© Maria Corte

The way public space has been managed over the last fifteen years has been a reflection of the policies that have defined the life of our city. This dossier goes over some of the architectural and urban solutions applied, which haven’t always responded adequately to the challenges posed by housing, mobility, urban sprawl and de-industrialisation.

The abuse of mortgage loans and the scarcity of public housing projects have made access to housing difficult for large sectors of the population. In some neighbourhoods, the phenomenon of gentrification has expelled the traditional inhabitants.

Mobility is key in order to rethink productive models. Vehicles occupy an excessive amount of space in our streets and are killing Barcelona, which is already one of the most polluted cities in Europe.

Barcelona is also being polarized between tourists and citizens. Even if tourism is inevitable, the city needs to be liveable. Changes to the productive model and its consequences for the industrial fabric encourage us to consider how we can re-industrialize our city, and what role public spaces need to have in the system of production and consumption.

The architects that participate in this dossier ask that urbanism solve existing problems instead of creating new ones, and they offer proposals that place people at the centre once again. They also ask that the democratisation of the city include sustainability, memory, redistribution, and the participation of citizens in demanding accountability.

Housing for the elderly on the Passeig d’Urrutia in Nou Barris.
© Vicente Zambrano

Barcelona is expelling the working class from the city centre to the periphery. Gentrification and urban sprawl are two results of a single process that must be actively counteracted, as they take us away from a city model that is more mixed and compact, and consequently more just and sensible.

Now that Barcelona is embarking on a new political era, one cannot help but wonder what kind of urban development project it needs. By now, the “city of marvels” should have learned that city planning and politics are inextricably linked. The very meaning of the words are rooted in the city streets and show us that, more than a simple question of aesthetics, architecture and city planning also have an ethical dimension. Too often, evaluations of the Agbar Tower or the Hotel Vela have consisted in simply answering the question “do you like it?” However, a political take on city planning is as necessary as achieving a balance in planning policy. The transformation of the city can just as easily be a democratic tool as a weapon used in the abuse of power. And over decades of ups and downs, Barcelona has been an example of both. We have witnessed how urban reform can be put at the service of corruption, speculation, privatisation, segregation and waste: but we need it to face the environmental and economic challenges that lie ahead.

For too long, city planning has disguised its political nature, but politics can no longer underestimate its task of city development. To be clear: technocracy has been the governing force in Barcelona. Experts and the powers that be have made top-down decisions, ignoring the needs of the people. To the bewilderment of many of our institutions, grass-roots movements have had to take the lead in response to the mayhem caused by the boom and bust of the property market and of tourism. It appears that activism has now taken the City Council, to govern it from the “bottom up” and for the “common good”.However, how does that translate into planning policy? 

A bike lane on the Passeig de Sant Joan.
© Vicente Zambrano

To start with, we need to have a more empathetic view of the social fabric that lives in the urban fabric. To stop looking at it from above as though it were a chessboard (not to say a Monopoly board) with criss-crossing strategies that are too complex for the city dwellers to understand. This distanced perspective has stopped technocratic city planning seeing something that residents experience first-hand, that Barcelona is expelling the working class from the centre out to the periphery. Gentrification and urban sprawl are two results of a single process that must be actively counteracted, as it takes us away from a city model that is more mixed and compact, and consequently more just and sensible. City planning carried out from a pedestrian’s horizontal point of view would have noticed the effects of this centrifugal dynamic that seriously damages the four spheres of everyday city life. It was not hard to know what these spheres were: every morning, we leave the place in which we live (housing) to travel (mobility) to a place where we earn or spend money (production and consumption) and then, if all goes well, we devote some time to leisure, culture or social participation (spaces of citizenship). Housing, mobility, places of production and consumption and spaces of citizenship are four fundamental areas that have been overlooked, and even abused, by the city planning format of the recent past. 

When it comes to housing, there can be little doubt at this stage that things have been done very poorly. In order to shake off the grey heritage of Francoism, Barcelona turned public space into a vessel for the young democracy; yet the domestic space remained in the hands of the market. By actively encouraging mortgage borrowing and creating a scarce supply of public, central and rental developments, we now have a landscape full of homeless people and people-less homes. Not only is the Catalan capital far from guaranteeing the right to a home, it is also facing a housing crisis that is attacking our right to a city. Paradoxically, the embellishment of squares and streets has made the surrounding apartments more expensive and pushed out the residents that are most deserving of these public redistribution actions. Staying out in the street and not crossing the thresholds of homes has been a mistake that may cost us as dearly as “getting pretty” and then going out without a coat. 

The mobility side of things does not come out of this analysis very well either. We earmarked the biggest part of the Olympic budget for the ring roads, a Pharaonic piece of infrastructure that allows more cars to enter Barcelona every day than Manhattan and that has made us one of the most polluted cities in Europe. Once it had been expropriated and dug up, this public channel devoted solely to private vehicles missed the opportunity to create a metro line around the city. Years later, this led us to start work on Line 9, an even more Pharaonic project that we do not even know if we can finish or pay for. At the end of the day, the density that is such a feature of Barcelona and that makes it so easy to move around on foot or by public transport also means that it is more vulnerable to the impact of traffic and that more people are revving away from it towards the greener suburbs. 

The production and consumption that make a city what it is have also jumped ship. Globalisation has taken industry away to distant places where it is much cheaper to exploit workers and the environment. The factories that once attracted such a big workforce to Barcelona are as unemployed as their workers. When the city started to ask itself how to earn a living, it was trying to be clever, instead of intelligent. For example, it got the idea of planting casinos on the farmland of the Llobregat and expected millions of euros and thousands of jobs to rain down on it. However, as we know, with this kind of city planning, it never rains, but it pours. Meanwhile, globalisation was also replacing small shops with franchises that give nothing to the everyday life of the local community. The streets of the city centre are now easily mistaken for a shopping mall and on the outskirts there is an abundance of hypermarkets and vast retail spaces that incite irresponsible consumerism, waste, use of private transport, job insecurity and the concentration of wealth into very few pockets. 

Fira d’Economia Solidària [Solidarity Economy Fair], which took place in October 2015 at the Fabra i Coats space in Sant Andreu.
© Vicente Zambrano

Although city planning has mistreated these four fundamental spheres, whether we like it or not, it still holds the key to putting them right. Barcelona needs more affordable housing and fewer private vehicles, more places where many little hands can earn a living and more spaces where citizens can get involved, express themselves and be empowered. And all this involves a type of city planning that puts people at the centre. Putting them at the centre, physically speaking, means letting the working class repopulate the mixed, compact neighbourhoods from which they have been pushed out by the market. Putting people at the centre, politically speaking, means involving citizens in decision-making, so that they stop being affected by technocratic city planning and become the protagonists and beneficiaries of democratic city planning. 

A meeting of participants in the La Borda cooperative project, at Can Batlló.
Cristina Gamboa / La Borda

It’s time to start cooking. Let’s mix some cooperative approaches with views on gender and typological experiments, social policies with legal opportunities, and environmental awareness with countercultural and anti-regulatory efforts.

We have a housing problem. It concerns the right to housing. Buying a house is the most important investment we ever make. It uses up most of what we earn. Housing is essential to our identity because the home provides a shelter for our other rights: if I’m not registered as a resident, I can’t vote; if I don’t have anywhere to shower I can’t look for work; if I don’t have a place to sleep, how can I possibly establish relationships? If houses are just goods, how are housing rights possible? How can we even contemplate our right to the city?

We have a problem regarding the lack of transparency and accuracy of information on housing. Houses and our ability to fall into debt by buying one is one of the main measures of the country’s wealth and national solvency. Housing is the new gold standard. The information we dispose of is contradictory and scarce. Moreover, the data we do have is devastating.

The cooperative Sostre Civic program, at Carrer Princesa 49.
Foto: Jordi Gómez / Adriana Mas

A third of families in Barcelona live in rented accommodation and two thirds are homeowners, but almost all of these properties are on the free market. Social housing constitutes less than 1.6%. This would not be a problem if the market were self-regulating and it covered citizens’ needs, but the economic crisis has shown that the market only regulates in favour of the wealthiest members of society. Moreover, when the market is at its greediest, this 1.6% proves inadequate in meeting the requirements of those who have been pushed out of the market.

In short, more than half a million people have been evicted in Spain since 2008. It represents the Spanish equivalent to the 5 million people who were evicted as a result of the American subprime crisis. Among all Spanish cities, Barcelona is home to the most evictees, and the neighbourhood with the most evictees is Ciutat Meridiana. Half a million is a lot of people with their bags piled up on the pavement, equating to the size of the largest Spanish provincial capitals. They represent 500,000 units of pain and despair: 500,000 units of anguish who have lost the will to live. We have a housing problem, with our social services up to their ears because State welfare arrives late, if at all. Our healthcare services have collapsed, with an influx of illnesses linked to the lack of housing and mental health conditions brought on by fear. And this is the same healthcare system that is undergoing cuts and privatisation. 

We have a housing problem in Barcelona because there are 3,000 people sleeping rough whose only place to turn to is a volunteer-run and insufficient shelter network. It should not be this way. Barcelona is a wealthy city. 

We have a serious housing problem because what was meant to be a refuge has turned into a shipwreck.

The local authorities, so quick to launch big schemes, have proved to be sluggish in their attempts to solve the problem. Both the media and political neglect are responsible. Years of rhetoric from boards, desks, observatories, committees, departments, directorates, drives, councils, offices and even ministries – which there have been – devoted to housing. There is not much rice and it has been stirred. Stirred rice is spoiled rice. 

But all is not lost. There are five different areas of housing proposals that offer solutions. Firstly, there are proposals from the solidarity economy. Two experiments are underway in Barcelona: La Borda and Sostre Cívic, at Can Batlló and on Carrer de la Princesa, respectively. They propose the cession of use cooperative model as a housing solution that will allow people to settle, i.e. enrol their children in school or change their bathroom tiles, without unleashing the little speculator we all have inside us. This is no invention. The Andel cooperative model has been proven in Scandinavia, with ratios of up to 30% of the housing stock (Copenhagen). You might think this is a solution for the wealthiest countries. Well, it is not. In Montevideo, Uruguay, the model has been applied with a rate of 4%. 

A squatted building.

We have grassroots and counterculture proposals. The okupa squatter movement, spelt with a “k”, is a political phenomenon in response to an abusive market and it has been violently repressed in Spain. It would be impossible to conceive experiments such as London’s Bonnington Square or Copenhagen’s Christiania in Catalonia because the repressive mechanisms of local authorities are merciless. Spanish legislation places private property rights above other rights that affect the masses. In spite of all this, fortunately, the okupa and self-management housing collectives denounce speculators with their actions, as well as those who look down on and neglect their city and neighbours.

The Arrels Foundation’s Pis Zero project.

Moreover, there are proposals regarding social policies. The Arrels Foundation’s “Pis Zero” (Zero Apartment) offers a response to the reality faced by long-term street dwellers which overcomes the confines of only relatively effective welfare mechanisms. The “Arquitectes de Capçalera” initiative recovers the architect’s social role through a professional call to arms in response to emergency situations. These proposals go beyond the American Housing First approach, which has also been adopted in Australia, France, Canada and Finland. 

There are also proposals regarding sustainability and materials. Building with sustainable materials and holding workshops on the energy usage and maintenance of buildings provide strategies for fighting fuel poverty. The 2014 International Solar Decathlon award marked a turning point in the way in which housing is thought about in terms of its most important function: to provide actual shelter. The most interesting aspect of the competition’s most recent edition is not the winning piece’s technological capacity to be built and to function with virtually no environmental footprint, which it does. The best part is that it directly criticises the idea of a detached single family home as a model of urban growth. Single family homes are incompatible with the idea of a sustainable city. The Vallès School of Architecture (ETSAV) submitted the Ressò project, which won the first prize for innovation with a solar community house for social rehabilitation.

Image from the Vallès School of Architecture (ETSAV)’s Ressò sustainable community architecture project, the winner of the innovation prize in the 2014 international Solar Decathlon.
Foto: Sandra Prat

Lastly, we have proposals based on architectural form. France has moved ahead with densification projects in its suburban housing estates. It is no coincidence that housing initiatives coexist alongside an economic experiment within the one culture that has proposed theoretical alternatives to savage capitalism with the most editorial success. The essays published by _Export Barcelona on new residential architecture are extremely useful for moving forward. The “Casa sense Gènere” (Gender-Neutral House), a product of avant-garde feminist architecture, demonstrates the deceptive rationale of modern typologies. Designed by and for men, hierarchal spatial distributions actively disregard household chores through narrow, out-of-the-way kitchens that require women to work with their backs turned to their families, and tiny laundry rooms that are incompatible with domestic harmony. The Rehabitar research team reminds us of the benefits of a thick, mixed urban fabric and, like the feminist architects, demands housing that promotes equality and enables the home to adapt to changes in the family dynamic that occur over time. 

Image from the Vallès School of Architecture (ETSAV)’s Ressò sustainable community architecture project, the winner of the innovation prize in the 2014 international Solar Decathlon.
Foto: Sandra Prat

The five different proposals could lead to a city project that overcomes the housing dystopia with real, proven situations. Not one of them falls into the “smart city” trap, which is the town planning equivalent of using deodorant without showering. They are five consistent ingredients, constituting sustenance, not cosmetics. These are the five projects that bind the rice to the bottom of the paella. 

There are different interpretations regarding the etymological meaning of the word paella. The majority point to the Latin word patella, which describes a pan with two handles. Some defend its Valencian origin: from the Catalan words plat, platell and platella. In old and Latin American Spanish there is also the word paila, which is a large and fairly shallow metal pot. 

However, the hypothesis that best suits the purpose of this article upholds that the origin of paella is baqiyah, an Arabic word meaning “food leftover from the day before”. It is the most suitable theory because it steps away from the idea of the container and focuses on its contents. The contents are the leftovers, what is there. At home, food is not discarded – people make the most of what they have. The same thing should happen in the city, which is everybody’s home. The city of the future has already been built: this is it. 

Let’s not overcook the rice 

The Torre Via Júlia social housing project, included in the “Export Barcelona. Social housing in context” travelling exhibit, which includes twenty social proposals by Catalan architects.
This exhibit is one of the invents included in the second edition of the Cities
Connection Project.
Foto: Vicente Zambrano

It’s time to start cooking. Let’s mix some cooperative approaches with views on gender and typological experiments, social policies with legal opportunities, and environmental awareness with countercultural and anti-regulatory efforts. Urban planning has an inherent ability to bring these mixtures together and turn them into reality. However, doing so requires clear political will and a perspective capable of confronting important matters without abandoning urgent ones. To start with, projects should be carried out on a limited number of well-chosen sites. Approaching public housing policies solely on the basis of quantitative welfare logic is unrealistic. The location within the city is key, and harmony between the housing and the public space, absolutely vital.

The idea is to generate small-scale social housing and rented accommodation, in developments of two, four and twelve units, on sites that make the most of the city as it is now, by following the logic of the three Vs: value, visibility and viability. These places of opportunity exist within the compact city: narrow buildings against solid dividing walls; height extensions to existing constructions that rush through planning permission; and interstitial housing units. It is a question of taking advantage of scuffs in the urban fabric and being in contact with infrastructures. Moreover, there are places of opportunity along coastlines and riverbanks, as well as existing roads. 

It also involves making the most of a productive framework that has been crippled by the economic crisis: small developers, construction-based trades, the 50% youth unemployment rate. 

Can Caralleu social housing project, included in the “Export Barcelona. Social housing in context” travelling exhibit, which includes twenty social proposals by Catalan architects.
Foto: Vicente Zambrano

It’s about making more with less, on an experimental basis, so that constraints and legislative contradictions may be overcome. The elements must fit in with the existing neighbourhoods and encourage income diversity through a variety of types of homes, as well as different prices and access mechanisms to suit the incomes and life plans of their occupiers. 

The idea is to start by organising joint binding tenders with equal conditions for small businesses, in which it is imperative that older professionals work alongside young people. They have to be a sum of tenders, the reward for which is coordinated implementation, which overcome the conventional “competitiveness” and “excellence” formula in favour of collaboration and diverse disciplines. 

By doing it this way, adopting the strategy of an urban orthodontics team that is going to fill, restore and salvage units or fit a “crown” or “implant” at most, we will be able to go about creating a social housing stock of rental properties that can mitigate the extremes of the market. Anything else is like a set of dentures against the delicate natural landscape surrounding the city. 

We have put in too many shellfish. Paellas shouldn’t have so many molluscs. That would be a seafood platter. Our dentures have gotten caught on the leg of a lobster. We need to add more rice. And we cannot just add it around the edges like a side of boiled rice. The rice absorbs the flavour of the ingredients from the depths of the paella and distributes it between the diners. That is where its democratic power lies.

Can Travi social housing project, included in the “Export Barcelona. Social housing in context” travelling exhibit, which includes twenty social proposals by Catalan architects.
Foto: Vicente Zambrano

The Plaça de les Glòries, a problematic public space. Time will show if it works well and if the administrative decisions taken were correct.
Photo: Vicente Zambrano

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”.

L’Illa Diagonal, a successful example of public appropriation of a private space thanks to a design that’s permeable to urban movement.
Photo: Vicente Zambrano

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. 

Park Güell, an example of how the “museumization” of the city can end up expelling everyday life from its spaces.
Photo: Vicente Zambrano

The “museumization” of a city means that the ordinary space used for everyday and community life turns into a place where everything is for entertainment and consumption. However, these two uses do not have to be mutually exclusive; a balance needs to be achieved.

In 1748 Giambattista Nolli published the Pianta Grande di Roma, a map of the city that was different from those produced hitherto, which were usually a set of pictorial representations of important buildings (similar to the tourist maps of today). What is fascinating about Nolli’s map is not just its accuracy, but the way in which it depicts the city. All the private buildings are shaded with hatching, distinguishing them from the public space, which is white, leaving the streets and squares perfectly defined in the urban fabric. To this white space, Nolli also added detailed ground plans of all the churches, chapels and cloisters, as well as internal courtyards, passageways and porticoes. This is how Nolli extended the idea of public space, making it encompass all places for meeting and worship as well as semi-public areas where people were free to walk. His gesture placed public buildings within a context and made it easier to understand the city as an organic system of parts.

Let’s think for a moment about what Barcelona would be like if we followed Nolli’s approach. To the avenues, boulevards and squares, we would add the other social spaces: public facilities. Municipal libraries, public markets, civic, cultural, and sports centres, public schools (and their playgrounds), and art factories. This way, we would understand the city’s public spaces not only as the unbuilt remainder, but as a much more complex structure that organises and stimulates community life. Let’s borrow a metaphor from biology: the streets and avenues are the arteries and veins, while the public facilities are the motor organs that stimulate circulation, movement and life in the city. In this drawing, you would be able to see the distribution of the facilities throughout the city and note how the streets and squares are, in reality, the vestibules and thresholds that link community spaces.

Pianta Grande di Roma by Giambattista Nolli, a map that, for the first time, presented the city as an organic system, revealing the relationship between public and private spaces. 
Photo: Wikimedia

It may seem slightly trivial to use an 18th-century method to study the urban shape of Barcelona, but it is a classic method in urban development analyses. In the 1970s, American architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown used Nolli’s method to analyse the spatial richness of the Las Vegas Strip. In this case, to the city’s main street were added the lobbies of hotels and casinos that visitors to the city can freely access even if they are not staying there. This results in the expansion of the street; instead of being considered as a space for traffic bounded by vertical planes, it extends through the ground floors that are in contact with it.

Unlike the map that would be drawn of Barcelona, which aims to show the community structure, the Las Vegas map shows that it is a space built to attract tourists, with consumption in mind. The US city deploys all the potential of its symbolic features, posters and neon lights to persuade visitors, as if it were a huge fair full of attractions.

Incomplete city maps 

The application of the Nolli methodology to Las Vegas is an example of a space meant to attract tourists and encourage consumption.
Photo: Eva Guillamet

However, despite the fact that the Barcelona map would show us the city of the people and the Las Vegas map, the city of consumers, both are incomplete. The Las Vegas map does not explain how to live in the city; we do not know anything about the lifestyle of its inhabitants who, we should imagine, live behind that big lit-up showcase. Likewise, our Barcelona map would not show anything that is for the rest of the world. In other words, the Sagrada Família cathedral, the FC Barcelona Museum, the courtyards of La Pedrera and the vast majority of attractions that “illustrate” the maps for tourists would not appear in our drawing. These maps show a Barcelona that is parallel to the one in which its residents live; they are often distorted maps that only highlight the “points of interest” drawn in an easily recognisable way (like those old maps of Rome), while the rest of the city is a uniform, uninteresting mass.

In the early 20th century, Georg Simmel defined the figure of the stranger – someone who arrives today and stays tomorrow – to refer to immigrants who come from abroad and stay to live among us. The tourism of the 21st century is a phenomenon that has little to do with immigration. Immigrants appear in the census statistics – both the documented and the undocumented. They establish themselves, they create ties with the community, either by grouping together with others who are similar to them or by mixing in with the great mass of nationalities and origins of the modern metropolis. Tourists, on the other hand, arrive but do not stay. They look but they do not participate. For tourists, the city is a show, an object to be observed or experienced as a simulation of what it could mean to live in the city as a local.

Tourists arrive and become part of the city’s flow – with their maps full of icons – but, as in any ecosystem, invasive species can either be integrated or they can disrupt the internal balance by destroying the original system.

The “museumization” of a city means that the ordinary space used for everyday and community life turns into a place far removed from everyday activity, where everything is for entertainment and consumption. The emblematic buildings and tourist attractions that were once part of the structure of the public and urban system are thus decontextualized and placed in the category of the exceptional: the everyday becomes impossible. A case in point is Park Güell. The need to limit the influx of visitors due to the astronomical number of tourists ended up necessitating a way to regulate access, turning the park into a closed, impermeable space where the free movement of the city’s inhabitants has been practically suspended.

In an ideal situation, the everyday and the exceptional would coexist – with their internal tensions and their occasional minor imbalances – in a continual interplay in which the two ways of understanding the urban space would complement each other.

However, far from overlapping with and completing the ordinary, everyday city, the city of consumption and entertainment has ended up invading it by disrupting the balance of life. In the Ciutat Vella district, at the same time as the number of residents is falling, apartments for tourists – that floating population – are multiplying exponentially. Tourists are the strangers who are here today and gone tomorrow. Or rather, those who are here today and tomorrow have a different face and a different accent. A floating population does not stay or establish itself; there is no possibility of integration or addition, and therefore the social and community structure ends up being useless. The city of entertainment demands for itself places and forms that have little to do with the everyday city. The two cities do not have to be mutually exclusive, however. It would be necessary to achieve a balance, a sustainability that would allow us to return to that state of grace in which there is literally “room for everything”.

© Maria Corte

The “Barcelona model” was founded with the aim of creating a more just city by improving public space and the urban landscape. After thirty years, the shiny surface conceals urgent issues created by a neglected housing policy. 

Barcelona is a dense city, made out of the sum of small parts, both private and public, and most of its neighbourhoods are very diverse. Its small scale, its diversity and its high density are features that explain many of its advantages: it is a city on a human scale, a city that values proximity. It is “the smallest big city or the biggest small city”. These features are also key factors when explaining the challenges it faces: the housing crisis, environmental problems, mobility and the domination of the big over the small, the global over the local, the specialist over the diverse, the “exclusive” (and therefore excluding) over the inclusive and thus shared and cooperative.

Its “almost big” size gives it the muscle it needs to face metropolitan and regional challenges and the specific challenges of being a capital, and its “almost small” size give it flexibility, diversity and agility in local policy-making. The blurring of the lines between these two conditions has often led to unsustainable imbalances which the powers that be attempt to correct with measures that provide no solutions, neither quantitative nor qualitative. But above and beyond quantity and quality, the challenge is to identify who benefits and who and what is put at the centre of the municipal policies from which everything else stems.

The “Barcelona model” that allowed the city to “make itself beautiful” or “be the best shop in the world” insisted that we would achieve a more just city by improving public space and the urban landscape of shops and façades. In the eighties, we were told that we first needed to conquer the public space by pedestrianizing squares and cleaning façades and that, little by little, this “positive metastasis” would end up improving homes and communities. Thirty years later, the reality is different. Over time, this “from the outside in” strategy has been accentuated and has created a city of shop windows and clean façades that conceal urgent problems deriving from the neglect of local government housing policy. The consequences of this lack of attention are alarming. Today, Barcelona has more than thirty thousand families on the waiting list for a home that they can afford, three thousand homeless (nine hundred of whom are sleeping rough), a 10% increase in families in fuel poverty, ten evictions per day, countless empty flats, a type of housing stock that doesn’t match the demand, a system of occupancy still stuck in ownership and rental, and a ratio of social housing under 4%, a ridiculous and unjust amount for a city that exports its urban model around the world.

We continue to repair streets, squares and avenues, improving the image and the performance of a type of commerce and tourism that does indeed benefit many people but that is also gentrifying no few neighbourhoods.

We often say that Barcelona is dying of success. This oxymoron leads to another that is hard to digest and that focuses the debate on the issue of urban regeneration: “improvements make things worse” or, at least, this kind of cosmetic improvement often leads to ethical imbalances, pushing the people they were supposed to benefit out of these neighbourhoods and making their lives worse.

Some people defend positive gentrification, which consists of bringing about transformations that involve a certain degree of social infiltration to promote greater diversity. But a city as small and fragile as Barcelona must watch the perverse economic processes that go with improvements very closely (or even better, from the inside), mapping and, in particular, controlling the abuses of power that arise. Barcelona cannot allow itself to lose neighbourhoods, but in the last four years Ciutat Vella has seen 45% of its inhabitants leave. And if an urgent solution is not found, soon even the tourists will stop coming to this counterfeit city, which more than ever is just a spectre and a stage set of the city they were looking for.

A baseline strategy to improve the neighbourhoods and keep gentrification in check must involve much more social housing and a meticulously executed map of what lies inside this city. Because social housing is not just about building. It also means improving the housing and living conditions of residents, rehabilitating communities and bringing in forms of urban recycling. It means thinking about the city from the inside out, putting people (the ones that are already there) and everyday amenities at the centre of municipal policies, and promoting this kind of positive metastasis that has to link everything together. Starting with the people and ending in the city, and not the other way around as we have been doing recently. 

Barcelona can grow, but it has to grow from within, improving the living conditions of neighbourhoods without pushing out the people who are already there. To do this, we urgently need to re-think the disproportionate amount of space given over to private transport and reclaim it for highquality community use. This will have a positive impact on families’ health and increased life expectancy resulting from improved air quality, less noise pollution, etc. Decisionmaking needs to shift level when planning new strategies to discourage the use of private transport and give strong backing to high-quality, faster, more affordable and convenient public transport, so that the entire city and metropolitan area is included. Public attention has to switch its priorities to pedestrians: this is vital for implementing the right housing policy, based on the idea that housing is not limited to a mortgage payer’s four walls. My home is also the landing in the stairwell, the entrance hall, the street, the café on the square and the tram stop. If my home is also the city, we should be able to renegotiate the amount of cars that are parked there or that pollute the neighbourhood en route to somewhere else. This negotiation is urgent because of the scandalous figure of 60% of the city’s public space being hijacked by vehicles, when only 15% of our journeys are made by private vehicle. 

It is essential that we identify the whats (housing and mobility) but it’s even more important to identify the hows.The city should be researching and trying out new methods of participation with which to pilot different forms of activism, trying to reach consensus among technicians and citizens, experts and users, public and private players, large and small, past and future…, from every possible dimension. The priority must be to reach an integrated overview of the issues: we need to create meeting and consensus platforms and launch pilot projects that give a voice to groups who might otherwise be marginalised. We’ve spent too many years making citizen participation a repetitive and adulterated mechanism for justifying processes or, what is worse, for reaching consensus without any depth or risk-taking. The new Council team is, in the majority, made up of activists that know, and have tried out in their own platforms, new and brilliant methods of empowerment and participation. These processes should be scalable and applicable to the whole city, to demonstrate that one can “govern by obeying” with creativity and ambition.

There is a broad spectrum of urgent issues and they are often justified quantitatively with a sudden multiplication of official openings and inaugurations in pre-electoral periods. There are promises to put an end to deficits and to excesses, but as time goes on, the solutions tend to be oversimplified and short cuts are found that skirt around the complexity and the diversity of the original problems. The Barcelona of the future is already built, but the future of its people is not. Urgent issues are not solved with a single brushstroke, or in a single place or following a single short cut. More than ever, we need to take risks and, as soon as possible, test out multiple responses to multiple challenges, to overcome the technical difficulties and political minorities with creativity and drive. 

© 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.