Resilience and Urban Regeneration Policies. Lessons from Community-Led Initiatives. The Case Study of CanFugarolas in Mataro (Barcelona)

Diego Saez Ujaque,Elisabet Roca,Rafael De Balanzó Joue,Pilar Garcia-Almirall,Pere Fuertes

doi:10.3390/su132212855

Abstract

This paper addresses socio-ecological, community-led resilience as the ability of the urban system to progress and adapt. This is based on the socio-cultural, self-organized case study of CanFugarolas in Mataró (Barcelona), for the recovery of a derelict industrial building and given the lack of attention to resilience emerging from grassroots. Facing rigidities (stagnation) observed under the provisions of urban regeneration policies (regulatory realm), evidenced in the proliferation of urban voids (infrastructural arena), the social subsystem stands as the enabler of urban progression. Under the heuristics of the Adaptive Cycle and Panarchy, the study embraces Fath’s model to analyze the transition along, and the interactions between, the adaptive cycles at each urban subsystem. The mixed method approach reveals the ability of the community to navigate all stages and overcome successive ailments, despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles (traps) at the physical support (built stock) and the regulatory arena (urban planning). Further, cross-scale, social-centered interactions (panarchy) are also traced, becoming the “sink” and the “trigger” of the urban dynamics. The community, in the form of an actor-network, becomes the catalyst (through Remember/Revolt) of urban resilience at the city scale. At a managerial level, this evidences its temporal and spatial complementarity to top-down urban regeneration policies.

Highlights

Urban resilience provides a useful framework with a large potential for the analysis of urban socio-ecological systems (SES)
Whereas the Adaptive cycle is the growth-conservation-release-reorganization path that any whereas the Adaptive cycle is the growth-conservation-release-reorganization path that system follows, and the Panarchy is constituted by the sum of the cross-scale interactions between such adaptive cycles, Revolt and Remember are the mechanisms through which such interactions take place
In the first part of the results, we describe the transition of each urban subsystem, and at the Large/Focal/Small scale, throughout the stages of the adaptive cycle

Summary

Introduction

Urban resilience provides a useful framework with a large potential for the analysis of urban socio-ecological systems (SES). Bottom-up reorganization mechanisms, selforganization and participation can be key factors for building the adaptive capacity of SES [1,2]. Practical tools to bridge and put urban resilience findings into the realms and practice of urban planning, economy and policy are still needed [3], especially when it comes to bottom-up or alternative initiatives. The concept of adaptability varies with the system’s ability and capacity for selfreorganization [4]. Society emerges as the outcome of heterogeneous relationships between actors and artifacts, making it impossible to determine the social network or system beforehand, which conditions the subsequent analysis and findings [7]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion