Supplying Barcelona: The Role of Public Market Halls in the Construction of the Urban Food System

Abstract

The origin of Barcelona’s food system can be determined at the time when open-air markets were moved to covered spaces. Since then, market halls have adapted to many different scenarios: they have been the built form of public support for food sanitary control, a guarantee of quality and variety of edibles or a tool for the regeneration of urban fabrics. While in the second half of the twentieth-century comparable market systems in other European cities began to decline, half of the thirty-eight active markets at the end of the 2010s were built out of time in the city as a result of a public policy that accompanied urban expansion through the consolidation of small neighborhood centers. With the development of the so-called “Barcelona model” of regeneration of public space in the 1990s, markets became key pieces for urban transformation through food supply systems, a strategy still in force today.

Outdoor Terraces in Barcelona and Milan: Configuration of New Spaces for Social Interaction

“…When vendors began by number to strangle the circulation, they were relocated to sheltered places. With the subsequent construction of canopies, markets ceased to be open spaces and food gained protection from sun, rain, cold and heat, and soon adopted a non-sensory and aseptic condition, losing seasonality and, consequently, physical and cultural proximity to the territory that once fed the city [50,51]. Despite this current detachment from the street, market halls are to be considered, in the words of Susan Parham (2015) [44], "outdoor rooms", positively designed spaces, with a clear function and clear volumetric boundaries, with the right proportion between the floor area and height of the surrounding buildings that provide the conditions for them to be convivial and vital urban places.…”

Creative Food Nodes: Innovating the Role of Urban Markets in the Cosmopolitan Habitat

“…This organisational model, still in force today, accompanied Barcelona's expansion and its consolidation of small neighbourhood centres in the 1990s, and markets became key elements of the urban regeneration of public space. (Fuertes, Gomez-Escoda 2020). Following the example of Barcelona, food nodes can potentially become social innovation and living hubs, enhancing new forms of social encounter, education, culture, experience, and enjoyment, and drawing their mission and added values from their polyvalence of roles and functions in the context of contemporary, often non-transparent supply lines of "food cycles".…”

Mapping Food and Health Premises in Barcelona. An Approach to Logics of Distribution and Proximity of Essential Urban Services

“…Even without planning traces, the location of market halls followed a logic that since the nineteenth century considered the compactness of the fabric and the density of the population, so that the service radii determined the relative positions [35]. Market halls are located at a minimum distance of between 492 and 1663 m from any other nearest market.…”