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Middle Ages to Early Modern Period
El Raval emerged during the Medieval era as an urban settlement which extended beyond Barcelona's city walls. In the 14th century, a second set of walls were constructed around the city; El Raval became an intramural space, predominantly devoted to agriculture.

From the 15th to 18th centuries, El Raval was associated with poverty, transient populations, and criminality. Religious foundations spread throughout the region during this era, establishing 30 monasteries and convents in the neighborhood.

The Industrial Revolution
During the 19th century, El Raval was transformed by the Industrial Revolution. Coal-fueled textile mills proliferated, along with multi-storey, densely-packed tenement buildings constructed to house the rapid influx of migrant workers from the countryside. Conditions in these tenements were generally poor. Water and lavatory access was limited to shared facilities, located in communal courtyards. In these circumstances, epidemic diseases were common, and the mortality rate was high; many of the neighborhood's inhabitants didn't survive beyond their late teens.

In addition to mills and factories, a diversity of more modest industrial endeavors animated El Raval during this era, including slaughterhouses, tanneries, and brickworks.

Post-Industrial Period
Towards the end of the 19th century, many of El Raval's larger manufacturers relocated outside the city. Spanish migrant workers continued to flow into the neighborhood, claiming abandoned factory buildings as ad-hoc residences, with additional shacks constructed on rooftops; this pattern of habitation came to be known as barraquismo vertical, or vertical slums. Other vacant factory buildings were partitioned into smaller workspaces. An eclectic mix of specialty shops emerged, trading in wares such as candles and theatrical supplies; in addition, a network of services catering to day laborers constellated around El Raval's port.

Taverns, clubs, music halls, and brothels multiplied during this transitional period, earning El Raval a reputation as Barcelona's bohemian neighborhood and red light district. During the same period of time, anarcho-syndicalist political organization and activism spread among El Raval's laboring class. Workers' cooperatives, trade unions, radical press, and social, cultural and educational centers for laborers flourished. Violent confrontations broke out during a general strike in 1902, and again in 1909, during the Tragic Week (La Setmana Tràgica), during which working-class protest of a military conscription led to vandalism, arson, and a deadly clash with Spanish army forces. Subsequently, industrialists hired gunmen to assassinate prominent union leaders, in what came to be known as the years of pistolerismo, or gun law.

Living conditions remained strained by poverty and overcrowding. In 1930, the neighborhood's population reached 230,000, with a population density of 103,060 per square kilometer--about ten times Barcelona's average. Inhabitants were plagued by a variety of infectious diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis, and typhoid.

Following the Spanish Civil War, the conservative Franco regime banned prostitution, and closed theatres and brothels; El Raval deteriorated, although illegal prostitution persisted.

In the 1970s and 80s, heroin abuse and trafficking became significant issues for the neighborhood, causing many residents to leave. Between 1970 and 1986, Raval experienced a 40% population decline.

Urban Reform and Renewal
In the 1980s, Barcelona's municipal government launched a series of urban renewal projects known as PERI (or "Special Plans of Interior Reform"), which were aimed at alleviating poverty and social inequality in deprived neighborhoods such as El Raval. Taken together, these projects (and their underlying principles) would come to be known as the Barcelona Model. Although PERI began with top-down policy decisions, its planners made an effort to engage local residents, and solicit their input in the planning process.

El Raval's renewal included a course of demolition referred to as esponjamiento ("mopping up"), aimed at reducing overcrowding and housing decay. Churches, cloisters, schools and warehouses generally survived demolition; scrapyards, brothels, slaughterhouses, and selected tenement housing were bulldozed. Those displaced by the process were offered either new housing in the same neighborhood, or a lump sum buyout.

Major cultural institutions and public spaces replaced a portion of the demolished housing. Examples include the Richard Meier-designed Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, and the Rambla del Raval, a 317-meter-long public promenade. These institutions have in turn attracted art galleries, cafes, restaurants, and fashion shops.

Critics have argued that renewal efforts represent subtle attempts to assert greater control over the neighborhood's social life. New cultural investment has catered primarily to tourists, capitalizing on the neighborhood's gritty past. Its public space has been redesigned to draw more affluent outsiders in, and enlist them in displacing problematic social behaviors. Following El Raval's renewal, property prices per square meter are now fifteen times higher on average than their pre-renewal values.

Demographics
As of Barcelona's 2016 census, El Raval was home to 47,986 inhabitants.

El Raval is one of Barcelona's most multicultural neighborhoods. In 2016, immigrants comprised 49.6% of the neighborhood's population. Moroccans, Pakistanis, Indonesians, Filipinos, Bangladeshis, French, Italians, and Romanians comprise some of the predominant nationalities.

The 2016 birth rate, 9.6 per 1000 inhabitants, was slightly higher than the city's average of 8.5. Adults aged 24-65 made up the vast majority of the population, at 65%.

El Raval's 2016 unemployment rate was 7%, compared to 4% in greater Barcelona.

Representations in Popular Discourse
During El Raval's post-industrial period, the neighborhood came to occupy a prominent place in Barcelona's moral and social discourse. Its extreme poverty, itinerant worker population, history of radical activism, and marginal institutions provoked the attention of novelists, journalists, educators, and political activists, whose depictions established it as a place of poverty, vice, disease, danger and squalor. Such sensational depictions of the neighborhood rarely featured its working-class inhabitants, however, who have historically comprised the vast majority of the neighborhood.

In the 1920s, journalists rechristened El Raval's southern portion Barrio Chino, or Chinatown. The name described no real immigrant enclave, but was rather meant to evoke associations with San Francisco's Chinatown, portrayed in a contemporaneous film as a mysterious underworld. Paco Madrid, journalist for the periodical Escandálo ("The Scandal"), was the first to use the term; in print, he also described Barrio Chino as "the city's ulcer," "the refuge of bad people," and "a forbidden zone." Barcelona's middle-class press proceeded to cover this theme extensively, portraying the neighborhood as criminal and immoral. Doctors pathologized the population, while politicians both liberal and conservative agreed on the need to impose order. The neighborhood's bad reputation has inspired and informed several successive plans for reform, including the completed PERI renewal project of the 1980s and 90s.

Renewal and Neighborhood Identity
El Raval's PERI renewal project involved a concerted effort to change its public image. The establishment of a neighborhood identity or "brand" was a prominent aspect of the Barcelona Model's program; in the course of its renewal project, El Raval was branded as a multicultural arts enclave. The neighborhood's post-renewal cultural institutions host events which help bolster this identity; for example, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona hosts the yearly Sónar Barcelona Festival of Advanced Music and New Media Art. Working artists have set up studio space along the Carrer Rierta.

El Raval's branding has diffused into public space and use in diverse ways. On the street, graffiti art is common, and frequently incorporates the neighborhood's name in its imagery. In the private sector, number of newer clubs, theatres, and businesses incorporate any of the neighborhood's common names into their own branding.

In 2001, a coalition of neighborhood social and cultural organizations, government officials, businesses, schools, and individual citizens established Fundació Tot Raval, a civic foundation whose stated mission is to "enhance social cohesion, coexistence and quality of life in the neighborhood." In 2005, they launched a neighborhood campaign coining the verb ravalejar (which appends a Catalan verbal suffix to the neighborhood's name). As the campaign described it, ravalejar characterized an attitude particular to residents of the neighborhood, by which they expressed its unique and authentic character. In recognition of the neighborhood's multicultural nature, this marketing material was distributed in not just Castilian and Catalan, but also, Urdu, Arabic, and Tagalog.

Beyond messaging, Fundació Tot Raval also plays an active role in sponsoring community events, often engaging with its diverse populations. Current foundation projects include community health initiatives, educational projects, an inter-religious work group, public art events, and a major cultural festival.