Urban form and social cohesion: the socio-morphological definition of the residential fabrics of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona

Abstract

[EN] Social inequality has become of great importance nowadays, and it is in metropolitan areas where it appears to be more intense. Thus, inequality becomes unavoidable when rethinking the contemporary cities. To get a grasp of this phenomenon, for the first time in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, a common look between urban morphology and social cohesion is made. The goal is to describe the socio-morphologic structure of the metropolitan territory, which is the result of combining both categorizations and maps of the existing sociological and morphological aspects. For such purpose, a two-stage methodology has been used. The first stage develops the quantitative and qualitative criteria to overlap the two existing maps, and stablishes the areas that will be considered the new socio-morphologic fabrics. The second one applies the areal interpolation method to assign this socioeconomic and/or demographic information to these new fabrics. The result of this combination is a categorization of twenty-one types of fabrics that describes the socio-morphological metropolitan reality. This new categorization sheds light on a tight relationship between urban shape and social cohesion, both conditioning each other. Moreover, the new map shows socio-morphological similarities between distant areas and announces common urban strategies to achieve a larger urban equity. The interest of having this new approach increases when thinking in the new investigation lines that will be derived from there. One of them would be the evolutionary reconstruction, which will allow visualizing processes and ease the understanding of certain phenomena to foresee urban blight.