Few European metropolises have been able, as Barcelona has, to connect urban renewal with a transformation in their social and public life. Teeming with metaphors and narratives, the success of our renewed democracy was radically based on the transformation of the raw material of the city where social life took shape; its public and collective spaces.
Firstly, there was a massive creation of public spaces (parks and squares, beaches and seafronts) on which to build and give shape to easily identifiable meanings and references, where the novelty of space and its physical quality were easily accepted by the public and were to foreshadow the physical appearance and the expectations of urban renewal. Secondly, the ability of the community to “contaminate” and take possession of the very character of private spaces (places and buildings), giving them a new collective meaning, helped to create a city with a greater wealth of places and complexity of meanings. As Manuel de Solà-Morales said, the force in this duality consisted of “urbanising the private, in other words, turning it into part of the public sphere”. The mixed-use building of L’Illa Diagonal, where the ground floor merges with the pavement, was to exemplify this idea.
The ability of the public space/collective space duality to transform has been irregular, because neither the availability of physical space nor the city planning objectives have been consistent over time. The creation of squares and parks that were such a feature of the early years of democracy resulted from the opportunity and the availability of
spaces in which to give material form to the transformation: obsolete factories and large chunks relocated to the outskirts, spaces that were the result of local government planning and existing sites to be redeveloped.
In the absence of an overall model, the coherence of the architectural narrative also gave cohesion to the image of public space redevelopment, above and beyond the specifics of each context and the particular wishes of each place, and we saw the birth of what architectural literature applauded as “Barcelona Public Space”.
Additionally, the evolution of the council structure and the gradual subdivision of city authorities over the last two decades, together with the unfolding of the metropolitan mosaic (“a city of cities”, “the city of neighbourhoods”) and the new sensitivity towards communities, neighbourhoods and citizens, have often led to public space projects being simplified, paradoxically in favour of grass-roots architecture. The proliferation of little spots, spaces inside street blocks and squares full of subjectivity and personality, exemplifies architecture’s new role. What gives these spaces such a different tone is not their design or specific features, nor their inherent and necessary sensitivity to citizens and neighbours, but the autonomy of the land to the detriment of the relationship between things.
Once the gaps have been used up and the holes in the city have been filled, the transformed infrastructure creates greater urban opportunities where the distance between infrastructure and public space projects becomes even more apparent. The covered sections of Ronda del Mig and Travessera de Dalt and the recent redevelopment of Plaça de Lesseps are great examples of this limited methodology. The contribution to the dynamics of the city and its social success become “suburban”, in that they have minimal capacity to create general urban meanings and to capture collective imagination. Any comparison to the major infrastructure transformations that took place in the eighties (Moll de la Fusta, Ronda de Dalt, Trinitat), when infrastructure and public space were both the subjects of the same line of thinking, can only consolidate this perception.
The transformation of Plaça de les Glòries plays a direct role in this debate. Despite the titanic efforts of local government and the exemplary work of architects and engineers, the patent lack of connection between the underground hustle and bustle (packed with metro lines, train tracks and road tunnels) and the square itself decreases any mutual awareness between the surface and underground. A central space or a hub of connectivity? It could be both, or neither. The way the built space actually behaves will determine whether the authorities made the right decisions or not.
New thinking on the collective space
Given this situation, the collective space re-emerges as a new territory to explore, with blurred and highly ambiguous borders and as yet no precise model. If in the nineties, the notion of collective space anticipated community ownership of private property as a civilising act, the noughties brought a broader notion that looks at the exclusive nature of the public sphere.
In parallel to this, the emergence of a significant group of new urban features, both public facilities and private buildings, puts forward models that deliberately question the strict dividing lines between public and private. Some of them are originally public buildings, such as art factories (Fabra i Coats in Barcelona, Matadero in Madrid, Kaapeli in Helsinki and Space in London), where art cooperatives are mixed with housing and communities and citizens stop being passive actors for entertainment’s sake and collectively become the living protagonists of the space.
When it comes to the private arena, the way work spaces have mutated (Repsol Campus in Madrid, Red Bull in London) foresees forms of production without fixed spaces, organised, where the basic work structures are defined on the basis of collaboration and cooperation.
In line with their more urban nature, initiatives such as the NDSM wharf, the Hallen district and the Kromhouthal in Amsterdam are bringing the idea of on-going participation to neighbourhoods, homes and free spaces, where fusion and creativity are blurring the original community framework and giving it a stronger collective character.
The results have some interesting characteristics. The ownership of the space is ambiguous – neither obviously public nor private – and there is a promiscuous combination of uses and spaces. By shifting social change to public spaces as universally accessible urban locations, they become places for exchange, relationships and production, quite different from their peaceful, neutral image. Heterogeneous in its layout, both individuals and groups come together in the public space, shattering the idea of it as a bucolic place for leisure and turning it into a place for doing things, and for doing them together.
This evokes a new line of thinking and proposals that reclaims the best aspects of public space and contemporary features to reinforce citizens’ ownership of them, going beyond the communitarian view (the space as a resource for subjective communities) and intensifying the collective view (the space as a resource for anonymous and different individuals). In other words, that which recent urban theory defines as a space’s information, production and participation capacity. In a space that has been redefined like this, people necessarily leave behind their role as passive spectators and become actors.
As Manuel de Solà-Morales predicted, the collective space constitutes the future wealth of cities. The social shift, the need to redefine new models of production, the changes to the urban models (from housing to amenities) all predict that the collective factor will burst onto the stage as the key argument in the cities of the future. And not just as the crosspollution of spheres and spaces, but as the multiplication and in-depth intensification of a social change. Collective yes, and collective to the limit.