València

Few cities embody the engagement of urban process with globalisation and European integration better than the Mediterranean city of Valencia. Valencia is Spain’s third-largest city (after Madrid and Barcelona) with more than 1.5 million residents within the Metropolitan Area. This traditionally agrarian and provincial city has become the capital of the Spanish Autonomous Region, the Comunitat Valenciana, Mediterranean cultural and economic centre, and a major destination for foreign visitors. Indeed, the University of Valencia is now the second most popular destination for European exchange students. This metamorphosis is seen in the city’s changing landscape, embodied in the monumental cultural-entertainment complex Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències (City of the Arts and Sciences), a new conference centre, the growing container port, gentrification and immigration in the city centre, and the newly renovated harbour

Valencia, a city fascinated by great transformations, relied on the abstract notion of ‘positioning itself on the map’, turning its back to its genuine virtues of an entrepreneurship based on what it did best: reinventing itself, listening and learning from its masters to later challenge then.

As in many other cities of southern Europe, the economic crisis, the interaction of a human scale beyond the bursting of the housing bubble, public policies have made us turn our eyes to the city built, forgetting to order unnecessary growth .
It is between its existing bricks – and many are centuries old – where spontaneous dynamics take over the urban spaces where an innovative energy transforms the historic centres (and this city has a few) in factories of the present.
Valencia, as evidenced by surveys from the Economics Research Unit of the University of Valencia, is more than a one-day city: visitor satisfaction increases with the days they spend here. Valencia is a city for a stable relationship.

(Contributed by Ramón Marrades)