Planeamiento regional industrial y cultural europeo: comparativa de políticas territoriales en la región del Ruhr y Barcelona

Abstract

European industrial regions fostered the development of new territorial planning tools and they keep innovating in this field with cultural regeneration policies. These strategies have a special interest because they promote the development of vast territories with a clear decentralizing and polycentric objectives. In order to analyse the evolution of this trends in Europe, we compare two paradigmatic study cases: the Ruhr region and the province of Barcelona. This article focuses not in big cities, but in medium ones and the synergies that they build between each other. The mechanisms that regulate these connections in both cases are highly important from different perspectives: industrial, cultural and natural. Therefore, the objective of this study is to emphasise the value of cultural networks that add a new level of complexity. Together with the natural and the infrastructure networks, they create attractive, dynamic and cohesive urban and territorial tissues.