Freeway Freestate: The trolley problem Part 2 Project 2025 Luke Hickling University of Westminster London | UK Barcelona’s 3,000 Chatarreros salvage 115,000 tonnes of scrap metal each year but see none of the city’s €2.3 billion municipal waste contracts. Most are homeless, surviving day-to-day by selling to scrapyards that pay just enough to get by. Their original settlement, Mount Zion, was the only organised collection point in the north of the city. It was demolished in 2013 to make way for development, forcing Chatarreros to walk far greater distances and fracturing an organically formed brotherhood of trolleymen.Freeway Freestate reclaims the C-31 motorway trench, a stranded structural asset holding 59,340,000 kilograms of embodied carbon, as the site of a new circular settlement: New Mount Zion.Developed in collaboration with the municipality, the project turns the city’s waste back into its own architecture. Domestic and construction salvage is processed on-site into modular parts that form housing, workshops, and civic spaces, powered entirely by energy harvested from motorway traffic. The scheme bridges the motorway trench, repairing the urban fabric and extending civic infrastructure into adjacent neighbourhoods, serving both Chatarreros and existing residents.By formalising informal labour into permanent infrastructure, New Mount Zion offers autonomy, dignity, and a future, built by and for the Chatarreros Barcelona forgot. Tutor(s)