Socio spatial characterization of Large Housing Estates in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona

Fifty years after the construction of Large Housing Estates in the periphery of the Barcelona urban continuum, public administrations face the need to redesign polices and tools aimed at improving living conditions in each of these specific areas. The need to improve the current living conditions of the housing stock according to habitability exigencies, maintenance and repair of building pathology, the improvement of energy efficiency and the research of a better social integration of their population, are some of the issues that call for being addressed when aiming to improve Large Housing Estates. The current research provides a socio spatial characterization of 20 study cases according to the evaluation of both socio demographic, socio economic and spatial indicators and their evolution along 5 time periods since their construction. Even if all study cases originally had many common characteristics, their very different evolution in time calls for a specific analysis of the current state of each area. Moreover, the characterization of the different evolution of the studied indicators on each specific case is a very useful tool to identify and describe past and ongoing complex social and urban processes. The applied methodology provides a detection of risk parameters, allowing to identify the most vulnerable cases in comparison with the analysed cases as well as the city average indicators. The transversal capacity of considering simultaneously social aspects as well as urban, architectonic and technological aspects, provides an integral view on the current state of Large Housing Estates in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona. A result consisting of relevant information in order to design effective integral tools that refer to the particular social and physical contemporary conditions and ongoing processes on each site.