Barcelona Metropolis

The Cerdà Plan for Barcelona’s Eixample has witnessed multiple interventions since the outset of its execution. This variability, typical of plans or architectures designed with flexible and adaptable systems, are structures that manage to be sustainable over time thanks to their capacity to be updated.

“…Asserting the value of incomplete form is a political act architects should perform in the public realm. This means asserting not only the beauty of unfinished objects but also their practicality.”

“Asserting the value of incomplete built forms is a political act because it confronts the desire for fixity; it asserts (…) that the public realm is a process.”^[1]

This concludes the essay The Public Realm by the sociologist and urban planner Richard Sennett. Based on his experience as a member of multidisciplinary teams for urban design projects around the world, he sets forth the virtues of open urban systems, in unstable evolution and in a process of constant change adaptive to the uncertainties and imbalances of society. Sennett proposes an initial dichotomy between two systems: one closed (in harmonious equilibrium) and one open (free from stalled urban planning). Based on this polarisation, he develops a thinking that defends the virtues of the cities that spark an open, permanent debate, and that constantly invite reflection on their future.

An open system

Taking this categorisation of the public realm as a reference, it is clear that Barcelona’s Eixample is an open system, which, as it resolves its conflicts, generates new ones. This organicism has been what has kept the Cerdà Plan alive and kicking for a century and a half since its conception. Every debate, every new municipal proposal, every neighbourhood demonstration or every citizen demand is, despite the ambiguity, a sign of the success of the planning for the Eixample district. Cerdà’s grid has always been subject to a desire to change for one reason only: because it allows it. This capacity to transform and acquire new formal definitions is the most genuine feature of open urban systems that ensure that a city evolves in tune with the needs of its times.

As an analogy, both conceptually and aesthetically speaking, the Eixample represents a kind of chessboard for Barcelona. Understanding it as a theoretical isotropic mesh, its systemic and geometric order unfurls an infinite range of plays in which a single right movement is never set out. The essence of the game is essentially focused on all its combinatorics and the capacity to do and undo according to its rules.

Cerdà’s basic plan, comprising a system of blocks with sides 113.3 m long, streets of 20 m wide, chamfers of 20 m and 45⁰ north orientation, replicating the Roman orientation, plots the master lines of an urban universe in which the relationship between content and continent (empty and full) lies in its versatility and multi-functionality, because it can accommodate even future options that are yet to be invented. In this regard, it is paradigmatic to think that Cerdà devised the road section in the Eixample based on, besides the hygienist component, the forecast of the circulation of trams and not cars, an invention that would take fifty years to crystallise but that unfortunately has ended up being one of the main actors in the Eixample in the last century.

An absurd system

Road traffic still occupies a disproportionate volume in the heart of Barcelona. Head architect at Barcelona City Council, Xavier Matilla, points this out with figures that show that every day a greater number of cars drive through the Eixample horizontally than those driving along the upper Ronda de Dalt ring road and the seaside Ronda Litoral ring road put together. In the same vein, Josep Bohigas, the current director of the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona, considers the Eixample an absurd channel for vehicles of unacceptable levels. Barcelona absorbs more than 600,000 cars every day in the city centre from the outskirts, a figure higher than that recorded by Manhattan, for instance.

These positions have long been beyond the scope of opinion and are quantifiable certainties in the air pollution index (the cause of roughly 7% of natural deaths, i.e. approximately 1,000 per year)[1] and noise levels. As the writer Gabi Martínez tells us, Barcelona is the noisiest western city in the world and seventh in the global ranking behind New Delhi and Cairo, among others.[2] The item left on the game board that should gradually dwindle and disappear is, non-negotiably, the private car. Our preferred living scenarios – the streets – should stop being hostile places where community life plays a secondary role, giving precedence to tarmac and smoke.

A system on trial

Focusing once again on this likely change of script when tackling a new Eixample, Matilla denies the fact that the model of hubs and squares blurs the previous superblock plan. He declares that, all in all, the hubs will end up defining groups of pacified blocks and that the current council’s urban strategies are an evolution of those proposals that were already implemented in previous mandates, such as when, for example, Enric Granados or Portal de l’Àngel became pedestrian streets. This is a model and a criterion that must be defined with the competition’s winning teams based on ideas that are clear in concept and still vague in form. This is also understood by the members of Cierto Estudio (Marta Benedicto, Ivet Gasol, Carlota de Gispert, Anna Llonch, Lucia Millet and Clara Vidal), the winning team of the Hubs competition, in conjunction with B67 Palomeras Arquitectes, who justify that in the timeframe and scope proposed by the tender, their proposal evokes rather a street atmosphere instead of a closed project ready to execute: “the ambiguity and proportions of the Cerdà plan support the future flexibility that we propose, a street able to adjust to the next hundred years like the streets that Cerdà himself defined”, explains Carlota de Gispert.