Project Runway

Barcelona has been facing many issues in terms of public participation in political matters.The movement for freedom Catalonia from Spain has been one f the most widely discussed problems of the country.However, as masses cannot be legally mobilized under this reason, strikes held in different parts of catalonia, including barcelona  cite reasons of labour struggles and indifference of the authorities to the demands of the workers.

The most recent strikes of barcelona has been mainly in the transportation sector, often disrupting regular metro and tram services.But how does the citizens of Barcelona feel under these circumstances?  Are they in support of the cause or feeling disgruntled due to the inconvenience caused?

Upon collecting the data of 2000 tweets from Twitter on 23rd of February, it was overlayed with information relating to the strikes to create an analytical assessment of the present condition.

It was noticed that the number of tweets relating to the subject of strikes and independence of Catalonia varied significantly and rose considerably the day before the trial of the leaders involved in the movement.It is also of importance that the most tweeted time of the day corresponded to the most travelled times of the day, mainly during the morning peak commuting hours at 7.00am and and evening peak hours at 6.00 pm.

This led to the speculation of whether people who reported a majority of negative opinion was unhappy about the circumstances of the strike or unhappy about the plight of their leaders.Further analysis revealed that people were mainly unhappy due to the strike and these feelings were mainly localised to the most active zones of the city.Also, the priority in the the use of Catalan among all languages showed that the locals were the people who were most unhappy about the disruption.

The district which had been most vocal has been Eixample while the least tweets were from Horta Guinardo.

Since this data is momentary and cannot be used to give a comprehensive analysis unless the data is collected over a longer period, the conclusion is that

“Barcelona went through a phase of unhappiness on February 20th at 7:00 AM”

How unhappy is Barcelona? is a project of IaaC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia
developed at Master in City & Technology in (2018/2019) by:
Students: Sarine Bekarian, Raeshma J. Nair, Xinyu Zhang
Faculty: Starsky Lara