Geographies of Gentrification in Barcelona. Tourism as a Driver of Social Change

Among Spanish cities, Barcelona has arguably the greatest international projection. It tops the rankings in many of the country’s tourist indicators and, in recent decades, the city has been the gateway into Spain for various socio-urban processes, including gentrification. Two decades of academic studies of this city have constructed a discourse of gentrification and mapped out the territories exposed to these processes. In this chapter, our objective is to study the geographies of gentrification in Barcelona based on an analysis of this literature. The bibliographic review shows how tourism has become a critical element in most modes of gentrification to which the Catalan capital has been exposed. Specifically, its historic centre – the diverse and segregated district of Ciutat Vella – subject to the strong pressures of tourism and the housing market, emerges as an inescapable point of reference in these studies. The same is true of other city neighbourhoods targeted by strategic plans of urban renewal, the case, for example, of Poblenou.