Ada Colau - the radical mayor of Barcelona. PA images/Emilio Morenatti. All rights reserved.Since the late Middle Ages, cities in Europe have played a crucial role as places of production, craft, artistic and cultural creation, as nodes of extensive trade networks, and as spaces of individual and collective liberation from the previous constraints of servitude.
Urban development has, since then, accompanied moments of historical progress on our continent. And cities are, at the same time, the stage and the main actor in any process of economic, cultural and societal transformation.
In recent decades, after the end of the Fordist production model, new forms of work organisation - diffused, immaterial and networked - as well as the increasing financialisation of the economy that has led to land and real estate speculation, have again profoundly altered the nature, role and function of European cities.
