Tourism promotion and urban space in Barcelona. Historic perspective and critical review, 1900-1936

Abstract

This paper focuses on the historic connections between tourist promotion as a factor for both capital attraction and competitiveness and its influence on the urban configuration of Barcelona. Today, tourism represents a strategic value in the urban organisation of Barcelona and constitutes an excuse for the design, management and planning of the city, but the genealogy of this process has not been considered. In analysing this origin, the paper emphasises the validity of the strategies that were used at the beginning of the 20 th century and makes a parallelism with the current promotion of the city. The tourist construction of Barcelona originated in the framework of the bourgeois ideology, which placed aesthetic and cultural values as a core idea of its discourse. Both the urban reconfiguration and the monumental construction of Barcelona were a prerequisite and a consequence of this promotion.

Smarter city, less just destination? Mobilities and social gaps in Barcelona

“…Barcelona is an exemplary test case to look at a tourist destination in which “tourismification” brings into the picture a shift in its social ecology (López-Gay et al , 2019; Sequera and Nofre, 2018), driven by the inflation of housing rents (Garcia-López et al , 2020), changes in the use of public space (Cocola Gant and Palou Rubio, 2015; Brandajs and Russo, 2019) and fundamental alterations of the activity rhythms (Rouleau, 2017; Nofre et al , 2018). All this conjures to challenge the comfort and the affordability of incumbent populations, triggering resentment and exclusion, but also changing fundamentally the socio-economic environment of the city, producing socio-spatial polarisation.…”

Visualizing Digital Traces for Sustainable Urban Management: Mapping Tourism Activity on the Virtual Public Space

“…Promoted as a tourist destination since the beginning of the 20th century [71], and following several decades of international tourism expansion in Spain [72], Barcelona experimented an exceptional growth in the number of visitors [73] after the celebration of the Summer Olympic Games of 1992 [74] and is currently the 12th most visited urban destination in the world [75], holding the 6th position in the Airbnb top destination cities [76].…”