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In this paper we analyse the ways in which egg donors from a private infertility clinic in Barcelona try to render their new experience meaningful. Donors are striving to see their action as a contribution to the creation of a particular kinship bond - motherhood in another woman - by means of the abrogation of a bond that also looks very much like kinship, which links them to the individuals that will be born thanks to their eggs. The specific meaning that egg donation has for each donor varies according to her particular circumstances, but the language constructed in order to convey this meaning emerges from the creative expression of several cultural paradoxes and dichotomies that constitute, in themselves, an original and highly significant cultural grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes the Narrative Production Methodology (NPM) as a suitable methodology in the field of critical collective memory studies. Firstly, we discuss the narrative dimension of collective memory, exploring possible articulations between the critical perspective of the Social Psychology of Memory and NPM. We call this articulation Narrative Productions of Memory and we develop its potential through an example of research on the memories of migrant struggles for rights in Barcelona. We argue that Narratives of Memory produce knowledge by linking remembered experiences with present repertoires of interpretation, elaborating an understanding of current contexts and power relations that need to be challenged, and promoting alternatives. The strength of NPM in collective memory studies, we argue, lies in the production of horizontal and legitimate knowledge about the past, blurring the distance between researcher and participant, data and interpretation, memory and history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban social movements, alliances and organisations use a range of strategies to contest injustice and inequality by making urban authority accountable to the 'power of the people'. While there is irrepressible diversity in the strategies used to build and enact people power across global urban contexts, movement participants rarely start from scratch in developing these strategies. There are patterns of contestation that resonate and circulate between urban movements. This article outlines an approach to analysing the patterning, diffusion and translation of commonly used urban people power strategies in and between cities. To track these strategies, we mapped hundreds of examples of urban people power, conducted field research across a range of cities, and co-designed findings and frameworks at a two week gathering of urban activists from a diverse group of cities. We identified five strategies of people power that are commonly repeated across different urban contexts—playing by the rules, mobilising, organising, prefiguring, and running for office. We outline the key characteristics of these different strategies, and discuss the different channels and forms of diffusion that facilitate their exchange across diverse urban contexts. All forms of diffusion involve the hard work of translation and learning, but this work takes different forms for different strategies. We find that where people power takes on a more visible and modular form it is more able to spread through weak ties and digital channels. However, where people power practices are more practice-based and harder to see, strong ties and personal relationships are often needed to spread the strategy. This is illustrated with a case study of the diffusion and translation of an organising strategy between housing activists in Cape Town and Barcelona. Our research and modelling of people power strategies and diffusion is offered as a contribution to on-going work of movement translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police-recorded crime data is commonly used to assess the crime risk of tourists and locals. Police records, however, are affected by different crime reporting rates across population groups. No research has explored the different crime reporting propensities of tourists and locals. We analyse two sets of surveys in Barcelona, a general population survey and a survey to tourists. Our results show that while international tourists are less likely to report personal crime to the police than locals, and domestic tourists may also be more likely than international tourists to report personal crime, both international and domestic tourists report vehicle crime more often than locals. Moreover, some individual predictors of crime reporting vary between locals and tourists. New means of encouraging visitors to report crime are needed, for example, through further dissemination of information about how to report from the hotel, specialist tourism police units, or dedicated tourism victims' support services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As racing vehicles become more complex, optimising the interaction between subsystems becomes critical for racing performance. In this work, we incorporate two such subsystems into a vehicle model. We investigate the performance benefits of a four-wheel-drive vehicle with independent control over its in-hub motors and active control on the rear wing flap rotation. The performance is evaluated by solving minimum lap time optimal control problems (OCP) for various vehicle configurations. The OCP is transformed into a nonlinear programming problem through direct collocation and is solved by an interior point method. The four-wheel-drive configuration performs better than rear-wheel drive in terms of lap time, finishing the Barcelona circuit 4 % faster. The benefits come mainly from higher longitudinal accelerations. Active aerodynamic control improves performance regardless of the propulsion configuration, leading to another 1 % of lap time improvement on the Barcelona circuit. The optimal aerodynamic control strategy is different between propulsion configurations, particularly on corner exits. This model enables the exploration of optimal torque vectoring controls and their interaction with a vehicle's active aerodynamics. This is needed to guide the design of the increasingly complex racing vehicle controllers of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores empirical and objective approaches to combinations of non-residential activities in contemporary urban settings. The research measures the mix of uses in compact cities through the analysis of an urban fragment of Barcelona with high population density that is strolled around daily by thousands of tourists and intensified by a unique combination of daily services, commercial uses and productive activities. The resulting cartography offers a parametric interpretation at the scale of plots, blocks and streets, and establishes some tools to better understand the spatial relations of urban functional mix and proximity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, I propose an analytical approach to describe the institutional trajectory of metropolitan authorities by using theory-based institutional models that, like 'ebbs' and 'flows', alternate over time. By employing a comparative, qualitative case-based approach, I empirically validated this analytical approach by reconstructing the divergent institutional trajectories of the metropolitan authorities in Barcelona, Spain and Milan, Italy over a period of 70 years. Furthermore, I examine to what extent the different institutional trajectories of both metropolitan authorities have had an indirect impact on land-use patterns by comparing longitudinal datasets (1950s-2010s) at different territorial scales. Results show that the different institutional models characterizing both metropolitan authorities cannot be clearly associated with a higher or lower proportion of urbanized areas. Rather, findings suggest that it is the inter-mediating role that metropolitan authorities routinely perform that can promote efficient land-use development and sustainable use of land as a scarce resource (equifinality). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the opinions and perceptions that shape narratives among 4-star hotel managers around Airbnb as a competitor, and presents the arguments on which their differences in perception are based. We used an interpretive and emic approach to obtain data through in-depth interviews with upscale hotel executives in the city of Barcelona in its present state of touristification. The results suggest that the dominant discourse among hoteliers is sceptical as to the extent to which Airbnb is replacing hotels. However, some hoteliers perceive Airbnb as a threat requiring a proactive, unified response by hotels taking into account the urban environment and the neighbourhood where they are located. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban tourism, as a social, cultural, and economic field, has been strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a reverse effect of this crisis, however, there is a recent shift away from the dominant logics of performance and efficiency towards mindfulness, serenity, and similar concepts that shape the everyday life of an increasing number of people. All these terms are related to the semantic field of Muße, a word derived from the German language, which is defined as the experience of moments of freedom, indulgence, placidity, and recreation. Following the idea that social phenomena are reflected and reproduced in tourism, the objective is to explore how and where tourists experience Muße in urban tourism. A focus on Muße first enables a better understanding of tourists' travel behaviour, expectations, and needs. In the same vein, it is possible to examine tourism place-making since the need for Muße produces and transforms individual tourists' worlds of experiences. Although place-making practices and experiences have been widely studied, their relationship to Muße remains to be explored in urban and tourism research. With the aim to study practices and places of Muße in urban tourism, the presented qualitative content analysis draws upon 84 interviews conducted with tourists in Barcelona, Florence, and Paris in 2019. Findings show that the practice of sitting is relevant for experiences of Muße with a particular impact on place-making. Six categories are suggested to illustrate how Muße can be effective while tourists are sitting. This includes a detailed discussion of the spatial dimensions of Muße. In conclusion, places of Muße are highly individual, intangible, and complex. Insights into the characteristics of Muße and engagement with this new concept in international tourism research can be used as resources to study tourist place-making and support the planning for sustainable tourism development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to conceptualise the organisational framing of tourism management in touristified cities, focusing on the assessment of participatory processes of tourism planning. A grounded theory approach is used to analyse and discuss the role of the newly created consultive Tourism Council of Barcelona. An analysis of in-depth interviews undertaken with representatives of local stakeholders led to Common Pool Resources and policy cycle theories as conceptual framework to support a precise characterisation of tourism-related conflicts in Barcelona. The results reveal difficulties to obtain consensual strategic views for tourism development, although working groups contribute to cooperation between stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of feminist perspectives in the cultural policies in the city of Barcelona during the period 2015–2019, attempting to identify potential resistances to gender-focused cultural policies. Based on a literature review and interviews with cultural policy and gender experts, the article reveals that resistances to gender-focused cultural policies remain in the cultural administration of the city, despite its feminist discourse. There are two key reasons for this resistance and for the lack of change to public cultural policies: the inertia in the organisation of cultural policies by the responsible department of the City Council and large cultural institutions, which are dominated by institutional cultures that protect male privilege and power; and the City Council's failure to consider the feminist movement in the design and development of cultural policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban regeneration linked to the Olympic Games is frequently planned with a master plan as in London or Barcelona. Atypically, the urban regeneration in the center of Athens seems different because it was carried out without overall planning after the Olympic Games had ended, although a master plan did exist since 1985. This research aims to understand how post-Olympic Games urban regeneration could be conducted in an informal manner over the long term, integrating all of the influences that have interacted to produce the current urban landscape (such as the deindustrialization, the development of recreative activities, and particularly the 2008 financial crisis and the effects of Airbnb activity). The results shows that urban regeneration has been conducted primarily by numerous family entrepreneurs, in an informal manner. The public authorities did not use strategic planning, iterative, contextualized, with objectives. The effects of this urban regeneration are also studied, such as in progress gentrification, evolution of jobs, increase in cultural and touristic activities, partial pedestrianization, partial buildings renovation, dilapidated buildings. The remain problem seems to be the lack of housing public planning and policy in the center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Routine activities theory has been the most widely used framework to analyse the relationship between tourism and crime. But beyond crime opportunity, other ecological and structural factors may be present in this relationship. This article analyses whether high levels of tourist intensity are related to higher levels of urban crime in Barcelona (Spain) using the variables of social disorganization theory, that is, concentration of disadvantages, population turnover and ethnic-cultural heterogeneity. Under the hypothesis that the touristification of Barcelona neighbourhoods intensifies population turnover and enhances economical and ethnic-cultural heterogeneity in the area, it is expected that higher levels of tourism are related to higher rates of property and personal crime. To test this hypothesis and the mediating role of ecological variables, negative binomial fit models and simple mediation regression models are used. Findings suggest that higher levels of tourism are related to a higher volume of property and violent crimes in neighbourhoods and that this relationship is mediated by residential instability and national heterogeneity. However, mediation models suggest a negative relationship between tourism and crime when concentrated disadvantages are the mediator factor. The need to rethink the role of the socioeconomic variable in the relationship between crime and touristification is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an ethnographic study conducted with in-depth interviews, this study shows how the children of interfaith couples whose members were socialised in the Catholic and/or Muslim faiths, respectively, internalise the religious and/or cultural values that their parents transmit to them. We furthermore point out that the negotiation processes of both transmission by the couple and inheritance by the descendants are often conditioned by social and contextual factors, including the gradual process of religious secularisation. We shall analyse the consequences that this factor, increasingly common in Barcelona, has on these interfaith negotiation, transmission and inheritance processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the increase in global research on health inequalities, more needs to be done to strengthen efforts to inform local interventions. In this article, we ask what determines the local capacity to engage in research on health inequalities. A bibliometric analysis identified Spain as the 10th highest global contributor to this research field (1966–2015), yet a significant proportion of this production was affiliated to just a few institutions in Barcelona. How and why has the city produced so much health inequalities research over four decades? A realist explanatory case study was conducted to test and refine six causal mechanisms, and identify the contextual conditions that might have activated them to generate this outcome. Data was triangulated from 10 semi-structured interviews, and scientific and grey literature. Our findings confirmed that several of our proposed mechanisms - functioning under certain conditions over time - explain the large volume of health inequalities research in Barcelona. Based on these findings, key lessons from the city's experience are suggested. Further research is needed on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of GeoHumanities is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the 2015 local elections, political formations with their roots in social movements took control of several Spanish city councils, including Madrid and Barcelona. The wave of protests that began with the 15-M movement in 2011 gave way to an electoral model that aspired to promote transformative politics and new ways of 'doing politics'. The aim of the present study is to examine the scope and the limits of this move into the institutions in Madrid and Barcelona (2015–2019). The case studies involved in-depth interviews and a documentary review. Results reveal significant differences between the two cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Festivals and events are important to cities, residents, cultural workers, and visitors, growing over time to have an inseparable relationship with the places that host them. In this article, we are concerned with the way outdoor urban public spaces in two self-identified Festival Cities are used to host festivals and events, including the tensions and disputes generated. Methodologically, we draw on in-depth case studies of the use of public space for festivals and events in Edinburgh (Scotland) and Barcelona (Spain). We found that both cities have experienced similar problems, with evidence of tensions and disputes over who can make use of public space to celebrate their festivities and with implications for access to those spaces for others. Open public space traditionally used for popular festivities is increasingly brought under the gaze of planning and management to maximise external reputational benefits over local citizen interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tourism Geographies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A healthy diet is vital to sustaining tourist mobility. In cross-cultural mobility, tourists must face strange local eating environments in tourism place and the complex health problems that these environments may cause. Existing research on tourist food consumption and health mainly addresses health from a biomedical perspective by emphasizing food nutrition and hygiene. We adopt an assemblage approach to understanding health as a relational outcome determined by multiple material, psychological, and cultural dimensions. Using Chinese outbound travel to Spain as a case, we explore how psychology, dietary habits, and cultural beliefs interconnect with the foods in novel cross-cultural environments to generate healthiness. A semi-structured interview method was used to collect data in Barcelona and Madrid. We construct three formulas to illustrate the health assemblages in tourists' food consumption. In the food-psychology assemblage, tourists believe that low-risk foods are healthy. Neophobic tourists avoid tasting novel local foods due to unknown health risks, whereas neophiliac tourists show fewer similar health concerns. In the food-dietary habits assemblage, healthy dieting is the habitual and comfortable diet. Tourists with Chinese dietary habits are uncomfortable eating novel local foods. Cosmopolitan tourists, who incorporate various food habits in their diet, switch freely between different foods to obtain health. In the food-cultural beliefs assemblage, traditional Chinese cultural beliefs of yin-yang balance affect tourists' health experience through diet. Tourists carefully choose local foods to achieve a cold-hot balance to keep health. These three health assemblages indicate that food health in tourism is a relational result of multiple dimensions. 健康饮食对于旅游流动至关重要。在跨文化旅游流动中, 游客在旅游地会面对陌生的饮食环境, 以及这些环境可能引起的复杂健康问题。既有关于旅游食物消费与健康的研究主要是从生物医学的角度来理解食物的健康, 强调食物的营养与卫生。我们采用组装视角, 将健康理解为由物质、心理和文化等多种维度决定的关系性结果。以中国游客赴西班牙的出境游为例, 我们探讨了饮食心理、饮食习惯和文化信仰如何在新奇的跨文化环境中与食品相互联系, 从而生产饮食健康。我们采用半结构式访谈法在巴塞罗那和马德里收集数据。我们构建了三个公式来说明旅游食物消费中的健康组装。在食物-心理组装中, 低风险食物被认为是健康的。具有恐新心理的游客会避免品尝新奇的当地食物, 担心其有未知的健康风险。喜新的游客则较少具有类似的健康担忧。在食物-饮食习惯组装中, 健康饮食被认为是令人舒适的习惯性饮食。根植中国饮食习惯的游客因不习惯于消费当地新奇食物会出现身体不适。世界主义游客因已融入多种饮食文化习惯, 他们可以自由地在不同食物之间切换以保持健康。在食物-文化信仰组装中, 中国传统阴阳平衡的文化观念影响游客对食物健康的体验。游客精心选择当地食物, 以搭配食物的冷热均衡, 从而获得健康。这三个健康组装证明旅游饮食健康是多维度的关系性结果。 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The edge effect is a problem that can alter the results of some analyses, such as counting crime within a given geographic area. This article introduces a tool developed for ArcGIS toolbox, (ArcGIS Geographic Information System) to correct the border issues when using an aggregated crime data to artificially bounded space analytical units. It uses a method which considers those points located near the edge of the analysis unit, and avoids increasing the number of criminal points by assigning a value according to the distance of the edge. For this purpose, two functions based on decay with distance can be chosen: normal and linear. In order to show the performance of the tool, a sample of theft data occurred in 2016 in each census tract of Barcelona (Spain) district was used. These results show remarkable differences in the number of thefts in each census tract, before and after applying the edge correction. Some of the census tracts even went from experiencing no theft at all to having 5.5 or 4.5 incidents after correcting the edge effect. Finally, to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed tool, other strategies traditionally used as a solution for the edge effect were used. Then, the results are compared with those previously obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social innovation and empowerment are complex concepts that, from an analytical point of view, are not necessarily related. One explicit goal of social innovation is to empower communities, as well as the individuals that are involved in activities within those communities, but this does not necessarily always occur. Here we address the question 'Does social innovation in early childhood education and care (ECEC) empower women?' First, we explore whether the projects we examine can be defined as social innovations. Second, we analyse to what extent arrangements that are identified as innovative in ECEC empower the mothers who choose them. We argue that if the characteristics of a particular social innovation project enhance or reinforce the capabilities of the women who participate in it, that experience will most probably empower them; if not, this is unlikely to occur. Our empirical material includes 37 interviews with key informants, educators, and mothers involved in these non-institutionalized projects, collected in Barcelona. Our results reveal the socioeconomic bias in these projects, as well as the costs derived for both sets of participants (mothers and educators). They also show the wider social impact that stems from these projects being under-regulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The magnitude of the pore water pressure developed by a soft fine-grained soil subjected to shear stresses is what determines the occurrence of sudden failure. As part of an extensive testing programme, besides identification and classification tests, 20 monotonic simple shear tests and 139 cyclic simple shear tests with different levels of static stresses (τo) before the cyclic phase were performed. In this research, reference is made to pore water pressure (u) developed by a soft fine-grained soil subjected to combined monotonic (τo) and cyclic shear (τc) stresses. Laboratory tests were carried out on undisturbed samples from the Port of Barcelona, Spain. The samples were obtained at depths between 29 m and 52 m, that correspond to an effective vertical stress of (σ'ov) between 277 kPa and 413 kPa, respectively. In general, the results indicate that: (a) the combination of τo and τc controls the generation of pore water pressure (u); (b) it is not always true that, as a consequence of increased pore water pressure when τo/σ'ov + τc/σ'ov ≈ Su/σ'ov, the soil reaches the failure cyclically (with Su being the undrained shear strength); (c) in the monotonic case, it is possible to establish empirical functions between u/σ'ov and the monotonic shear strain (γm); and (d) in the combined monotonic and cyclic case, it is possible to establish empirical functions among u/σ'ov, the cyclic shear strain (γc) and the number of cycles (N), for different (τo/σ'ov) ratios. In addition, an application was made to study the seabed stability based on the knowledge of the material under cyclic load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tourism Geographies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A method to solve minimum-lap-time problems using quasi-steady-state models and free (i.e. not predetermined) trajectory on two-dimensional tracks has been recently proposed. This work describes the extension of the method to three-dimensional tracks and builds upon g–g–g diagrams (instead of the standard g–g), to account for the effects of three-dimensionality. The main features of car and motorcycle g–g–g diagrams are discussed, to get insight into the main effects of three-dimensionality and to suggest a convenient parametrisation for the subsequent optimal control problem (OCP), whose size is not affected by the complexity of the vehicle model employed to generate the g–g–g diagrams. The application of the method to the Mugello and Barcelona–Catalunya circuits is given, with vehicle datasets resembling those of a race motorcycle (MotoGP) and a race car (Formula One). The results obtained are in line with those reported in the literature using full-dynamic models, yet such dynamic models are generally associated with the solution of much larger OCP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This provocation shows how five emerging digital citizenship regimes are rescaling European nation-states through a taxonomy: (i) the globalised/generalisable regime called pandemic citizenship that clarifies how post-COVID-19 datafication processes have amplified the emergence of four digital citizenship regimes in six city-regions; (ii) algorithmic citizenship (Tallinn); (iii) liquid citizenship (Barcelona/Amsterdam); (iv) metropolitan citizenship (Cardiff); and (v) stateless citizenship (Barcelona/Glasgow/Bilbao). I argue that this phenomenon should matter to us insofar as these emerging digital citizenship regimes have resulted in nation-state space rescaling, challenging its heretofore privileged position as the only natural platform for the monopoly of technopolitical and sensory power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The housing policy of Barcelona, the Plan for the Right to Housing (2015–2020), implemented by the anti-austerity local government of Barcelona en Comú, relates closely to degrowth imaginaries and norms. It incorporates vacant housing to the public housing stock, develops a special unit for attending evictions and other residential emergencies, and introduces support for promising yet marginal tenure forms such as co-housing or leasehold estate. However, a critical analysis of this policy reveals strong contradictions and limitations. Given the existing uneven socio-spatial dynamics of a global city such as Barcelona, the well-established power relations in the production of urban space, and the still-dominant discourse of austerity, the local government's actions remain precarious. However, albeit both promising and contradictory, Barcelona's housing policy proves to be a useful case for developing degrowth planning principles and tools for urban housing policy and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of resilience remains vague as it pertains to the buildings' scale and the architectural dimension, particularly when dealing with the recovery and reuse of former industrial premises. This study advocates for socio-ecological (bounding-forward) resilience and the use of Panarchy heuristics to analyze the embedded resilience of building stock. This research is based on a case study of CanFugarolas, in Mataró (Barcelona), a former workshop converted into a socio-cultural centre. Here, the building becomes a repository for latent urban dynamism, where spatial transformation is the mechanism by which embedded resilience is released in the form of social dynamism. Adaptive spatial capability (potential) translates into social dynamism (performance) because of socio-spatial interactions. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the spatial and social parallel evolution of the case study reveals that (i) a strong correlation exists between spatial transformation and social participation; (ii) spatio-functional tactics and spatial adaptive capabilities are social and formal complementary mechanisms for spatial appropriation during social progression; (iii) spatial diversification and hierarchization are evidence of spatial specialization, resulting from said socio-spatial interactions. Eventually, (iv) indications of thresholds appear in the form of spatial over-fragmentation and hyper-specialization, denoting spatial exhaustion and embedded resilience limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Ecuador's worst economic downturn in 1999, women left the country in the thousands. They migrated for economic reasons but also hoping to distance themselves from gendered duties and obligations that confined them to oppressive feminine roles. Less than a decade later they bought into Spain's housing bubble in an effort to 'make up' for their departure. I argue that Ecuadorian migrant women's decisions to buy mortgaged homes in Barcelona were in part informed by their conceptualizations of domesticity, care giving, and motherhood. For women portrayed as culpables or 'culprits' for leaving Ecuador and failing to upkeep their caregiving responsibilities in their country of origin, the promise of homeownership became a way of accomplishing complex forms of transnational caregiving as well as upward mobility. This article focuses on gendered conceptualizations of care, motherhood, and kinship amongst Ecuadorian migrant women and the relationship these notions have with housing financialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barcelona, one of the main destinations for Airbnb users, has turned into one of the main stages for the now global debate around short-term rentals and their impacts on resident communities. Criticism has mostly focused on the conversion of housing into conventional tourist apartments while less attention has been paid to the problematization of short-term rentals in primary residences. Important questions thus arise as to whether these allegedly genuine forms of home-sharing should be 'formalised' at all through a regulation, and which type of controls should be applied. Our research helps to excavate this issue, shedding further light on the different logics and practices behind the development of home-sharing, and discusses the limitations of a regulation which is being introduced. To this end, it offers an in-depth analysis of the home-sharing supply in Barcelona, tackling its social and spatial logics, which is framed in the broader debate on processes of social change affecting inner cities. It then focuses on el Raval, one of Barcelona's core neighbourhoods where home-sharing practices have become more diffused, revealing how these practices are strongly correlated with high residential mobility and the presence of a single-dweller childless European resident population. Finally, we argue that home-sharing becomes an equally problematic agency of conversion of housing into a mooring for mobile communities, further contributing to potential gentrification and the displacement of residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The compact city concept remains a key policy response to multiple societal challenges. Based on theoretical and empirical research, this article seeks to a) develop a systemic understanding of compact city qualities; b) map alleged compact city qualities from the literature onto this framework; c) map qualities mentioned by stakeholders in two European cities onto the same framework; and d) apply the developed framework to analyse how compounded compact city qualities relate to policy challenges, such as carbon neutrality, poverty alleviation, neighbourhood revitalization, or community engagement. It is based on literature reviews and interviews with stakeholders in Barcelona and Rotterdam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The entry into Barcelona of the Nationalist troops in January 1939 and the taking over of official information in the city by the Director of the Servicio Nacional de Propaganda, the poet Dionisio Ridruejo , meant the end of the style of information dissemination established by the democratic government. Ridruejo replaced the journalist Jaume Miravitlles, who throughout the war headed the Comissariat de Propaganda, the official organ of the autonomous government of Catalonia. This paper attempts to reconstruct and analyse the final efforts of official republican propaganda in Catalonia, and contrasts them with the propaganda of occupied Barcelona, which, in nationalist terminology, had just been ‘liberated’. We will analyse how the end of the Civil War represents the replacement of propaganda carried out by professionals in persuasion by an alternative supervised, and, often dictated, by the military. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After the death of the dictator, Spanish cinema began to offer a series of films committed to portraying the Civil War. These narratives often selected characters from the Republican side—civilians or combatants—underscoring their suffering and the violence that characterized this era. Yet, it could be asked whether these productions genuinely attempt to rehabilitate the Republicans, who previously had been so vilified. In contrast to the films made during the dictatorship, which were based on simplified and mythical representations, do these new stories succeed in creating new myths? This paper sets out to examine what has changed and what has not in representations of the Civil War in film productions from the transition to democracy onwards. In this way, we can analyse how aspects of the Francoist myth-making persist in certain films which retain obvious links to the cinema of the dictatorship. It also explores how the representation of the war evolves in five films dealing with two Republican myths: the siege of Madrid and the defence of Barcelona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music printing in the Iberian Peninsula has been little studied and rarely has this specialized aspect of book production been considered in the broader context of more general trends in printing there during the sixteenth century. Music historiography has tended to assume that music printing failed to flourish because of poor local demand. However, more recent evidence, including analysis of book inventories, suggests that there was a thriving market, based on both international and local distribution, but that the printing of music books was affected by many of the factors that beset printing in general, including the expense of importing high quality paper, limited availability of specialized fonts and the socio-economic vicissitudes of individual printers. This essay explores the dynamics of the production of and market for music books through analysis of three major cities – Seville, Barcelona and Madrid – which appeared to offer the right conditions but which ultimately produced only a limited number of editions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information about the Sixth Carbohydrate Bioengineering Meeting held on April 3-6, 2005 in Barcelona, Spain is presented. In the meeting, scientific programs are presented that consists of thirty-six lectures and over 150 poster presentations addressing different topics on basic and applied aspects of carbohydrate bioengineering. Accordingly, the author stressed that some of those papers presented are published within the issue of the Journal.

In most European countries, local governments must provide waste collection, transportation and treatment services. However, the form of production for delivering the service chosen by local governments differs from one city to another. The decision on how to provide the service has usually been approached in a simple way, by either public or private production. However, solid waste services are becoming increasingly complex, and governing this complexity has become a challenge for governments and practitioners. Here we discuss the case of the metropolitan area of Barcelona, where a new and ad hoc intergovernmental agency has been created to manage the complexity. Since this metropolitan area includes a huge geographical agglomeration around Barcelona, this becomes a complex management system that makes this case study of great interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a lack of methods for the strategic assessment of ecological connectivity, specially for fast growing metropolitan areas. This paper presents a new geographic information systems (GIS) methodology with this aim. It allows the diagnosis of the connectivity of terrestrial landscape ecosystems, on the basis of ecological functional areas and a cost-distance model that includes two compound indices: one for the barrier effect, and another for ecological connectivity, with three variations for the latter, designed for different applications. We applied this model to the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (Spain) assessing the identification of the direct and cumulative impacts on ecological connectivity within this area, resulting from the current artificial barriers, the planned urban growth, and a high-speed train project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand how policies for the social and solidarity economy can contribute to economic democratization and identify the challenges linked to this, we examined the impetus plan which Barcelona city council implemented between 2016 and 2019. Based on semi-structured interviews with policy actors, social entrepreneurs and engaged activists, and on participative observation of two city council assessment workshops, we explore the limitations of the social and solidarity sector from a political economy perspective. Barcelona's approach has previously been acknowledged as an outstanding and innovative strategy that confronts the lack of transversality across public administrations and the complexities around co-construction within the social sector itself. In this examination, we observe how sector actors address issues of cultural tensions around economic thinking and stress the need for a plural and transformative approach towards economic activity. We conclude that, to couple social and solidarity economy policies with economic democratization goals and enable tracking of changes in cities' socioeconomic governance, it is necessary to work with an integrative perspective that takes into account other policy fields besides social entrepreneurship, and other types of actors, while also considering the connections between public bodies and the social and solidarity economy sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study provides an alternative empirical approach to identify optimal urban growth when accounting for its associated environmental effects. It is assumed that preserving outer landscapes and enjoying reduced density levels are inversely related, and so households must trade them off. The exercise analyses whether more disperse urban growth would be socially desirable in a particular area, the metropolitan region of Barcelona. A contingent valuation exercise using a double-bounded format was undertaken and an extended version of the spike model was used to estimate the willingness to pay of changing to a less dense urban path. The results show that a less compact scenario would be welfare-increasing in aggregate terms. It is suggested that general proposals on compacting cities should not necessarily constitute a desirable planning goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article aims to further our understanding of the process whereby terrorists choose targets for attacks. It offers a case study based on information from a jihadist cell broken up by police in the province of Barcelona, Spain in April 2015 in Operation Caronte. Based on detailed analysis of conversations between cell members, obtained thanks to infiltration by an undercover police officer, it argues that the terrorist brainstorming was informed by four main factors: organizational, contextual, logistical, and geographical. The materialization of the desire to use violence in an attack plan was the dynamic outcome of the way these factors modulated the will of the terrorists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing concern about climate change has produced growing interest in natural ventilation and urban planning. There seems to be a gap in the study of introducing urban climate into urban planning, even though doing so would increase population comfort and decrease energy spending. Natural ventilation provided by wind flowing through the streets of a city might be considered as a first priority for passive cooling. It is intuitive that if the street grid coincides with wind flow direction, a city will get more wind in the street. Otherwise, building walls will stop the wind. This study addresses this important topic, grounded on the urbanization of Ildefons Cerdà with regard to Barcelona. In this research, a consistency analysis of the grid orientation and wind flow direction is done for Barcelona. The objective is to demonstrate using current technology that Cerdà's grid orientation, which strove to capture fresh winds in summer and avoid cold winds in winter, really works. Methodologically, we discuss the reasons, found in the vast work of the Cerdà urban plan, for capturing winds; and we demonstrate the goodness of fit of street grid orientation for capturing winds using spatial analysis in GIS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses recent urban regeneration projects in Barcelona, focusing especially on the role of bottom-up practices and their consideration and inclusion in urban regeneration policies. In a context of social and political mobilisation against austerity, the combination of these two elements gives rise to the emergence of bottom-linked practices and new policy instruments. Our comparison of two case studies in Barcelona shows that a process of experimentation for broadening urban regeneration is underway, but also that it is far from being consolidated and that it is not without its own contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a multidimensional concept of urban regimes that allows for explaining racialized asymmetries of access to public space among different religious minority groups. Departing from an empirical study of collective religious rituals in the streets, parks and squares of Barcelona, we compare Buddhist, Sikh and Islamic events in public space. Although all religious events are in theory subjected to the same regulatory regime, we find significant differences in the ways that these regulations are enacted. Making sense of these differences requires a multidimensional concept of urban regimes involving (a) the bureaucratic regulations, (b) the interaction order of the city and the attached emotional registers, and (c) imaginations of public space. The conjunction of all three domains allows for a deeper understanding of how conceptions of ideal public space, urban visibility and public emotional registers are configured in the governance of religious events and partly intersect with institutional racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Professional Geographer is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Digital platforms for urban democracy are analyzed in Madrid and Barcelona. These platforms permit citizens to debate urban issues with other citizens; to propose developments, plans, and policies for city authorities; and to influence how city budgets are spent. Contrasting with neoliberal assumptions about Smart Citizenship, the technopolitics discourse underpinning these developments recognizes that the technologies facilitating participation have themselves to be developed democratically. That is, technopolitical platforms are built and operate as open, commons-based processes for learning, reflection, and adaptation. These features prove vital to platform implementation consistent with aspirations for citizen engagement and activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will address experiences centred around relationships—which are often conflictive—between sexual dissidents and museums, in particular outside the Anglophone world. In it, I address certain projects that I have worked on personally and collectively as an artist, and offer reflections that are undoubtedly conditioned by my own status as a migrant and sexually dissident person who collaborates with a museum in Barcelona. In this regard, the article is not a theoretical one, but rather a personal reflection intended to analyse my experiences situationally, and to identify ways for museums and dissidents to relate that take on and circumvent power relations, the logic of mere representation, and 'extractive practices' that have marked these relationships to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary art practices are often described as projects or processes. But when can we say that an art project or process is finished? How is it valued? Does it become a product? In this article, I will present a particular artwork, 'The Artist and the Stone,' that consisted in taking an artist and a 2 tone stone from Palestine to Barcelona, Spain. Through this example, I will explore the different temporalities of process, project, and product in contemporary art. My argument is that process, project and product are often contradictorily juxtaposed in an ongoing tension that is revelatory of a deeper contradiction between art as a form of value and art as a form of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several papers discussed at a symposium on the medical management of advance prostate cancer held in Barcelona, Spain on March 16-17, 2007 is presented. More than 30 Spanish experts in the different fields presented updated information on the most relevant diagnostic and therapeutic aspects of the cancer. A case report of an asymptomatic patient with hormone-refractory prostate cancer as well as a case report was discussed.