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Barcelona Plans 60,000-Person Neighborhoods on Underused Land
City officials outline transformations on underused land to ease housing pressures while staying within existing boundaries.
How we reported this
Barcelona City Council has released a fresh timetable for a compact new neighborhood beside Poble-sec, delivering more than 500 homes plus facilities on land once used by the Montjuïc fairgrounds.
The move comes as the city grapples with a severe housing shortage and cannot expand outward because of Collserola, the sea, the Besòs river and the neighboring municipality of Hospitalet de Llobregat. Officials therefore focus on reworking industrial plots and infrastructure corridors inside the current footprint. The overall pipeline covers projects expected to produce more than 25,000 homes and room for over 60,000 additional residents, according to the reporting published by Ara on 9 December 2025.
Chief architect Maria Buhigas has described the approach with a household comparison: just as a studio can become a bedroom when needs change, Barcelona can convert former industrial zones or rail corridors into residential areas. This method is already visible in Marina del Prat Vermell, where more than 2,000 people have moved in and further buildings rise, and in the planned Mercedes eco-district at Bon Pastor.
La Sagrera transformation
The largest single project centers on La Sagrera, where covering the railway tracks will remove a long-standing divide between Sant Martí and Sant Andreu. The scheme calls for more than 13,500 homes, 43 percent of them subsidized, to accommodate 30,000 new residents along a four-kilometer linear park. Work on the upper stretch of Rambla Prim is scheduled to begin in 2029 and will include 3,360 homes, 2,089 of them public, the Ara account states.
Smaller but still significant changes are under discussion around the upper Diagonal once Hospital Clínic relocates, and at several other former industrial sites scattered across the city. These sites are mapped in detail in the Ara article, which shows how each location connects to existing neighborhoods.
Construction sequencing will determine how quickly new residents arrive and how services keep pace. City planners expect the first phases at La Sagrera and the Poble-sec site to set the pace for later projects, with progress reports likely to follow the published timetable.