Search

There is an urgent need to develop a coherent political strategy to address the current crisis of care. Allocation of care through the market or the state leads to a care and democratic deficit. Organising care on the logic of the commons provides an alternative paradigm rooted in democracy and solidarity. Municipalism aims to build institutions to enable the commons; it represents a political strategy for the crisis of care at scale. In this paper we explore Barcelona en Comu 's experiments in care to build upon what has been termed 'care; municipalism'. Our case study focuses on domestic care work as a domain that reflects the core inequalities of the crisis. Through our analysis we have identified three key features of care municipalism: firstly, a feminist narrative of care; secondly, new forms of organising care and thirdly, building social infrastructures. The paper closes with a reflection on the limitations of Barcelona en Comu 's experiments in care from a perspective of the commons, before outlining a future research agenda to contribute towards more caring cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities play increasingly recognised roles in global climate change responses: as change laboratories, spaces of opportunity, and as administrative and economic hubs that concentrate human and financial resources and needs. They host high climate mitigation potential and acute climate adaptation vulnerabilities. Scholarship flags conventional urban planning approaches to limit global warming to 1.5°C as inadequate. Yet urban sustainability transitions literature features few examples of functioning alternative governance and planning paradigms. This paper assesses one such approach, new municipalism: social movements centred on a democratic transformation of the local economy and state. We combine attention to urban sustainability transitions and new municipalism research to interrogate whether and how the latter can facilitate the provision of leadership and institutional arrangements that enable urban transformation to sustainability. Our desk study considers two prominent examples of new municipalism in Spain, where Barcelona en Comú and Ahora Madrid arose as anti-austerity movements to combat neoliberal urban agendas during the 2010s. We find that the praxis of collective decision-making associated with new municipalism does offer inclusive, innovative policy pathways and the potential to implement experimental knowledge and learning in complex real-world settings at the urban scale. We argue, however, that powerful neoliberal mechanisms impose structural constraints on the very push for deep political change that new municipalist movements embody. By linking transformative climate governance needs with new municipalism movements and wider political economic structuring forces, we explicate the tensions and contested dynamics of institutionalising progressive social movements in the multi-scalar governance of urban sustainability transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a context of global-scale inequalities and increased middle-class transnational mobility, this paper explores how the arrival of Western European and North American migrants in Barcelona drives a process of gentrification that coexists and overlaps with the development of tourism in the city. Research has focused increasingly on the role of visitors and Airbnb in driving gentrification. However, our aim is to add another layer to the complexity of neighbourhood change in tourist cities by considering the role of migrants from advanced economies as gentrifiers in these neighbourhoods. We combined socio-demographic analysis with in-depth interviews and, from this, we found that: (1) lifestyle opportunities, rather than work, explain why transnational migrants are attracted to Barcelona, resulting in privileged consumers of housing that then displace long-term residents; (2) migrants have become spatially concentrated in tourist enclaves and interact predominantly with other transnational mobile populations; (3) the result is that centrally located neighbourhoods are appropriated by foreigners – both visitors and migrants – who are better positioned in the unequal division of labour, causing locals to feel increasingly excluded from the place. We illustrate that tourism and transnational gentrification spatially coexist and, accordingly, we provide an analysis that integrates both processes to understand how neighbourhood change occurs in areas impacted by tourism. By doing so, the paper offers a fresh reading of how gentrification takes place in a Southern European destination and, furthermore, it provides new insights into the conceptualisation of tourism and lifestyle migration as drivers of gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Barcelona as a paradigmatic case, the aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which contestation organised by sublocal grassroots movements in the context of the current urban crisis operates, both in terms of content and form of protest. Our thesis is that resident mobilisation in the neighbourhood of Ciutat Meridiana is expressive of a new cycle of (urban) social mobilisations in Spanish cities. In such mobilisations, more or less spontaneous initiatives which emerged to counteract the effects of the crisis at the community level are simultaneously serving as platforms for reciprocity and political contestation. Establishing a dialogue with the literature on social innovation, in this paper we claim that these micro-local urban practices are linked to broader social movements and thus play a fundamental role in the political empowerment of citizens living in highly segregated and vulnerable urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the so-called Bilbao effect and Barcelona Model are diffused internationally through what may be called urban policy tourism: short trips made to Bilbao and Barcelona by policy-makers to learn from their regeneration in the past 15 years. The paper reveals for the first time the substantial extent of this practice and contextualises it within a wider phenomenon of urban policy transfer and the international ‘motion’ of urban policies. Although both models are internationally known for a set of elements, this research shows that in fact the messages mutate and shift as they circulate through the policy circuits. Ultimately, however, the popularity of the Bilbao and Barcelona models suggests a process of global urban policy convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to extend the definition of a sub-centre beyond the usual definition as a place with significantly larger employment density that has an effect on the overall employment density of the nearby locations. Together with the previous conditions, it is suggested that it is necessary to include another which represents a structural element of an urban sub-system within the metropolitan configuration—that is, a place with intense spatial interaction with its hinterland. Therefore, a metropolitan area can be seen as one comprising urban sub-systems characterised by greater or lesser polycentrism. In this paper, a 'bottom-up' methodology based on commuter flows is proposed in order to detect metropolitan sub-centres. Using empirical data from the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona, the proposed methodology is tested, comparing its results with those of other commonly used methodologies (cut-offs, parametric and non-parametric models). The results suggest that the proposed methodology permits optimising the sub-centre delimitation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2005 Barcelona passed an Ordinance to ‘promote and guarantee peaceful coexistence in the city’. This put an end to five months of a political race against the clock. In those weeks, incivility made it to the government’s political agenda and the proposal was drawn up, discussed, amended and finally passed, generating a heated political debate, capturing the attention of the media and articulating a change of course in the government’s approach to community safety and urban disorder. This paper traces back the political and policy process of the Barcelona Ordinance in the context of the literature on the subject, looking at how civility and incivility were defined in this particular local context, but in light of similar processes of ‘defining up’ of deviancy elsewhere. It ends by highlighting the similarities and differences between similar processes in different countries, the policy transfer mechanisms and the active role played by cities in defining the urban security agenda in and beyond the urban sphere between the 1990s and the 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the geography of three street centrality indices and their correlations with various types of economic activities in Barcelona, Spain. The focus is on what type of street centrality (closeness, betweenness and straightness) is more closely associated with which type of economic activity (primary and secondary). Centralities are calculated purely on the street network by using a multiple centrality assessment model, and a kernel density estimation method is applied to both street centralities and economic activities to permit correlation analysis between them. Results indicate that street centralities are correlated with the location of economic activities and that the correlations are higher with secondary than primary activities. The research suggests that, in urban planning, central urban arterials should be conceived as the cores, not the borders, of neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper estimates a hedonic price model which makes it possible to determine how the price of a unit varies with the set of attributes it possesses, in the Spanish housing market. Concretely, and by means of capitalisation, hedonic price models can be used as an instrument to capture how local public expenditures influence housing prices and, by extension, how homeowners can indirectly receive benefit from local public investment. Using individual data for dwellings from the city of Barcelona (Spain) for the period 1998-2001, it is found that local policies aimed at enhancing the quality of life or the location-speciic characteristic of the city of Barcelona have a positive impact on housing values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to estimate the impact of residential job accessibility on female employment probability in the metropolitan areas of Barcelona and Madrid. Following a 'spatial mismatch' framework, a female employment probability equation is estimated which includes variables controlling for personal characteristics, residential segregation and employment potential by public transport network. Data used come from the Micro-census 2001 of INE (the National Institute of Statistics). The research focuses on the treatment of endogeneity problems and the measurement of accessibility variables. The results show that low job accessibility in public transport negatively affects employment probability. The intensity of this effect tends to decrease with individual's educational attainment. A higher degree of residential segregation also reduces job probability in a significant way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]