Active Cities and Healthy Life Styles: the cases of the Informal Appropriation of Public Space for Leisure and Sport in Barcelona

The identification and classification of the different typologies of infrastructures for leisure and sport is crucial in the study of the opportunities for practising physical activities and in the recognition of the characteristics of the body facilitating environments. The paper presents a part of a research, which is in a finalization phase, whose applicative field concerns a qualitative study based on interviews and observations concerning the body facilitating environments and the citizens’ participation in planning sports and recreational areas. The research compares several European case studies. The speech focus on the Barcelona case in which, together with sport facilities and infrastructures designed for allowing the body’s expression, there are several cases of informal appropriation of public spaces aimed at transforming them into light sport facilities. Compared with other European cases, the Barcelona’s results show the effectiveness of these bottom-up proactive processes in allowing leisure and sport oriented body expressions. Moreover, while some of the ongoing processes of informal appropriation have begun twenty years ago, they reveal their economic and social sustainability.