Urbanism and Sport: Analysis of the Informal Sporting Practices in the Public Space of Barcelona

This article proposes to review the concept of public space and the sense of its use by the citizens of the city. To achieve this, it studies, in first place the evolution of the concept and, in second place, it analyses the informal sporting practices, which generate themselves in the public spaces of Barcelona, as an example of the application of the concept. To this end, results are used from the research conducted into the social sporting networks from a sample of 30 spaces and more than 60 networks, in the city of Barcelona(Puig and Maza, 2008). By way of results of the analysis, the concept of public space is confirmed as presenting a crisis owing to the transformation suffered by the new uses of the space and owing to the climax of collectively used, privately managed spaces, generated in the new central areas.