In the summer of 2019, Barcelona is a city under siege. The influx of rich people fleeing the surging violence in the countryside is pushing up prices to levels most inhabitants can no longer afford. Large parts of the city have already been literally cut off. When a district is no longer deemed of any value, an insurmountable wall is erected, leaving the moneyed people wondering what will have become of their fellow townsmen on the other side. They can see drones flying over and you can hear shooting sometimes, but contact with the unfortunate ones behind the wall is impossible.
The Conçales-Roldán family are struggling to stay on the good side, Alba with a certain flair and her husband Jordi mostly tragically. Meanwhile their daughter Mireia is planning to move to the other side voluntarily. Since everybody will end up there inevitably, why not choose the right moment yourself? When her boyfriend Joan is arrested and threatened with expulsion, things are speeding up. Mireia finds a courier service willing to smuggle her through the wall.
Mireia enters a mostly empty concrete city which gradually changes colour and turns out to be populated and green on the inside. She is encouraged to become part of the green revolution which aims to replace the obsolete capitalist model with a localised system of sharing and collaboration. As long and difficult as the road ahead may seem, Mireia is immediately infected with the enthousiasm and staying power of all those people who have survived the first horrendous years of the lock out and who are now beginning to see the fruits of their imagination and strongmindedness.
Despite its dystopian setting, Jungle Town is in essence an optimistic novel. There is light at the end of the tunnel, there always is, especially once we realise the vast majority of humankind are decent people who want nothing more from life than to live in harmony with their environment. But we will have to go into the deep end to get rid of the petty elitist mindset of entitlement of which capitalism has proved to be the most vulgar and damaging outgrowth.
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