Does a ‘Barcelona Model’ Really Exist? Periods, Territories and Actors in the Process of Urban Transformation
Abstract The so-called ‘Barcelona Model’ of urban regeneration is known world-wide as a ‘success story’. Amongst the most frequently mentioned features of this ‘model’ are: the use of major events – such as the Olympic Games – as catalysts for great urban regeneration; the adoption of a relational mode of urban governance based on the collaboration between different tiers of government, public and private bodies; the political and administrative decentralisation and the participation of the citizenship. However, the ‘Barcelona Model’ has also received strong criticism from certain segments of the city's academic elite and several local social movements. This article calls into question the mere existence of one ‘Barcelona Model’. It highlights how the main strategies of urban public policy have changed in different periods. It illustrates that, territorially speaking, the strategies of urban regeneration have also been very varied. Eventually, it shows that the networks of urban actors involved in processes of urban change have been significantly diverse. Some learning elements for the analysis of urban regeneration are highlighted at the end of the article.
Circulating knowledge and urban change: ideas, interests and institutions in the development of Olympic Rio de Janeiro
This research examines why and how local policy actors engage with globally circulating ideas about urban policies and what are the broader implications of this mobilisation process. Grand visions for the development of cities have long generated interest in urban scholarship and attention has often been paid to identify the practices, models and techniques that travelled across geographical boundaries. There is however, a renewed interest spanning disciplines to critically engage with the way context-specific policies and expertise are abstracted, circulated and adapted into new political settings. This is particularly important at times in which cities are brought together in a context of competition for resources, measured against each other and encouraged to learn from ‘best practices’. The contemporary development of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil provides the basis of this study where it is claimed to be currently undergoing a watershed moment due the preparations for the 2016 Olympic Games. The focus is on three policies pursued since the mid-1990s that have had profound impacts on the city’s development trajectory: strategic planning, the attraction of mega-events, and waterfront regeneration. These circulating policies are examined through a socio-constructivist perspective that combines relational thinking to examine urban change and a framework of policy analisys that consider ideas, interests and institutions as mutually constitutive. In order to analyse the circulation of policy ideas and their situated mobilisation into public policies, this thesis draws on detailed archival research and semi-structured interviews with a range of policymakers, planners, consultants, developers, scholars and activists. It argues that an appreciation of how policies are not just defined ‘in place’, can help us to understand the ways in which development is relationally pursued, and how globally circulating ideas are grounded and institutionalised into local urban policies
Performance Evaluation of Fuzzy Routing Algorithms for a New Fuzzy Mixed Metric Approach
Optimizing routing decisions has been an important subject in research of communication networks. The present paper is introducing a new fuzzy mixed metric approach, which takes routing decisions based on fuzzy costs in parallel to crisp cost of other metrics. The present paper evaluates the new fuzzy approach for its performance. The paper first describes the new fuzzy approach and the fuzzy routing algorithms developed for the approach and then the performance is evaluated both in empirical and analytical terms to show its advantages over the previous fuzzy approaches and traditional link- state routing approach. The paper analyzes the performance for different cases to show the efficacy of load on delay. The present paper bargains with three such cases.