barcelona, in which, for the particular urban conformation of the public space, the transformation had a particularly violent impact on the social order of the community living there. As a complement to the data compiled in this neighbourhood, my observations are supported through comparison with a series of other similar situations I researched on, in other neighbourhoods of the same city.