Who Owns the Waterfront? Urban Transformation and Collective Struggles for the Urban Coastal Commons in Barcelona

Barcelona has undergone continuous transformations along its waterfront since the 1992 Olympic Games, which marked the city’s symbolic “opening to the sea” by turning marginalized coastal areas into accessible public spaces. In recent decades, however, tensions have grown between tourism and urban-development-driven economic interests and citizens’ demands for equitable access and participation. Privatization, elite-oriented development, and touristification have deepened socio-spatial inequalities, particularly in long-standing neighborhoods such as Barceloneta, while climate change intensifies environmental vulnerability. Existing frameworks for coastal commons have largely focused on rural and fishing contexts, leaving highly urbanized shorelines shaped by tourism and mega-events analytically underaddressed. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and visual documentation of the 37th America’s Cup as a critical case study, this article proposes urban coastal commons as a new conceptual framework that integrates commons theory, blue justice, and degrowth. The analysis shows how the event accelerated coastal enclosures while simultaneously triggering citizen mobilizations through which residents claimed the shoreline as a shared socio-ecological environment. It also reveals a structural misalignment between institutional resilience strategies and the vulnerabilities experienced by long-term residents—a tension that emerges most visibly in moments of conflict.