Contenu du sommaire : Jeunesses et transformations urbaines

Until well into the 1980s, on the eve of the feast of Saint John the Baptist—Sant Joan, in Catalan—, celebrated every June 24, hundreds of bonfires—fogueres—were lit in the evening in all the districts of Barcelona. They were built by self-organised gangs of kids—called colles—who had collected the wood a few days before and kept it until the summer solstice festival. Today, fewer than two dozen bonfires are lit for Sant Joan in the Catalan capital, all prepared by adults and with the permission of the mayor. This article summarises the results of research conducted between 2015 and 2016. We obtained oral information from 213 residents from different neighbourhoods of Barcelona, aged between 45 and 70, who recalled a lost space : the street as a matrix of experiences from which they learned everything that mattered. Memories of play and fire that were a mix of game and ritual, a landscape that evokes the coming-of-age of the city itself, the raw material that shapes all urban experience. All of this is inseparable from the crisis of the street as a place of encounter, and beyond that, of the urban as a society, always against the backdrop of a city in transformation.