Who Is Moving in Barcelona’s Central City?: Residential Mobility and Migration in the Sociodemographic Renewal of the Urban Core

Antonio Lopez Gay, University of Minnesota
Joaquin Recano-Valverde, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Since Barcelona’s central municipality reached its maturity, migration and residential mobility have been the determinant factors of its sociodemographic renewal. In many other inner cities it has been proved that participants in residential flows (moving into, moving out and moving within the urban core) are not randomly extracted from the whole population. In Barcelona, young people, singles, professionals and the highly educated are more willing to move into and within the central city. Meanwhile, family dimension is behind most of the leaving the inner city movements. Manual workers and medium educated are more likely to leave central areas. As a consequence, Barcelona’s urban core has experienced an intense process of population renewal during the last decade. This research is based on the analysis of the Census 2001 100% microdata, which enables to explore the sociodemographic profile of each person who has arrived, left and moved within Barcelona’s central city.