To what extent has Barcelona become a model of urban transformation for other cities in Europe and even globally and why might this be the case?

CONTENTS

List of figures

1. Preface

2. Barcelona within the global structure of world cities

3. Barcelona, a city built on four main dimensions of transformation
3.1 Urban policy and planning…
3.1.1 The importance of the 1992 Olympic Games and its impacts
3.1.2 Other improvements of puplic spaces and buildings
3.2 Economic changes
3.3 The political change and its impacts on the social transformation

4. Evaluation of Barcelona’s urban transformation
4.1 Advantages and benefits of the transformation
4.2 Challenges for Barcelona

References

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig.1: Eixample

Fig.2: The GaWC Inventory of World Cities

Fig.3: Forum2004 – Barcelona

Fig.4: SEAT factory in Martorell

Fig.5: GNP development

Fig.6: Population development

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1 Preface

With increased globalisation in the last years, more and more old cities get deindustrialized whereas so called Eurocities are growing to urban centres of importance. Several impacts on those cities like economical and social changes make them special centres for the particular country and provide them with a functional primacy in comparison to other national and international cities. Hence, it is not just terms like population and growth that make cities become big but also other reasons that act as basis for urban transformation processes which are worth indicating in this work. However, and very important for analysing a metropolis, is the fact that increasing globalisation led to an enlargement of the cruising range of a city towards the developing hinterlands as the “globalization has had dramatic effects on the working of urban systems” (Cochrane and Jonas, 1999, 145).

This work will focus on the Mediteranean city of Barcelona, the centre of the industrialization and both political and social developmenst in contemporary Spain. To what extent the city can be seen as a model for urban transformation and to what extent the enormous costs for developing an efficient urban infrastructure in conjunction with growing shortages of available budgets (McCarthy & Danta, 2003) apply to it will be discussed in the following chapters.

Hence, Barcelona will be classified in the global structure of world cities in the next chapter before the four main dimensions of change will be illustrated and discussed in part three of this work. Finally, the whole transformation of the city will be evaluated including some major benefts but also present and future challenges Barcelona is confronted with.

2. Barcelona within the global structure of world cities

For several years now the term world city has been discussed among important authors. In many definitions financial elements such as the “concentration and accumulation of international capital” (King, 1990, 30) are included and John Friedmann describes global cities even as “organising nodes of a global economic system” (Knox and Taylor, 1995, 25). But is the economic importamce the only criterion that gives a city a primary role? World cities, of course, do act as special economic junctions but it certainly takes a lot more charactersitics to make them globally important. Social mixtures and transformations, political activites but also urban developments of a city should all be considered within the analysis of major places around the globe.

Barcelona, the city we look at in this work, is seen as a so-called ‘Gamma World City’ within the inventory of cities of the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and lacks behind Madrid which is a cut above (Taylor, 2003).

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Source: GaWC, 2004.

Some authors argue that Barcelona can be seen as model of urban transformation which makes the city very interesting to look at. To what extent this and other characteristics make it worth regarding as as world city will be discussed in the following.

3. Barcelona, a city built on four main dimensions of transformation

The progress Barcelona underwent during the last years is mainly based on four dimensions of change.

3.1 Urban policy and planning

3.1.1 The importance of the 1992 Olympic Games and its impacts

Barcelona began to expand already with the hosting of international expositions in 1888 and 1929 but the growth in the following decades was slowed down in 1975 when the city underwent a general economic crisis. It “entered into a stage of difficulties, aggravated by the transfer of industry outside the city, the stagnation of the population, and decreased political activity” (Brunet, 1995, 2). Hence, the 1986 nomination to organize the Olympic Summer Games in 1992 was an ideal opportunity to revive the city both from an urban but also from a social point of view. Not only the city core but also the outer towns within Barcelona’s municpal boundaries did undergo an entire transformation. That is, 29 percent of the Olympic projects were carried out in the metropolitan areas around the city and 16 percent in the rest of Catalonia. Here most important was certainly the improvement of road and transportation infrastructures but also other projects like housing, telecommunication, hotels and sports facilities were goals to follow for the organizing committee (ibid). A special role within this inter-institutional organization team had both the Spanish government and the Generalitat, the one responsible for Catalonia, as they had the opportunity “to make up for the backwardness that has disgraced Barcelona, Catalonia and Spain throughout the twentieth century” (Montalban, 1992).

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