City of Barcelona
September 2023

In this self-driven project, focussing on the city of Barcelona, I chose to analyse recent trends in population, demographics, migration and the birth/death rates of the city to discover how population patterns influence the future of the city.

 

I extracted the data from the local government data portal. I used Tableau Prep to clean and wrangle data and exported this as new CSV files after connecting multiple source files. Data analysis and visualisations were made using Tableau Desktop. To finish, I grouped all the visualisations in a Tableau Story to showcase the results.

 

Conclusions: Despite unforeseen global events that caused population and immigration to drop (such as the Covid and Financial crisis), Barcelona still has a positive trend of population growth, largely due to immigration. Although the population is ageing year by year, which will challenge healthcare services in the future, this will likely give opportunities for employment in social care. While there was significant migration from bordering countries, the highest concentration of migration outside Europe came from China, Pakistan and South America.

 

Limitations: Data was not available for every year in all criteria in the analysis which proved challenging when presenting the conclusions. I overcame this by presenting certain elements of data in different date ranges. 

 

Possible next steps: More time needs to pass in order to accurately reflect the trends following the Covid-19 pandemic, it would be fascinating to interrogate this data at a future time. I would like to analyse more deeply into the migration of young people following the financial crisis, cross-reference the results with additional data from housing, transport and healthcare, and compare data with nationwide Spain and the EU to see the local trends in a wider context. I would also like to analyse the impact of the Catalan independence movement on migration trends.

 

This analysis could help local government to work on policies that encourage young adults to stay in the city, improve healthcare in neighbourhoods with a larger number of ageing adults, encourage investment in schools in neighbourhoods with higher numbers of children and adapt housing policies to better accommodate immigrants in future years.