Barcelona, the city I’ve lived in for more than six years, is changing at a pace that feels both exhilarating and unsettling. It’s as if the city is accelerating — and not everyone manages to jump onto the train in time.

Today, the capital of Catalonia is trying to solve several problems at once. On the one hand, it wants to reduce the pressure of mass tourism and make life calmer and more comfortable for local residents, many of whom have been leaving the city in recent years because of rising housing costs, noise, and overcrowding. On the other, Barcelona is positioning itself as one of Europe’s key technology hubs, competing for talent, investment, international companies, and global business.

This is where the core question emerges. Can a city that is becoming more convenient for investors and the tech elite remain accessible to those who lived here before? Or is the new version of Barcelona inevitably a city not meant for everyone?

Visible and Invisible Changes

Barcelona, already one of the most densely populated cities in Europe, shows no signs of slowing down. On the contrary, local authorities are increasingly talking about the need to widen the city’s “gates” — to make them broader, more efficient, and more accessible to those who choose to come here. And not only in a physical sense, but in a bureaucratic one as well.

In 2025, the city approved a €3.2 billion expansion of Josep Tarradellas Barcelona–El Prat Airport. The runway along the coast is set to be extended by nearly 500 meters, alongside the construction of a new terminal. If the project goes ahead — despite opposition from residents and environmental groups — the airport could be handling more than 70 million passengers a year by 2033, accommodating fully loaded wide-body aircraft and significantly increasing long-haul flights.

At the same time, Barcelona is streamlining pathways for skilled migration through visa programs, special regimes, and digital administrative systems. Gradually, the airport and the migration infrastructure are merging into a single attraction mechanism — designed to bring in the kind of people the city wants.

Today, Barcelona has firmly established itself as one of Europe’s capitals for digital nomads. According to Spain’s Migration Observatory, in 2024 more than a third of all new permits issued to remote workers were concentrated in Barcelona and its surrounding areas — nearly twice as many as in Madrid. In global rankings, the city consistently appears among the best places in the world for remote work and workation.

Seen from this angle, it’s hard not to ask: what is this, if not a new turning point in the city’s trajectory? Can it be compared to the moments that once reshaped Barcelona’s destiny — the rise of Catalan modernism in the early 20th century, or the Olympic Games of 1992?

Speaking as someone who lives here, I can say this: I’ve never heard as many foreign languages in the city as I do now — not in 2019, when I first moved to Barcelona, and not even a year ago. This polyphony keeps growing. And with it, the city is increasingly ceasing to be a weekend resort, gradually transforming into a platform for long-term presence.

The Cost of the Shift

Barcelona has one chronic problem that city authorities have been unable to fix for years. It is the rise in housing prices — a development that has become a serious strain on local residents and a constant headache for City Hall. For a long time, the main culprits were said to be property owners who prefer to rent their apartments to tourists, often through short-term rental platforms.

The scale of this market is indeed significant. In 2025, rents in Barcelona grew at double-digit rates — between 10 and 18 percent year over year, according to data from the real estate portal Fotocasa. At the same time, wage growth barely reached 3 percent. As a result, Barcelona has become the most expensive city in Spain in terms of rent: the average price now stands at around €22–23 per square meter. Renting a typical 65-square-meter apartment costs roughly €1,300 per month.

The situation on the purchase market is no less tense. By the end of 2025, the city’s average price approached €4,800 per square meter, while in certain neighborhoods — such as Dreta de l’Eixample — it already exceeds €7,000. Buying a home within the city limits has long been a privilege reserved for a small minority. What has changed is that this boundary now feels fixed — and for most residents, no longer attainable.

The consequences of this pressure are clearly visible in the numbers. Nearly 65 percent of renter households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing and utilities, and one in three spends over half. In its reports, the Urban Research Institute of Barcelona describes this condition as residential insecurity — a persistent form of housing instability that now affects not only vulnerable groups but also the urban middle class. The situation is particularly alarming for single residents, many of whom spend around half of their income on rent alone.

It is important to note that this pressure is primarily structural rather than political. And it is not driven by tourism alone. By focusing on short-term rental platforms, the city was able to signal control while avoiding a far more uncomfortable question: what kind of social model Barcelona is actually encouraging through its development strategy.

Barcelona is increasingly described as a city where the share of foreign residents with higher education already exceeds that of those born locally. In urban studies and public debate, the term transnational gentrification appears more and more frequently. It refers to the way Western European and North American migrants — drawn by lifestyle rather than specific jobs — become privileged consumers of housing, particularly in central neighborhoods, gradually displacing long-term local residents.

According to analysts, demand for housing from this group has increased by roughly 40 percent over the past two years, intensifying pressure in areas that were traditionally considered residential and “city” neighborhoods — Eixample, Gràcia, Poblenou, and Sant Antoni.

The result is a paradox that is difficult to capture in official rhetoric. Barcelona may indeed be becoming quieter, cleaner, and less dependent on mass tourism. But at the same time, a different selection mechanism comes into play — a price-based one. The city does not push people out directly. It simply becomes gradually impossible for those whose incomes are not integrated into the global market.

Those who benefit are property owners, businesses oriented toward an international audience, and high-income professionals. In a more vulnerable position are renters, service workers, young families, and anyone for whom rising housing costs stop being an abstract indicator of growth and become a daily constraint. This process rarely looks dramatic. Yet it is precisely this quiet, cumulative pressure that reshapes the city’s social fabric — more deeply and more durably than any wave of tourism ever could.

Official Logic: “Balance,” “Sustainability,” “Diversification”

In public documents and official statements, this transformation is described as a necessary and almost unavoidable step. According to the city’s official rhetoric, Barcelona is striving for a “balance” between residents’ right to the city and economic activity, for “sustainable growth,” and for the “diversification of the economy” beyond mass tourism. These formulas are repeated year after year, creating the impression of a carefully designed and measured strategy.

The logic appears coherent. Mass tourism is framed as an excessive and vulnerable model: it brings noise, infrastructure overload, and unstable revenues. In response, the city shifts its focus toward the knowledge economy — technology, creative industries, education, international companies, and highly skilled migration. This turn is presented as a way to simultaneously improve residents’ quality of life and preserve Barcelona’s competitiveness in the global race between cities.

Within this framework, rising prices and changes to the city’s social structure are treated as side effects — issues to be mitigated through regulation. Officials speak of controlling tourist apartments, stabilizing long-term rentals, and protecting “high-pressure zones.” At the same time, the development vector itself — attracting capital, talent, and mobile professionals — is rarely questioned. It is framed as natural, rational, and inevitable.

The problem with this logic is not that it is false. It is that it is selective. When officials speak of “balance,” they rarely clarify between whom this balance is being sought — or at whose expense it is achieved. The rhetoric of sustainability focuses on economic indicators and global image, while showing far less willingness to address long-term social consequences: who will be able to remain in the city, and who will not.

By concentrating on tourist platforms and short-term rentals, City Hall has been able to signal action and control without confronting a more uncomfortable question: what kind of social model Barcelona is actively encouraging through its development. The city speaks at length about quality of life, but far less about which groups that life is becoming accessible to.

As a result, official language creates the impression of a manageable process in which growth, comfort, and sustainability move in tandem. Yet beyond this rhetoric lies a central tension: as Barcelona increasingly positions itself as a city for the global economy, it spends less time discussing the boundaries of this transformation — and who it is prepared to include within the new “balance.”

Other Cities: Not a Unique Case

The trajectory Barcelona is following today is far from unique. Over the past ten to fifteen years, other European cities have already gone down this path — cities positioned at the intersection of technology, global mobility, and an attractive lifestyle. And almost everywhere, this journey has been marked by the same set of contradictions.

For a long time, Lisbon was presented as a success story: mild climate, low prices, openness to digital nomads and startups. In reality, the rapid influx of mobile professionals and foreign residents sharply intensified the housing crisis. Rents rose faster than incomes, the middle class began to leave, and after several years the authorities were forced to scale back parts of their digital nomad programs and return to the language of protecting local residents. The city became globally visible — but paid for it with social instability.

Berlin long remained a symbol of an “affordable capital” for the creative and tech class. It was precisely this affordability that turned the city into a magnet for international companies and specialists. But as the tech sector and investment grew, Berlin ran into the same gap between incomes and rent. Attempts to freeze prices and intervene radically in the housing market revealed how late the scale of the problem had been recognized: social tension had already become part of everyday urban reality.

Amsterdam took a different route. It accepted high living costs early on as an inevitable condition of global competitiveness. The city is stable, well-maintained, and economically successful — yet increasingly perceived as a space reserved for those who can afford it. For the middle class and young families, the entry threshold has become so high that the question of “staying or leaving” is no longer a temporary one.

Against this backdrop, Barcelona looks less like an exception and more like the next link in a familiar chain. The difference is that this process is not yet complete. The city is still in a phase where growth, comfort, and global attractiveness are seen as mutually reinforcing — and where the consequences of this choice can still be debated, rather than merely recorded.

The question, then, is no longer whether the city chose the right direction. The real question is this: for whom is Barcelona building this future — and is it prepared to acknowledge that success, comfort, and sustainability almost always come with a cost?