Geographical Origin as a Cohesive Factor of Residential Areas in Barcelona
In-migration to Barcelona in the twentieth century was not only a population influx from rural Spain, but an incoming of people imbedded with a distinct cultural and linguistic background from that of the local Catalan-speaking people. This article analyzes the impact of in-migration on the configuration of residential areas in Barcelona from 1970 to 1991; that is, twenty years from the decline of the migratory inflow until the arrival of a period of intensive urban renewal. Among the various steps of the analysis, geographical origin as a cohesive factor of the residing population is contrasted with two other factors : professional status and lifecycle.A multivariate analysis applied to the population of census tracts draws quite a clear picture of four clusters defined by geographical origin, but none of them is composed of exclusive urban spaces occupied only by people of a specific origin. Furthermore, the distribution of the four groups shows considerable overlaps with that of professional clusters and that of lifecycle clusters, so segregation by geographical origin is, to a certain degree, due to different socioeconomic compositions found among the four groups. This interpretation is supported also by another analysis based on the index of dissimilarity, by which the effects of various socioeconomic variables on residential patterns are statistically evaluated.After clustering the dwellings of Barcelona by a similar method to that applied to the population, a cross-tabulating analysis reveals that the living conditions of the dwellers show a remarkable disparity by groups of different geographical origin-a disparity related not only to the qualitative aspects of the dwellings themselves, but to the situation and the accessibility of the neighborhood in which they are inserted. However, differences in socioeconomic composition mentioned above are also behind the unfavorable conditions of the newcomers, which in turn have been experiencing major changes through improvements in housing equipment and also in the surrounding infrastructure.