In Subsistencias, persecuciones y resistencias en el Área Metropolitana de Barcelona, Óscar López Catalán undertakes a rich ethnographic investigation into the precarious livelihoods and survival strategies of Romanian Roma populations engaged in informal waste collection. Set against the backdrop of Barcelona’s expanding urban margins, the study reveals a microcosm of economic marginality, mobility regimes, and policed informality. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation, López Catalán captures the voices of individuals who navigate a semi-legal trade in recyclable materials—paper, cardboard, scrap metal—constantly negotiating between opportunity and vulnerability. The logistics of subsistence are tightly interwoven with urban geography: the timing of container access, knowledge of buyer reliability, and avoidance of police surveillance become tactical calculations in a precarious labour circuit. The accounts illustrate a sophisticated knowledge of value, risk, and mobility, embedded in a transnational and intergenerational framework of family cooperation. Yet this survival economy is subject to structural criminalisation, where legal grey zones, police harassment, and territorial stigmas perpetuate social exclusion. López Catalán’s methodological sensitivity uncovers how Roma collectors re-signify the urban environment—not merely as a resource, but as a contested terrain of dignity, autonomy, and micro-political negotiation. The article challenges dominant representations of informality as disorder or deviance, instead framing it as an adaptive response to exclusionary labour markets and urban regimes. It contributes to urban anthropology by centring subaltern agency, illuminating how marginalised actors produce space, value, and meaning from the overlooked and discarded layers of the city.
López Catalán, Ó. (2018) ‘Subsistencias, persecuciones y resistencias en el Área Metropolitana de Barcelona’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 8(1). Available at: http://www2.ual.es/urbs/index.php/urbs/article/view/lopezcatalan (Accessed: 1 August 2025).