During my childhood I lived in some of the largest cities in the world, including Mexico DF, Sao Paolo and London. When I studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge I was taught in the romantic English tradition that cities are the main menace of the modern age. My PhD in Urban Sociology, which I wrote in London and Mexico, was partly an attempt to reconcile the contradictions I had come across. The conclusion I came to was that the cities are neither good nor bad - they are what we make of them. The challenge is to draw on the advantages of cities - their concentrations of talent and innovation - to overcome the social, environmental and economic problems which they spawn.



I moved to Barcelona when I was finishing my PhD, and I have done research here on slums and poverty, and on patterns of urban growth and suburbanization. Apart from being a wonderful place to live, I feel that Barcelona provides an excellent example of the forces at work in the modern city; it has numerous advantages inherited from its past, and has tackled the hallenges of globalization head on, but it constantly has to face new problems with imaginative solutions.


→ Send an e-mail: awalker@iesbarcelona.org


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