The State's neoliberal management and its inability to develop large urban projects, as they had been carried out during the Fordist era, led to much more fragmented urban actions. Over the last two decades, we have witnessed the end of metropolitan governments and the inoperative or slow implementation of large-scale planning. Barcelona has been an important urban laboratory of avant-garde ideas of modern urbanism, except for the period of the fascist dictatorship (1939-1975). The creation of new public spaces and the projection of Barcelona on a global scale is what defined the Olympic urban planning.
From the 2000s, disciplines such as biology and psychology replaced the dominant role of architects and engineers when designing Barcelona's urban transformations. The new period focuses on the redesign of an already built public space and the enhancement of a local-place that urban planners and politicians supposedly believe can exist isolated without taking into account the existence of the global in the everyday. Associated with this scale, the value is placed on the traditional popular urban concept: the neighbourhood, conceived by planners as eminently monofunctional, but also from a romantic and idealized vision. Achieving urban sustainability through the greenification of public space and the enhancement of mobility on foot and by bicycle marks the new urbanism that has the “neighbourhood” at the centre of the debate.
Based on the case of Superblocks Barcelona, this research aims to analyses the limitations of urban planning to address the sustainability of retail urban systems in the contemporary metropolis.
Mots clés : urban planning|retail|proximity|planetary urbanization|scale
A102756LF