Intro
Barcelona is an ancient city, a beautiful city, and a cosmopolitan city. In 2011, the population of the city of Barcelona was 1,615,448 people. The population of Barcelona’s entire metropolitan area at that time was 4,777,042. Barcelona’s surface area is 10,216 hectares. In 2008, the GDP of the city of Barcelona was €64,521,300,000. The city functions as a major Mediterranean port and some of its largest industries are shipping, finance, manufacturing, and tourism. (Statistics taken from the Official Website of the City of Barcelona.)
Another important function of the city of Barcelona is that it is the capital of the Autonomous Community of Catalonia (Spanish: Cataluña, Catalan: Catalunya). Catalonia has a strong independent streak throughout its culture. Many Catalans today call for further autonomy, or even independence, from Spain. This is one major reason that it is worthwhile to study the city of Barcelona; if the Catalan nationalist movement succeeds in winning independence from Spain, it will become a new world capital. But the greater reason to study the city of Barcelona is to understand how it has accomplished all that it has. Barcelona is held up in the urban planning field as a paragon of planning, pedestrianism, density, communal space, and urban form. By studying what phenomena have shaped Barcelona, and how those phenomena have shaped Barcelona, perhaps we can learn how to emulate this Paragon of Planning in our own work as community-builders.