Below and beyond the map: stories of urban regeneration of the Barcelona waterfront

Urban regeneration is often presented by those responsible as an unquestionable success story. Barcelona’s transformation from the mid-1980s, with its great Olympic momentum and successive attempts to maintain its international status, is perhaps one of the most widely publicized and celebrated. Amo...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Benach, Núria, Font-Casaseca, Núria
Formato: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Recursos:Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Repositorio:Repositorio Digital de la UPF
OAI Identifier:oai:repositori.upf.edu:10230/71241
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/10230/71241
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/land14050953
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Barcelona
Waterfront
Layering
Heritage
Collective memory
Descrição
Resumo:Urban regeneration is often presented by those responsible as an unquestionable success story. Barcelona’s transformation from the mid-1980s, with its great Olympic momentum and successive attempts to maintain its international status, is perhaps one of the most widely publicized and celebrated. Among the operations, the waterfront stands out as one of the most significant regeneration efforts due to their territorial scope, social implications, and economic impact. In this text, we want to challenge this official success story with other untold stories: the stories of the preexisting spaces that have been erased, the people who have been displaced, and the industrial heritage that has been destroyed. There are hardly any memories left, and the regeneration projects seem to be built on a previous emptiness. The discourses of success are often accompanied by maps that conceal the process of change and, at the same time, present the regeneration projects as disconnected from other spaces and processes. Maps appear as artifacts with great limitations in their capacity to represent complex and time-delayed processes and, at the same time, have enough power to legitimize urban regeneration as beneficial to all. However, maps can also be powerful tools for changing the way regeneration processes are told and who tells them, thus revealing what has been hidden.