A quantum leap for the notion of public space

© Maria Corte

Public leadership is needed to mark out the areas to be transformed in the future, to set aside the location and to start designing these public spaces. This is what will ensure that this space will become an important part of the city.

We must not lose our hope of building a better city: the biggest challenge facing us when it comes to the public spaces of the future is to be ambitious; ambitious in the sense of creating a vision of the city that is not obvious, a vision that is therefore controversial. I believe that Barcelona has inherent, major problems that do not even feature on the agenda of local political parties. We have to be ambitious collectively and this in itself poses a challenge, because we tend to be extremely conservative when it comes to urban issues and we generally only reach a consensus when we all join forces behind a “no”. We need to build a collective intelligence in the city: one that suggests, encourages and applies a vision of the future. Complex and initially brave arguments are often used to find clichés that trivialise the debate, thereby justifying intellectual stagnation and a lack of foresight. To propose is to innovate, to act against “how it has always been done”, and this leads to reticence. City planning is a profession exposed to this, but the value of these professionals lies in being consistent, in having the capacity to disagree and to argue for new ways of taking on complex challenges.

There are certain commonplaces repeated in city planning circles that become devoid of content and even end up being the opposite of what they originally meant. One of these is the paradigm of the open city. In Barcelona, large projects have a bad reputation. Yet the open city, in the original meaning put forward by Habermas, Arendt and Sennett, is one that is being endlessly transformed; a city that turns borders into hinges and is therefore invasive; a city that does not end, in which indeterminacy strengthens the passage of time and just allows itself to happen. The question of a city’s degree of openness should not be about the scale of intervention, but about its ability to evolve over time. To accept that the leading role is not played by an architect or an association, but that the intervention has much more life above and beyond whoever designed it.

An engineer friend of mine was telling me that he cannot understand why city councils apologise when construction work is undertaken. He makes a good point: why, when a tunnelling machine is boring its way underneath half the city and we are collectively investing a fortune on it, do we conceal it and only focus on the inconvenience caused? We should get rid of these complexes: “Take a look at this tunnelling machine that is helping to build Line 9 of the Metro with minimal disruption, leaving future generations a city that is connected by fast and competitive public transport” or “a round of applause for the team that works so hard every day to shorten distances”.

In today’s post-property-bubble scenario, the pace of transformation seems much more important to me than its size. When a place is in constant transformation, it is a pain, but it is no reason to bury one’s head in the sand. What is unforgiveable is that everything is closed and walled off. A place’s connectivity must not be reduced by construction work, because otherwise the daily lives of thousands of people are affected: shops are closed, wastelands are created and ground floors become deserted. Sometimes, wanting to finish a piece of the city, even if it is small, can cause a  trauma. In other words: the problem with the Sagrera project is not its size or scale but its implementation strategy, based on a never-ending “closed due to construction work” situation. As things stand, with a strip of tracks exposed like an operated stomach, the authorities are blaming each other and are burying their heads in the sand, unable to turn the space into an opportunity. There is one project by the Alday-Jover architectural team and another by the RCR architectural firm to start colonizing the edges of the site. Both are easy and fast to execute, but have been halted by the change of government, even though they are crucial for starting to transform La Sagrera before the park arrives. 

Overcoming the criticism of the speculative model

I shall put forward three issues which the city should be thinking about. The first is the myth that Barcelona has thousands of empty flats. There are some, but, paradoxically, a lot fewer that what is needed for a reasonably healthy, uninflated housing market. Experts say that with less than 5% of the housing stock empty, the market does not function properly. Barcelona has around 800,000 homes and the banks appear to have 2,400 empty ones. To avoid an inflated housing market, there has to be a large supply and the antigrowth rhetoric only benefits current property owners. I think that this error stems from the old notion that some people have of the property market. Building a city does not mean building flats, but creating centres, places that are there before they are built. This means designing top-notch public spaces that are well-connected, green, appealing and well-structured. Growing a city means being able to make it fairer, better distributed and more welcoming to talent. 

Barcelona (the metropolitan area) has plenty of margin for growth. It is a great place to live and it faces the challenge of attracting talent or people with a desire to build a shared future that is better, innovative and entrepreneurial. We have to move beyond our criticism of the speculative model that ruled prior to the property bubble. We have to get over (and fight) our fear of those shady and lucrative property deals and start to imagine a well-connected and much less unequal metropolitan area. We need to design new areas of the city that are flexible and open, and this is not something one can do spontaneously: public leadership is needed to mark out the areas to be transformed in the future, to set aside the location and to start designing the public space there. This is what will ensure that this space will become an important part of the city. 

The second issue relates to the density of public space and built space. One of the city’s most important genetic features is its living density. High-rise construction is met with disdain. In fact, anything that sticks out is met with annoyance. However, this is an efficient way of leaving a small environmental footprint and providing light and views to all users. Systematically opposing a different project drags the city into mediocrity, the “product” city, safe values and the standardization of the built environment in the shape of Núñez i Navarro apartment buildings and sterile hotels. This false aim of not letting anything stand out is contrary to the city’s essence: identity is a public value that is under threat. Fear of managing the risk must not paralyse us and for this we need competent experts, politicians backed by arguments, responsible investors and creativity from residents. 

Mediocrity is not a question of scale: there are fantastic buildings that are large and tall and there are large buildings that do not add anything. There are also large public spaces that disconnect, just as there are unplanned thoroughfares that magically embody the essence of a public space. However, we must get over our prejudices and dare to think laterally. The clichés that imply that everything big, different or private equals “speculation” is the result of a lack of analytical thinking and simply a wish to please. 

The third challenge relates to how the public space of the future should be planned. In an ever-changing environment, does it make sense to set out today what has to happen three generations down the line? We need to find planning tools that pinpoint locations, set aside areas and consolidate a structured public space, still leaving future generations room to rethink, redraw and rearrange, to suit each project. This could mean, even in the developed world, preaching a “back to basics” approach: I would content myself with a very clear definition of a polycentric city where centres are thought of as “areas of opportunity”, wellconnected by public transport and self-sufficient in every respect (services, amenities, energy, workplaces). Moreover, I would suggest that these centres not be designated as such based on criteria of equidistance or other abstract reasons, but based on their pre-existence.

There are also political opportunities that we must make the most of, beyond all the stale partisanships. Mayor Trias was a big supporter of keeping the domestic character of the Tres Turons and Torre Baró neighbourhoods and I am sure that Mayor Colau will also share this vision, which puts people at the centre of urban policies. If there is political consensus for this more caring style of city planning, will we be able to produce the right technical tools to unblock the absurd situations created by a Metropolitan Plan for the last forty-plus years? We have the challenge of being more incisive and more innovative and of getting out there to defend the value of every urban project, at the risk of being maligned for dissent. The real debate has to be public, interdisciplinary and plural, to stop it from being used by partisan interests. 

Maria Sisternas

Architect. Barcelona CIRCLES. Codirector of the Master in Urban Management (UPF)

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