How we work
I ask the woman. She's gone back inside with her broom; meanwhile, another neighbour pokes her head out from the floor below. She looks at me from a doorway with a peculiar upper opening, from which she finishes a cigarette, in a ritual that seems to be a daily occurrence. With a piercing gaze framed by smoke, the peculiar window and the passage of time, Juana recounts how, out of the colony's 22 homes, only five still have residents. The rest are empty and boarded up. Getting off at the Foc stop is in itself a protest, given the decades it took to bring the metro to the Marina. The long, wide promenade of the Zona Franca stretches towards the sea and the mountains. A few early-rising acrobats are already dancing on the large zigzagging skatepark a few metres from the stop, and a little further on, the edge of the Fira Gran Via complex appears. On the opposite pavement, some of the many buildings that will fill the neighbourhood with flats and new residents are being erected. "La Marina will gain 30,000 homes in the coming years" is the already well-known headline looking towards a neighbourhood now full of contrasts, where old homes and complexes coexist with modern apartment and office buildings. Walking around makes you hungry. Where to have breakfast in La Marina? "I've only lived in the neighbourhood for a short while, but they make good _bikinis_ there," says a neighbour. And I go to _Tu Tesoro_ while neighbours come in, have breakfast, chat, and leave. If you have to try the _bikini_, you try it. "I've lived here for a year. I didn't know they had Colombian food," a neighbour comments to the owner, who replies something that seems common in a neighbourhood under construction: "We've also only been here for a year".
