The construction of an Urban Food System. Barcelona 1957-2020

Abstract

The urban form of Barcelona can be explained through the distribution of food supply systems. Thirty-eight public food market halls — reachable at a walking distance of five minutes from half of the city's households — are complemented by a private system formed by 1,522 specialty stores and 2,809 supermarkets that provide fresh edibles to citizens. Half of the market halls active today were built late after 1957, at a time when the architectural type was in decline or disappearance in most cities. With the country under a political dictatorship, a municipal strategy was developed to expand the public market system — born a century earlier, in the mid-19th — to strengthen small commercial centralities in peripheral neighborhoods. In many of these cases, the construction of the market hall was a milestone that preceded the services of any other facility or the arrival of public transportation systems. In 1986, a new public governance implemented an ambitious reform and expansion model to "make municipal markets the centre of the fresh food distribution network" which turned market halls into triggers for the regeneration of food retail premises. As a consequence and since 1998, 18 buildings have been updated and four more are under works as part of a policy sustained over time that has managed to consolidate an urban model that can now be diagnosed. The research deepens in the exploration of the urban evolution of the food commercial fabric as a result of the implementation of public control policies since 1957. Given the distribution of the system in the city, public markets have the capacity to become a tool capable of exercising control over food prices and to be the stage for a public commitment to the introduction of new practices related to healthy feeding habits.