For some considerable time now there has been a relative dearth of information in English about urban planning in Spain. Studies by economists and geographers have largely concentrated on the national and regional economic aspects of planning, focusing above all on regional differences and country-city migration, but urban planning has received little attention. This paper aims to help redress the balance by examining the evolution of urban planning in Barcelona since the middle of the nineteenth century.

During the period under review there has indeed been a great deal of planning activity in Barcelona. The early plans of ordenacion (arrangement, physical ordering) such as that ofIldefonso Cerda, which remained the official Development Plan for the city for almost a century, were concerned largely with the development of all or part of the plain of Barcelona, stretching from the old city on the coast to the Tibidabo mountain inland (see Fig. 1). In the last 25 years, however, a series of more sophisticated plans have appeared as the scale and complexity of urban growth have increased. The first two sections of this article outline the major features of planning and growth in the two periods 1854-1952 and 1953-1977~ the final section attempts to assess the value of some of the historical perspectives relating to planning over the period as a whole, which have appeared in Spanish commentaries in recent years.