Barcelona’s Rec Comtal: The multiple lives of a millenary water infrastructure

Abstract

The Rec Comtal is a canal that provided water to Barcelona for a thousand years, until it was disconnected from the water supply network in the late 20th century. Nevertheless, a small part of it continued to carry water, and remained inconspicuously active through informal uses (recreational and agricultural). The rediscovery of the canal in the 21st Century, initially in the form of archaeological remains, has made this hydraulic infrastructure newly visible and increasingly present in the social and political life of the city. It has been reconceptualized as a future “green infrastructure”, reclaimed as part of the historical memory of some neighbourhoods, and activated as a political ally in the resistance against certain urban developments. This article explores the multiple ways in which the Rec has resurfaced in the last two decades. It then zooms into an area - between Can San Joan and Vallbona - which was renovated following grassroots mobilizations, which anticipates the redesign of the Rec as a new green infrastructure for the city, and where this vision has produced friction with existing recreational uses such as bathing, now deemed inappropriate. Drawing from the anthropology of infrastructures literature we conceptualize the Rec as an infrastructure capable of channelling things other than water, including imaginaries, affect, promises, desires and moral behaviours.