Miquel Àngel Essomba, director of the UNESCO Centre of Catalonia, analyses the causes of the riots of the Besòs, which resulted in a fatality.

According to Miquel Àngel Essomba, who lived and worked as an educator in the Besòs for years, the neighborhood has a large deficit of associative network capable of articulating proposals of relations and coexistence. It should be noted that the two Catholic parishes in the District have played an important role in the history of this neighbourhood of 50 years, especially in the strengthening of networks of people who work for the community, and the Institute of the South of the territory, the Civic Center or associations as Gregal, carried out a great task in the promotion of young people.

But for a neighborhood of 25,000 inhabitants, this is too little. Also add the peripheral location within the city and the district itself, the chronic deficit in transport and infrastructure, the lack of economic network and the proximity of the neighborhood of La Mina Sant Adrià del Besòs, we have the perfect cocktail to aggravate a situation of tension and lack of coexistence.

The Besòs is not the Raval, which is why both public and private institutions have allocated scarce resources to the district. The Besòs does not sell, nor may interest those middle classes who go in search of a more diverse and multicultural social environment. In the field of education, schools do carry out a positive task though limited by investment, and education during leisure time has not yet materialized: there has been a community center for several years and a youth camp, but with difficulties to keep up, and it was not until last year when the first Scout group was created in the history of the neighborhood.

To this situation we must add a phenomenon of population ageing and a progressive switch to the occupation of vacant homes by foreign citizens, most of them from Senegal and Pakistan. This process of population replacement occured without strong mediation devices to open bridges of communication, knowledge and dialogue between the new newcoming neighbours, thus causing withdrawal and segregation between groups grounded on origin.

Solutions for the Besòs according to Essomba, pass through three basic actions. First, create cultural facilities in the heart of the neighborhood. Very close to this area there is the complex of the Fòrum and Diagonal Mar, but both spaces are beyond the symbolic boundaries that demarcate the Besòs. It is necessary to attract people of all kinds to the streets and squares of the neighborhood. Secondly, it is essential to make a large investment in the promotion of associationism, not recreational or vindictive  - there already are clubs of dance or the traditional neighbourhood association - but transforming, involving people from outside who bet for this neighborhood community and with people from the same neighborhood willing to get involved in social activism. And, thirdly, we need to carry out a major street work, with workers, social educators and cultural mediators, to create spaces of recognition able to prevent violent situations and to promote living-together, far from coexistence based on latent conflict.