Antonio Luna Garcia is associate professor at Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona at the Department of Humanities. He holds a BA degree in Geography from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (1989), a MA in Urban Planning from the University of Arizona (1994) and a PhD in Geography and Regional Development also from the University of Arizona(2000). He teaches in the department of Humanities in the degree of Global Studies.

He is one of the members of the Geohumanities research group and its a senior researcher in the Research Group CASEs Culture, Archaeology and Socio-Ecological Dynamics (https://www.upf.edu/web/cases). He has been involved in different research projects in the field of Geohumanities, Urban Geography and Planning, and Educational Geography founded by the EU (project Eurogame, and EUTOPIA-more), the NSF (Center for Global Geography Education) and by the Spanish Ministry of Research (projecte INVBAC; projecte Geohumanitats) and by other funding agencies such as the Institute of Catalan Studies, or the Regional Government of Catalonia.

He has acted as Academic Director of the Study Abroad Program of the UPF (2003-2009), head of the Department of humanities (2010-2013); academic director of the GLobal Studies Degree (2014-2020) and as Vice-rector for International Relations of the UPF (2021-2023).

In this presentation we will analyze the most important challenges of the contemporary city through the prism of the current environmental crisis. Contemporary Cities are facing several challenges: housing, mobility, governance and urban metabolic processes. We will analyze how different Mediterranean cities have faced these challenges throughout their history, and how they are facing them today. We will use the case of Barcelona's urbanism as a case study in these adaptability models.