Below and Beyond the Map: Stories of Urban Regeneration of the Barcelona Waterfront

Núria Benach () and Núria Font-Casaseca ()
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Núria Benach: Department of Geography, Universitat de Barcelona, 08007 Barcelona, Spain
Núria Font-Casaseca: Department of Geography, Universitat de Girona, 17007 Girona, Spain

Land, 2025, vol. 14, issue 5, 1-16

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Barcelona; waterfront; layering; heritage; collective memory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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