Educational Spaces and Student Mobility: Transiting the Peripheries of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area

This paper presents a quantitative case study of student mobility in post-compulsory secondary education—including both academic and vocational tracks—within the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (BMA) between 2019 and 2022. The study investigates the relationship between the territorial distribution of school places, student home-to-school mobility, and the configuration of educational spaces. The theoretical framework combines two main approaches: critical geography and structuralism, drawing respectively on the works of Doreen Massey and Pierre Bourdieu. Using quantitative techniques and a comprehensive census database of over 200,000 students, our findings suggest that educational spaces in the BMA are articulated around three key variables: school provision (public, private), educational tracks (academic, vocational), and educational spaces (central Barcelona, elite suburbs, working-class enclaves). Our analysis—employing, among other techniques, Cramér's V to assess the strength of associations between variables—underscores the socially embedded nature of mobility, which is deeply intertwined with forms of economic and cultural capital. This is reflected in the stark contrast between the mobility patterns of middle- and upper-class students—who display high levels of mobility, particularly through centralisation towards Barcelona and suburban trajectories—and those of working-class students, whose mobility is more limited and primarily confined to inter-peripheral movements. The paper concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and political implications of these findings, particularly in relation to territorial justice and educational equity—considering, for example, the effects of school choice policies and neighbourhood-based inequalities. We argue that these insights may be applicable to other Southern European metropolitan contexts with comparable educational systems.