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The issue of homeownership in the working-class peripheries of post-war Europe has received little attention in planning history. The main reason is probably that public housing built at the time of massive operations of constructing Modernist housing estates in Western and Eastern Blocs adopted tenancy as the predominant form of tenure in almost all cases. In the context of widespread growth of urban homeownership during the second half of the twentieth century in European countries, this paper addresses the singularities of ownership in Francoist Spain. In this case, the main peculiarity is that the working classes that flocked to inhabit the new outskirts were the main protagonists of the intense process of the spread in homeownership. First, the article discusses the ideological roots of the spread of homeownership in Spain as a singular phenomenon. Second, the spectacular growth of homeownership in the peripheral working-class districts of Barcelona and in the municipalities of its metropolitan area is analysed. Then, the paper considers the relationships observed between ownership in the new peripheries and the development of powerful urban movements. A final epilogue places such movements in the Western European context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of a smart city is still being developed despite the lack of a single universally accepted definition. It is implemented through different approaches in different cities around the world. The presented study concerns the improvement of this idea and the possibility of applying the solutions from Barcelona to the city of Kraków. This paper is based on the author's experience and observations during a trip to Catalonia and its capital - Barcelona - as well as a study of literature on the smart city. The author takes into account the specific topographical and environmental conditions of each city and the human-environment interactions that have shaped both cities over the centuries. The paper continues to focus on the challenges to smart cities following the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has demonstrated the need to modify ICT (Information and Telecommunications Technologies) applications related to the functioning of the city. Preliminary conclusions drawn from the pandemic also indicate that further development of smart cities should be based not only on ICT applications in public services and public spaces, but also on guaranteeing individual spaces for citizens to live in long-term isolation. In addition, attention was drawn to the need to improve both direct and electronic communication, especially by telephone with the authorities of Kraków, to enable "co-governance" in areas where the voice of the city's residents can be very valuable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Creative clusters are increasingly being recognized as vital tools in the promotion of the competitiveness, innovation, urban development, and growth of cities in developed countries. This paper studies the geography of Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) in Barcelona (Spain) for the years 2009 and 2017. We investigate the spatial distribution of firms using the Scan methodology, which identifies the localization of clusters and assigns them statistical significance. Our findings indicate that CCIs are not located haphazardly— they tend to cluster in and around Barcelona's prime districts. The evolution of the clusters over these nine years reveals distinct patterns of clustering among the twelve CCI sub-sectors. The mature clusters in Barcelona's core tend to have greater growth and enhanced transformation capabilities. Our results can guide CCI cluster policy, taking into account the specificity of each sub-sector. In addition, they can direct place-based development strategies, creative urban and rural planning, and restructuring in a polycentric context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of suburbanization patt erns and processes necessarily implies looking beyond towns and cities. Suburbanization is a blendscape because it occurs within the transition zone between urban and rural areas surrounding urban centres. Therefore, a tension emerges between the growth expectations of small- and medium-sized municipalities and the supra-local authorities (e.g. metropolitan, provincial or regional public bodies) that provide essential (mostly financial) support to those municipalities. Supra-local authorities hence perform the governance role of institutional blendscapes because they can mediate between those growth expectations and more efficient, area-wide land management. By using the Barcelona Province as a case study, this paper examines three inter-related issues in suburbanization processes: (i) the question of land transformation; (ii) the relation between municipal size and suburban patt erns; and (iii) the role of supra-local authorities in the management of suburban areas in the city outskirts. Findings show that, overall, while municipalities up to 9,999 inhabitants have a housing stock that is predominantly suburban in character (i.e. 76.5 per cent single-family dwellings), it is small-/mid-sized municipalities between 10,000 and 49,999 inhabitants that have the highest proportion (31.2 per cent) of suburban residential areas within the Barcelona province. These small- and mid-sized, often rural, municipalities tend to rely on financial and technical support from the supra-local authority of the Barcelona Diputación - a key governance actor in suburbanization processes. As an institutional blendscape, on the one hand, the Barcelona Diputación can steer a more efficient land allocation and management through environmental protection and assistance in developing (supra-)local spatial plans. On the other hand, by distributing essential financial help to provide basic public services in small- and mid-size suburban municipalities, it also partially mitigates the planning, construction, and maintenance of suburbanity in (very) small- and medium-size municipalities 'far from the city' and rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Located between Marseille and Barcelona, Montpellier is one of the most attractive cities of the Mediterranean coast. It has more than 460,000 inhabitants and grows by 7,500 more inhabitants every year. This is largely due to its positive image and its freshly constructed neighbourhoods "Antigone" and "Port‐Marianne." From the late 1970s, the municipality's strategy was to organise the urban sprawl to the east and then towards the sea in the south of the city. The Lez, a small coastal river, well known for its spectacular flash floods, was the spine of this new urban growth. Internationally renowned architects and planners have been recruited to build these new "green" neighbourhoods (in French "éco‐quartiers") located on lands that used to be flooded regularly. This urban policy is largely due to the Montpellier's former mayor Georges Frêche and his deputy, the geographer Raymond Dugrand. The "urban planning" concept, or "urban design" projects, have largely been used by the local experts and officials to describe this development, but seem to be misused in this case. It has being mostly a political city‐project, still having the same objective as more than 30 years ago: to turn Montpellier towards the seaside. This paper will return to the strategy used at that time and, in retrospect, all the interrogations that have followed in terms of sustainable development and flood risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need to answer to some of the challenges generated by the dynamics of Land Use Land Cover Change (LULCC) in a territory characterized by its dispersed urban structure is the origin of this work. LULCC can be generators of risk spaces and costs associated with urban sprawl, among which the fires in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) and the unsustainable mobility of a dispersed population stand out. The general objective of this paper is to analyze, on one hand, the territorial and landscape dynamics in a municipality of the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona, Matadepera, that have generated vulnerable spaces using a quantitative methodology, to determine the evolution of the LULCC using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). On the other hand, the use of qualitative methodology, allows knowing the voice of the resident population from semi-structured interviews. The diagnosis allows us to propose alternatives to moderate or even overcome the consequences of these challenges. Each territory has local development opportunities that allow a more sustainable relationship with the environment. Understanding the dynamics of LULCC allows us to find opportunities and alternatives for improvement in territorial management and planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Satellite nocturnal images of the earth are a useful way to identify urbanisation. Nighttime lights have been used in a variety of scientific contributions, including studies on the identification of metropolitan areas as well as landscapes impacted by urbanization. However, the study of urban systems by nighttime light imagery has had a fundamental limitation to date: the low spatial resolution of satellite sensors. Although the DMSP Operational Linescan System (OLS) has been gathering global low-light imaging data for over 40 years, its 2.7 km/pixel footprint has limited its use for in-depth studies of urban development. The 2011 launch by NASA and the NOAA of the Suomi National Polar Partnership (SNPP) satellite, with the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor on board, has led to a significant improvement. This instrument has better spatial resolution (742 m/pixel), on-board calibration, a greater radiometric range, and fewer saturation and blooming problems than DMSP-OLS data. However, it still has considerable limitations for the in-depth study of the area and internal structure of urban systems.The launch of Luojia 1-01 in June 2018 has increased expectations. LJ1-01 is a nano satellite that can obtain high-resolution nocturnal images (130 metres/pixel). The aim of this paper is to analyse, and compare with previous satellites, the new instrument's capacity to delimit the urbanised area and its efficiency in identifying types of urban landscape (compact, dispersed and rurban). The study cases are Barcelona Metropolitan Region (Spain) and Shenzhen City (China). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ancient cities and castles are ubiquitous cultural heritage structures all over Europe, and countless digital creations (e.g. movies and games) use them for storytelling. However, they got little or no attention in the computer graphics literature. This paper aims to close the gap between historical and geometrical modelling, by presenting a framework that allows the forward and inverse design of ancient city (e.g. castles and walled cities) evolution along history. The main component is an interactive loop that cycles over a number of years simulating the evolution of a city. The user can define events, such as battles, city growth, wall creations or expansions, or any other historical event. Firstly, cities (or castles) and their walls are created, and, later on, expanded to encompass civil or strategic facilities to protect. In our framework, battle simulations are used to detect weaknesses and strengthen them, evolving to accommodate to developments in offensive weaponry. We conducted both forward and inverse design tests on three different scenarios: the city of Carcassone (France), the city of Gerunda (Spain) and the Ciutadella in ancient Barcelona. All the results have been validated by historians who helped fine‐tune the different parameters involved in the simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Barcelona model of urban transformation has for some time now been considered a paradigmatic case of successful regeneration. Urban change is ongoing in the city, albeit in a changed global context in which cities are increasingly being seen as the principal drivers of economic growth and competitiveness in the 'new' or 'knowledge' economy. The paper draws on the writing of Henri Lefebvre and on his critique of representations of space, in particular, in order to examine the current strategic transformation of the Poblenou district of Barcelona into 22@Barcelona: an innovation district. The paper endorses Lefebvre's work as a point of departure in critically analysing contemporary strategies to engineer urban competitiveness. It argues that the functionalist and reductive representations of 22@Barcelona betray an ideological concern with the globally competitive abstract space, the reduction of differences, and the closing of the circuit of everyday life in Poblenou. [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]

The ongoing effects of the climate emergency and the recognition of the need to redesign cities to cope with future socio-environmental changes and increase the quality of life of urban inhabitants has pushed many cities to embrace the 're-naturalization' of public space through Nature-based Solutions (NbS). Les Glòries park (Barcelona) is an ongoing massive urban transformation project that incorporates NbS as a multifunctional tool. It attempts to respond to complex environmental, social, and economic urban problems while at the same time mitigating and adapting to hazards, such as floods and droughts, both predicted to increase in the Mediterranean region due to climate change. While NbS are also expected to improve environmental quality, not much attention has been given to how those strategies would intersect with citizens' expectations and visions of public space and the uneven socio-environmental relations they can enforce. Through a case of urban development of a new large green area in Barcelona, this article aims to discern different perceptions by the local community and planners on the socio-ecological role of NbS and the implications this has for sustainable urban transitions. In-depth interviews were held with 25 key stakeholders and users, complemented by the analysis of secondary data from the town council of Barcelona about the perception of the space by residents living in the surrounding neighborhoods of the park. The results of this paper show that perceptions around NbS are strongly divided into three groups: the believers , the opposers and the skepticals. These results contribute to nuance NbS, as they do not provide universal benefits, neither for nature nor for society, and that they are subject to urban tensions derived from inequities, conflicts, tradeoffs, and particularly from divided visions of what the 're-naturalization' of cities should look like. • Urban transformations are increasingly guided by the re-naturalization of cities through NbS. • By developing NbS in cities, human-nature relationships are modified but not in clear ways. • Transition literature downplays the social, political and economic aspects of NbS. • Stakeholders' perceptions shed light on the unequal socio-ecological relationships in NbS. • Divergent perceptions on the socio-ecological role of NbS conditions their future and questions its universal benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid growth of cities in recent decades has unleashed several challenges for urban planning, which have been exacerbated by their aging population. Among the most pressing problems in cities are those related to mobility and environmental quality, by which a global concern has flourished around enhancing pedestrian accessibility for both environmental and health-related reasons. To tackle this issue, this paper presents a new framework that combines multi-objective optimization with a graph model that aims to support urban planning and management to enhance age-friendly cities. The framework allows designing urban projects that improve accessibility and reduce noise and/or air pollution through the installation of urban elements (ramps and escalators, elevators, acoustic and vegetation panels), while considering the overall economic cost of the installation. To explore the trade-off between these objectives, we resort to multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, which permit to compute near Pareto-optimal interventions over the graph model of the urban area under study. We showcase the applicability of the proposed framework over two use cases in the city of Barcelona (Spain), both quantitatively and qualitatively. Results evince that the framework can help urban planners make informed decisions towards enhancing urban accessibility and the environmental quality of age-friendly cities. • Improvement of urban accessibility and environmental quality is formulated as a multiobjective optimization problem. • A framework using graph modeling and multiobjective metaheuristics is used to efficiently solve the formulated problem. • Results over two scenarios in the city of Barcelona (Spain) are examined quantitatively and qualitatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times, the emergence of coworking spaces (CSs) has changed not only the way workers cooperate, but also how they carry out their activities. This phenomenon, limited mainly to urban areas, has spread heterogeneously across cities. The paper focuses on the location of CSs in Barcelona, Warsaw and Utrecht, three European cities that differ in terms of the typology of creation of these workspaces. In the three analysed cities, CSs are mainly private initiatives, although in Barcelona they are developed by small entrepreneurs, while in Warsaw they are developed by large multinational CS chains. Using K-density (Kd) functions and density maps, we contribute to the empirical literature by identifying how CSs coagglomerate with the service sectors, how CSs are concentrated in core areas of each city and how these factors differ between cities, taking into account the typology of CSs. We found that the CS location and coagglomeration depend on the spatial structure of the city and its development model; therefore, policymakers should take this into account in order to implement appropriate policy measures to attract CSs • CSs agglomerate differently in cities with different levels of urban hierarchy and reveal different CSs location strategies. • The coagglomeration of CSs with Knowledge Intensive Services (KIS) and symbolic knowledge base firms has been confirmed. • Market and high tech KIS with CSs build an urban entrepreneurial ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tributary streams or torrents form runoff axes that are unique to the Mediterranean. They have contributed to the formation and growth of some cities. The approach in this paper is to investigate the importance of the streams in the process of urbanization in Barcelona, as well as interventions in these urban axes as public spaces. The study was conducted in two phases. The: first was a literature review and an analysis old maps obtained in the Historical Archive of Barcelona City. AHCB with satellite photographs and current mapping in CAD format obtained from the Cartographic Institut of Catalonia ICC. The second phase studied the characteristics of the Ramblas as emblematic streets for their design characteristics as public spaces, and from an empirical study based on the observation through field visits. The work concludes by recognizing the contribution of urban interventions carried out in the Ramblas to become one of the most emblematic streets of Barcelona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2000 the municipality of Barcelona launched an ambitious project called 22@bcn. This had two main goals: to make the city a leading center of scientific and technological production in the knowledge economy and to promote the integration and functional reconversion of a traditional industrial neighborhood located near the downtown area. This urban strategy is known as knowledge-based urban development (KBUD). The aim of this paper is to analyze the development of 22@bcn from the urban planning perspective, giving attention both to the theoretical framework of KBUD, as well to the social resistance and ideological, political and technical disagreements between residents, scholars and municipal advisors along this first decade. We state that 22@bcn constitutes an interesting case study of the creation of a knowledge-based district within a complex industrial area, with a rich urban heritage but also full of social diversity that must be taken into account in knowledge-based urban development initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Royuela V., Moreno R. and Vaya E. Influence of quality-of-life on urban growth: a case study of Barcelona, Spain, Regional Studies. There are several determinants that influence household location decisions. More concretely, the recent economic literature assigns an increasingly important role to the variables governing quality-of-life. Nevertheless, the spatial stationarity of the parameters is implicitly assumed in most studies. The paper analyses the role of quality-of-life in urban economics and tests for the spatial stationarity of the relationship between city growth and quality-of-life. [image omitted] Royuela V., Moreno R. et Vaya E. L'impact de la qualite de la vie sur la croissance urbaine, Regional Studies. Nombreuses sont les determinants du choix d'emplacement des menages. Essentiellement, la documentation economique recente accorde un role de plus en plus important aux variables qui determinent la qualite de la vie. Neanmoins, la plupart des etudes supposent implicitement une geographie stationnaire des parametres. On cherche a analyser le role de la qualite de la vie dans l'economie urbaine et on fait des analyses pour deceler la geographie stationnaire du rapport entre la croissance urbaine et la qualite de la vie. Qualite de la vie Economie urbaine Croissance urbaine Regressions geographiques ponderees Royuela V., Moreno R. und Vaya E. Der Einfluss der Lebensqualitat auf das Wachstum von Stadten. Eine Fallstudie von Barcelona, Regional Studies. Die Entscheidung fur den Standort von Haushalten wird von mehreren Determinanten beeinflusst. Insbesondere wird in der aktuellen Wirtschaftsliteratur den fur die Lebensqualitat ausschlaggebenden Variablen ein zunehmend hoher Stellenwert eingeraumt. Allerdings wird in den meisten Studien fur diese Parameter implizit eine raumliche Unveranderlichkeit angenommen. In diesem Beitrag analysieren wir die Rolle der Lebensqualitat in der Okonomie von Stadten und uberprufen die raumliche Unveranderlichkeit der Beziehung zwischen Stadtwachstum und Lebensqualitat. Lebensqualitat Okonomie von Stadten Stadtwachstum Geografisch gewichtete Regressionen Royuela V., Moreno R. y Vaya E. La influencia de la calidad de vida en el crecimiento urbano. Estudio del caso de Barcelona, Regional Studies. La decision de elegir el lugar de la vivienda depende de varios factores determinantes. En concreto, la reciente literatura economica asigna un papel cada vez mas importante a las variables que gobiernan la calidad de vida. Sin embargo, en la mayoria de estudios se supone implicitamente la estacionalidad espacial de los parametros. Aqui analizamos el papel de la calidad de vida en la economia urbana y comprobamos la estacionalidad espacial de la relacion entre el crecimiento de las ciudades y la calidad de vida. Calidad de vida Economia urbana Crecimiento de las ciudades Regresiones ponderadas geograficamente [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lot of attention is currently paid to the success or failure of European cities in terms of competitiveness. Barcelona is usually viewed as a successful city, performing well in terms of its business indicators and considered as an international cultural reference and an attractive location for creative and knowledge workers. Some authors attribute this success to the good job that the city has done in promoting the Barcelona brand. On the contrary, others highlight the importance of the joint effort that institutions, policies and actors have put forward in embracing coherent long-term objectives for the development of the city. Both arguments will be discussed in this paper as well as the challenges and opportunities that the city is facing today in terms of its future development. The Barcelona Metropolitan Region: From Non-Existence to Fame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An energy-landscape optimization nonlinear model is designed for land use planning. • The model is tested in a mediterranean biocultural landscape using diverse objectives. • The model integrates socio-metabolic balances and landscape functional structures. • Results allow different land use configurations for conventional-organic agriculture. • The model helps policies advancing toward green infrastructures in metropolitan areas. Image, graphical abstract Rapid population growth and urban expansion in metropolitan areas have led to a dramatic increase in food demand. In most cases, urban sprawl occurs in unplanned ways, forcing peri-urban agriculture to adopt detrimental practices for biodiversity conservation and metabolic efficiency (i.e. landscape homogenization and dependence on non-renewable external inputs), facing the food-biodiversity dilemma. In order to ameliorate these negative effects over the metropolitan socioecological system, researchers have focused on developing comprehensive indicators to support sustainable urban expansion in metropolitan areas. In this paper, we use these indicators to develop an Energy-Landscape Optimization (E-LO), a nonlinear model designed for land use planning by means of considering biophysical constraints. Then, we test the model in a representative Mediterranean bio-cultural landscape in the Barcelona metropolitan area (Spain). The E-LO results allow us to propose different land use configurations for both conventional and organic agriculture, taking into account the associated socio-metabolic balances and the related landscape functional structures, with the aim to meet different societal objectives. We have fruitfully tested three settings: i) to increase conditions to host farm associated biodiversity, ii) to increase agricultural production, and iii) to minimize dependence on non-renewable external inputs. According to these socioecological objectives, we have obtained the best landscape-metabolism integration, which is a useful methodology for sustainable land use policy. This socioecological perspective is necessary for the new paradigm on agroecosystem management and landscape planning, and can help advancing towards functional green infrastructures in metropolitan areas, especially in the climate change and agroecological transition global context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]