Resilience and Urban Regeneration Policies. Lessons from Community-Led Initiatives. The Case Study of CanFugarolas in Mataro (Barcelona)

Diego Saez Ujaque, Elisabet Roca, Rafael de Balanzó Joue, Pere Fuertes and Pilar Garcia-Almirall
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Diego Saez Ujaque: Institute for Sustainability Science and Technology, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
Elisabet Roca: Institute for Sustainability Science and Technology, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
Rafael de Balanzó Joue: Queens College, City University of New York, New York, NY 11367, USA
Pere Fuertes: Department of Architectural Design, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
Pilar Garcia-Almirall: Department of Architectural Technology, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, 08028 Barcelona, Spain

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 22, 1-19

Abstract: This paper addresses socio-ecological, community-led resilience as the ability of the urban system to progress and adapt. This is based on the socio-cultural, self-organized case study of CanFugarolas in Mataró (Barcelona), for the recovery of a derelict industrial building and given the lack of attention to resilience emerging from grassroots. Facing rigidities (stagnation) observed under the provisions of urban regeneration policies (regulatory realm), evidenced in the proliferation of urban voids (infrastructural arena), the social subsystem stands as the enabler of urban progression. Under the heuristics of the Adaptive Cycle and Panarchy, the study embraces Fath’s model to analyze the transition along, and the interactions between, the adaptive cycles at each urban subsystem. The mixed method approach reveals the ability of the community to navigate all stages and overcome successive ailments, despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles (traps) at the physical support (built stock) and the regulatory arena (urban planning). Further, cross-scale, social-centered interactions (panarchy) are also traced, becoming the “sink” and the “trigger” of the urban dynamics. The community, in the form of an actor-network, becomes the catalyst (through Remember/Revolt) of urban resilience at the city scale. At a managerial level, this evidences its temporal and spatial complementarity to top-down urban regeneration policies.

Keywords: community resilience; social-centered panarchy; self-organization; socio-ecological resilience; urban dynamics; urban regeneration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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