Population and housing dynamics in Catalan deep rural areas (1996-2009): increasing diversity in a period of change

The paper's aim is to analyse the interrelation between three socio-demographic processes recently characterising Catalan rural villages: depopulation -as around 43% of them lost Spanish population during the studied period-; high foreign population growth (particularly in some of them); and dwelling construction both as main or second residences. Significant geographical patterns have been found in the cluster analysis of the 1996-2009 Spanish and foreign population changes at municipality level. Resulting categories have then been use to study their dwelling patterns. Research has been based on the 480 Catalan municipalities under 1.000 inhabitants, where around 200 thousand people (2.6% of the Catalan population) lived in 2009, 18 thousand of which were foreigners -representing a 9.4% of the registered inhabitants. Results show there increasingly is a spatial dichotomy between a few dynamic rural areas and the other more regressive ones, largely occupying inland Catalonia.