Inventive City-Regions: Path Dependence and Creative Knowledge Strategies by Marco Bontje & Sako Musterd

Author:Marco Bontje & Sako Musterd [Bontje, Marco & Musterd, Sako]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Regional Planning, Public Policy, Political Science
ISBN: 9781317113171
Google: r1AfDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30144000
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

8.5 Barcelona’s and Catalonia’s economic, urban and social development policies

8.5.1 The Strategic Metropolitan Plan

The non-finished process of de-industrialization is one of the most important features of the Barcelona economy of today. To overcome the difficulties accompanied by this transformation, the region chose in the Barcelona Strategic Metropolitan Plan (approved in 2003, revised in 2006 and 2009) to implement a new strategy based on promoting creative industries, instead of following the most conventional strategy of promoting high tech manufacturers. This choice has been made since growth in creative industries is considered to be more related to tourism and more certain and easier to achieve.

The mission of the Strategic Metropolitan Plan of Barcelona is to propose, within a framework of public-private and inter-municipal cooperation, and with the participation of economic and social agents, the processes of change that are required in the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona, in order to give direction to the economic and social development of this territory and for constant regeneration of its potential for growth.

The history of policy making in the current way goes back only about twenty-five years, due to the specific background of Barcelona and Spain. The establishment of democracy meant the very beginning of a modern cultural and economic policy. The urban development of the city of Barcelona has been termed the ‘Barcelona model’. It started with small projects of exclusively municipal responsibility, progressively taking on projects of greater complexity and size, requiring agreements with other public administrations and the private sector.

Striking is the fact that little attention is given to the housing market in policy documents. Although the Barcelona Strategic Metropolitan Plan calls the housing market a critical issue, it is not a central goal of policy to improve the situation. Especially with respect to the severe problems on the housing market in Barcelona, this is remarkable. Housing market, labour force and economic development are tightly related, but this is hardly acknowledged in Barcelona’s strategic planning documents. In the meantime, over recent years, there was a lot of speculative building in segments that were unaffordable for households with low incomes and for migrants. This seems especially important for the creative industries, because a significant share of employees in this sector does not have a high income, and affordable space for companies is needed as well. The changing demographic composition of Barcelona’s population could affect the growth of the creative economy.

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