A fascinating look at four decades of tension preceding the Spanish Civil War and the actors in the competition for control of social and economic space in the expanding industrial city of Barcelona, host to the largest Anarchist movement in Europe's history. This history 'from below' examines the burgeoning public sphere of working-class life and its relationship to the state, industrial bourgeoisie and professional classes. Unemployment, rent prices and rising food prices are the backdrop to this laboratory of emergent urbanism.