City Commentary
Barcelona is a city which mostly already existed in its current physical form in the mid 1970s. But then hardly anyone saw it as one of the main tourist attractions of Europe. It consisted of the old town (Ciutat Vella), long a tourist draw, but a minor one, the grid square Extension (Eixample in Catalan, Ensanche in Castilian), only visited by a few Gaudí aficionados, and the rest, never seen by outsiders. All this changed in the 1980s and 1990s, such that Barcelona may now be visited almost as much for its atmosphere of urban innovation as for its more normal stock of tourist attractions. It is the way in which this transformation has been engineered that is the focus of this text: why, how, what, where, using which internal and external resources.
The following pages discuss the city and its recent physical development under the headings listed below:
