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The article analyzes an urban regeneration project in the historic old city center of Barcelona. Given the unsatisfactory outcome of all previous interventions on similar cases, the key decision here was to proceed according to an alternative strategy which would produce a proper response to some historical users vindications for the neighborhood regeneration such as maintaining the main essential features which have historically determined the site's character, as well as showing some respect for the historic memory of the inhabitants. Here, architectural design substitutes the usual urban planning tools both in previous analysis and exploration stages. Its starting point ignores all current regulations and only at the final stage, once the proper effectiveness of the project has been checked, those planning regulations are adapted to include the specificities of the new design. In this way, the usual design process sequence is inverted, so to avoid the frequent mistakes which occur due to excessive rigidity and lack of sensitivity in current urban planning regulation procedures when it comes to deal with so complex realities. In the initial analysis we give priority to all the graphic, sensitive, perceptive and experiential aspects. The article also introduces some unpublished materials from Enric Miralles' studio, author of the Santa Caterina urban planning project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]