It's been a busy week; first some extra work came through that I had to take care of, and then Oscar, who is my little black cat, came down with conjunctivitis in his left eye. With a houseful of cats, of course you have to quickly take care of anything that might be infectious, so Oscar had a very traumatic visit to Lluis the vet, who dumped three different kinds of drops into his eye. While I was carrying him down the street in his basket, he was howling the whole time, and he is an extremely noisy cat. Everyone was staring, of course, and I'm sure they thought I was torturing the poor thing. Well, he's fine now.

The number of tourists downtown is amazing. I went down to the Ramblas on Friday, and--this is just a guess--75% of the people down there were foreigners. Nothing wrong with this, of course, it's Barcelona's largest source of income. But it does seem like the Ramblas, the Barrio Gotico, and the area around the Sagrada Familia are close to becoming tourist ghettos, since you don't see many locals there. Up here in Gracia, where I live, we don't see many tourists. A couple or three come down from the Parque Guell, and that's about it.

Seems to me that young women are dressing more revealingly than ever. This can be a good thing, of course, but you'd be surprised at how often it isn't. Though Spanish people are generally not as overweight as Brits and Americans can get, they're bigger than they used to be, and current fashions conceal almost nothing. It also seems that more and more people are having plastic surgery. Corporacion Dermoestetica, Spain's largest plastic-surgery company, is listed on the stock exchange, and runs very expensive television advertising, along with a daily full page in La Vanguardia. The model they use is a classic BLBFLK--"Body Like Barbie, Face Like Ken." Finally, tattoos have become entirely too popular. Used to be only sailors and prisoners had tattoos. I still don't know why anyone would want one.

The media is certainly doing a good job of stirring up panic about the rural-exurban crime wave, or alleged crime wave. I still haven't seen any statistics on whether crime has really increased. There are two different types of crime that are receiving lots of attention: 1) night raids on small villages, in which a group of burglars breaks into several unoccupied buildings and steals everything there, and 2) armed home invasions / "express" kidnappings, in which a gang of armed robbers breaks into an expensive house and holds the people there hostage while stealing cash and jewelry. The home invasions are of course causing more furor than the burglaries, but rural Catalonia is literally up in arms: several towns and villages have set up patrols, of which at least one was going around packing heat.

They broke up one of the gangs that was committing burglaries; they were a bunch of Romanians who were camped out in the woods in a very remote area of Tarragona province. These guys were apparently responsible for more than a hundred break-ins. We'll see whether this calms down the hysteria.

A constant theme in the Spanish media since September 11 has been that the Bush administration is encouraging panic, hysteria, and paranoia among the American people in order to get away with its nefarious bellicosity. I've been to the US three times since September 11, and I didn't see any fear or panic there; certainly a lot less than there is now in Catalonia.

Here are the Vanguardia's main front-page headlines for the last six days:

Tuesday: Homeowners mobilize against robberies

Wednesday: Four more houses robbed despite state of alert

Thursday: House robberies question model of urban growth (!)

Friday: Patchy police response to wave of robberies in Catalonia

Saturday: Captured Romanians lived in forest like guerrillas

Sunday: Judges call for legal reforms to face wave of robberies

Methinks this is overreacting just a bit. From what I can tell, nobody's been killed yet in Catalonia in this "crime wave," and I haven't seen any evidence that this kind of crime has actually significantly increased.

Get the hysterical response from Wednesday's Vangua:

"Single-family houses have had enormous social success, surely because on one hand, they are the modern reflection of an isolated, trusting, and individualist lifestyle, and, on the other hand, the symbol of a prosperity that, to be seen, needs to move farther and farther away from metropolitan nuclei in search of cheaper land. However, development has been demonstrated to be incapable of facing the phenomenon of organized criminal gangs that move around freely in Europe...

Now wait a minute. Wanting to live in a house instead of an apartment means you support an individualistic, probably Anglo-Saxon lifestyle?

The crime suffered in extense areas of Catalonia is seriously questioning a model of disperse or diffuse expansion, through isolated houses and subdivisions, where social cohesion disappears almost completely because in these places there are no public spaces (plazas, services, offices, or markets). but only the possibility of enjoying a private and personal space (garage, swimming pool, yard with barbecue) where social relations disappear, according to Manel Cunill, ecologist and expert in environmental studies.

That's right, there's no social cohesion in suburban developments. Huh, that's surprising, since Leawood, Kansas, is pretty damn socially cohesive, in my experience. People come together at public spaces like parks (the city park is wonderful, with services unimaginable in Spain), schools (that's one purpose of the Friday night football game), churches (oh no!), club meetings (I know a guy who is in a karate club, for example), bowling leagues (I know someone who belongs to a bowling league AND a darts league), the gym, and, of course, bars and restaurants. And shopping malls, which are merely an indoor downtown. I think Manel Cunill is talking out of his hat.

"...Living in an isolated manner leads to, in the end, considering private security, also," says Manel Cunill.

Anything wrong with that? If you want to spend your money on a security guard, don't you have the right? It's not like there aren't private security guards all over the place in Barcelona anyway.

Living in your own house, separated from the rest, far away from agglomerations, and in contact with nature was an incorrect road to paradise. Urban planners and geographers have been denouncing the ecological impacts of this model that is trying to convert all of Catalonia into a city, which will mean heavy occupation of the land, the segregation of national spaces, the foment of private transport, and the waste of resources and energy.

"Urban planner" can be defined as "someone who knows how everybody else ought to live." As for "wasting resources and energy," uh, the market decides whether resources are being wasted. If driving were inefficient, people wouldn't do it. Rule Number One of Life: Never, never, never take sociologists seriously.

Public vigilance in order to overcome this social discohesion has an incalculable cost. Will we have to patrol all the streets and alleys of the subdivisions? The cost would be unacceptable and, surely, ineffective. When one zone is watched, the other part of the development is unprotected, says Cunill. "It isn't viable or logical to say, 'I want a house where I want it,' and then ask public power to fix all the security problems that I am causing it," said Jaume Curbet.

That's crazy. First, it's actually quite easy to patrol a subdivision. Second, since when is one area unprotected while the other is being patrolled? Don't the cops have radios and telephones? Isn't this just as true in the city, since if the cops are in Plaza Rovira they're not over in Plaza del Norte? As for Curbet, he doesn't seem to understand that the job of public power is to do whatever the citizens want, and if they want police protection for their subdivision, they're either going to get it or somebody is going to be voted out of office. One of the about three basic responsibilities of government is to protect the citizenry from crime, and who is Curbet to say that if you move to the country, you lose police protection? What an arrogant jerk. He seems to think it's the citizens' job to comply with the government's wishes, rather than vice versa.

Curbet predicts an expansion of the industry of private security (alarms, electronic control elements) and an increase in vigilance services, patrols, and intervention on the part of private companies. This trend has already been observed in other cities. It is bunkerization, walling-in, and the physical delimitation of protected spaces with controlled access. More than 30 million Americans, that is 12% of the population, live in the 150,000 closed residential communities that there are in the United States. Exclusive and excluding subdivisions where security measures are reinforced with walls, locks, doors, barriers, alarms, guards, and video cameras. Here, the law prohibits it, thanks to legislation that still, on paper, defends public space, the best police force. "Privatization of security is leading us retreat to the medieval," said Curbet.

Oh, of course, it's all the Americans' fault. Actually, I don't think the law could possibly prohibit the establishment of a gated community in Spain, and who is Curbet to say that people shouldn't live in one if they want to? Note that the arguments made by Curbet and Cunill are exactly the same as those made by American lefty anti-sprawl Utne Reader readers for about the last fifteen years. In fact, you can read all about both sides of the issue in Joel Garreau's Edge City, published back in 1991. Nothing these two guys are saying is new at all. I'd also like to know where the statistics came from.

Here's a 2002 article from USA Today giving both sides of the argument, though leaning toward the anti-gated community side. It says 6% of American households live inside gated communities.