Janet SanzFirst of all I wanted to welcome all three of you. I’m excited to talk with you about the challenges facing the city right now, but also with an eye to both the past and the future, because I think we need to know where we’ve come from if we’re to know where we’re going. Because in Barcelona urban transformation goes a long way back and forms part of the everyday life of local people. One of our goals in recent years has been to make every street, every square and every neighbourhood come to life. We want this collection of towns that have historically shaped the city of Barcelona to be stronger and more resistant than ever to address the economic, social and climate challenges now on the table.
The aim of this book is to offer a collection of photographs but also of opinions, like yours. To ask ourselves how we narrate and explain the city, and from what viewpoint. So one of the first things I wanted to ask is: how do you see the city? And, most of all, how do you imagine the city’s future in view of climate emergency, one of the most disruptive issues currently at the centre of urban policies? We know that a time period of 20, 30, 50 or 100 years will cause cities to mutate, so the aim is to ensure that this city survives.
Carme PinósThe city is the place of coexistence. If there is one thing we have to achieve it is to ensure that Barcelona is liveable and that community awareness is fostered. We are connectivity; we have to help each other and have common goals. The city has a lot to do with that. If we build a city that places coexistence at the centre, we’ll all work in the same direction; this promotes sustainability and we’ll be able to slow climate change. But the challenge of the city, the challenge of Barcelona, is to ensure community awareness: we need to work in the neighbourhoods. I’m very much in favour of the superblocks, because they help us walk. Because it’s when you walk that you bump into people you know, you talk and make plans... If we don’t solve climate change globally, with personal commitment, we won’t succeed.
Eva FranchI was talking with my students last week about utopian projects —projects that help us address that future. We talked about Ebenezer Howard’s garden city project, where society has three magnets: town, country and town-country. He made a list of the virtues of each of these three sectors and tried to design a garden city. This garden city had all the virtues of the city —this space of condensation, of meeting, of multiple relationships, of known and unknown people— and tried to find a space in between. Of course, today in the city we have all the complexity of a process of cultural and social but also industrial densification. The city is seeing the emergence of issues that are extremely harmful to health, such as pollution. All these invisible city forms are beginning to become visible. Now it is new architectures that we have to work on. For me, the city is always this jumble of relationships —relationships that are not always the well-known ones. This sense of the city as a space of constant transgression is a very difficult thing to build; it’s easier to produce closed, hermetic or functional spaces for certain sectors than to create a space where this meeting can take place.
CPEvery age has had its city. The bourgeois city, the city of the prince, the baroque city. We are a different city now. We have to find out what our city is. The thing is, our starting point today are the cities we have inherited, already built, and our future is to fix them; we can’t project utopias about the kind of city we want as though we didn’t have this chaotic reality.
JSTo see which way we have to go, we also need to know what has historically been placed at the centre of these cities. The 20th century above all was marked by a specific, supposedly universal subject: a white man with a certain income, a car and productive needs, who ended up being reproduced in urban design. Cities all over the world, not just Barcelona, have reproduced this configuration, giving rise to the cities we have today, as key spaces to address social and climate challenges. If city centralities have to shift, who should be the protagonists of cities in the 21st century?
Margarita JoverBarcelona has a great tradition of inclusion. I’ve lived in the States for 10 years and, when I come to Barcelona, I see the values of public space as a rather unique reality, an open, inclusive public space. But it’s true that the narrative, as you say, revolves around the dominant bourgeois white male figure you described. I like to think that this is gradually changing and that we should encourage it, using the analogy of the forest —a multispecies forest. As you know, there are male trees and female trees, old trees and small trees, but in cities we only include the male tree, which is why we have so many problems with pollen and allergies. The idea would be to move towards multispecies, multi-age environments, and not just in the case of trees. The resulting image of cities would be much more diverse and inclusive. Just as a forest is multispecies rather than monospecies, we have to tend towards this paradigm shift, towards collage and mix.
CPTo continue with your thread, I think we need to be aware that we are all essential in cities. We might not be equal, but we are all essential. We need each other. That’s why I talk so much about community and encouraging us not to be a closed forest, because everything that is closed rots. There is no future if we continue to think individualistically.
EFSpeaking of the city of multispecies, we need to think about our relationship with animals and with people, and about which we accept and which we reject. Which ones we give prominence to and which we try to displace or stamp out. We know that we need more green space, that we need natural spaces, and that we need more species. We have native species, we have animals that were here before us. We have to try to understand these ideas of respect, interculturality and interspecies; they are essential. The question is how we design the city —not as an imposition, but by understanding architecture as the construction of a cultural, material and biological biodiversity. I believe that the city as a form of knowledge production should be a laboratory for making and producing new ways of understanding what a garden is, what a plant container is, what a park is. For me, what’s interesting about what’s happening in Barcelona is when we start thinking about issues like rewilding. Not just the landscape, but trying to invite species that aesthetically don’t fit the image of a plant container in a cosmopolitan city. It is these new aesthetics that are necessary. When we talk about the city of the future, it might not be a utopian or idealized image; it might be a city where there are species, where there is vegetation, where there are animals, where there are strange and different situations.
JSRebalancing which species are present and which aren’t is a fundamental debate, like the debate about who can be present and who can’t in a public space that is finite, that is limited. One of the things we have done is to start placing at the centre those collectives that have been systematically excluded from planning and bring them suddenly to the forefront: women and children. I think that if we design a city for children, we’re designing it for everyone; we are incorporating everyone, because we are incorporating vulnerability and fragility. The elderly are also incorporated, because when we make this playable city, this city where a child is not afraid to run, walk or play ball in public space, it means that it’s a safe city for everyone. It’s about rebalancing the historical trend of the 20th century that led to an unjust city, a city that didn’t represent all of us, that didn’t represent everyday uses.
MJBarcelona has an impressive track record in terms of promoting social life and public space, and it seems very important to me to go one step further. Starting with the elderly and children, we have to continue this historical trajectory that is highly acclaimed internationally and that recognizes this great task in public space of promoting inclusivity, of working with all neighbourhoods, on all social scales, with all possible narratives and all cultures. We have to continue to move in this direction, with the ecology that has to do with opening up the city. More than taming nature, I think the paradigm is a city that promotes nature, regenerating and taking care of it. And this happens in the streets, in work on the superblocks, taming the traffic and creating permeable spaces. Or in the water cycle: rainwater and grey water can both be resources that help to improve the urban ecosystem in terms of temperature, humidity, biodiversity, new vegetation, and so on. All this will bring a new aesthetic sense of what public space is. It will no longer be the tidy design of the eighties and nineties, but its values will be inclusive of the old fallen tree, the vegetation that has adapted, that is new and stands next to what is native.
JSFollowing on from what Margarita says, do you think we should create parks or should we also fill the streets with green? This is one of the proposals we’re launching with the Barcelona Superblock. We’re seeing the growth of a large clearing in Les Glòries where there used to be a drum occupied by cars and fumes, that had nothing to do with life. Now we have an open space that is full of species, with different centres and nodes of biodiversity, but, at the same time, we’re also going into the streets. How do we see new materials, how do we see this green, how do we make it take root, how do we recover water, how do we configure all of this?
CPWe have to choose nature in every area. In the case of Barcelona, for example, the chamfered corners that are so characteristic of the Eixample create cement squares, which were designed to deal with something that is now a thing of the past: to be able to see cars coming from the next street when there were no traffic lights. Now, we could plant more trees there, and they could have other uses. We need to make the city more people-friendly, safer. We have to encourage coexistence. If we only think about ourselves, we won’t get anywhere. We have to think of the good of all.
EFThe question of what will happen in the city with a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees has many answers in the architectural field, but I believe it has to be tackled at different scales. Starting with the materials and their bonds, we go on to talk about buildings and street blocks, and not just the streets. We can also start to think about what happens on the roofs. We have to start producing structures not just for energy generation, but also for green production. That will lower the temperature of the city. In this way, we’ll see how this city, which has always been viewed in relation to nature, to Collserola, could come to generate a continuum of green with different logics, responding to different needs. The question here is what architectural, infrastructural and urban planning decisions we can make on the drawing board that help us produce a vision of the future that is capable not of going beyond these two degrees, but of coming up with answers to all these questions. And this is not only in Barcelona. They also affect many other cities around the world. What I like about Barcelona, obviously, is that these experiments are happening, and that many things are being tried out.
MJLast week I was in Delft at a conference on forest urbanism, talking about what the new streets of the future will look like to lower the temperature in cities by two or three degrees. There are many possibilities. One is to publish guides that let people clad their façades and balconies in certain ways, with regulations to encourage small projects and district initiatives that could help to lower temperatures. From the collective management of grey water, to green façades, to the porosity of spaces and streets. This agency, this ability to mobilize people to do things, I think would bring people and nature together in a more proactive way.
JSCommunity work on green management is one area where we’ve made major progress. From local people looking after tree pits and being able to plant in them, to urban allotments. It is natural heritage that brings the city alive. And although we’re a long way from the ideal of food or energy sovereignty, we’ve begun to take steps towards collective responsibility for our future. In the public sphere. We have to make it easier for the community to self-organize. As we said before, people need to become community-conscious.
To continue with this thread of lifestyles changes, I wanted to ask you what challenges you see for public transport. In recent years, all sustainable public transport has been made to compete: trams, buses, bicycles and citizens have had to compete for 20% or 30% of the available public space. Because 70% was not debatable: it was for cars. This is why it is so necessary to establish this coexistence: with 30%, everyone feels threatened. Those who walk feel threatened by bicycles, and bicycles by buses. Now, that is changing. The virtue of this new model and the new approach we’re taking with the Superblock is that this 70% of public space dedicated to cars is being questioned in order to ensure that everyone has their space and to put an end to a historical inequality in public space.
EFAs someone who cycles everywhere in the city, I’ve had this conversation many times with car drivers, and it’s always been a difficult one, because in reality cars always had priority. One of the big surprises I had on arriving in Barcelona a few months ago was to find that I now have a space where I can move around without feeling either threatened or threatening. This is one of the big questions we have to ask ourselves when drawing a street section, when we design it, separate the uses, make a single platform and give priorities. There is, actually, no blanket solution. You have to see who is inhabiting that space, who is circulating there, and you have to analyse what education processes are needed so that everyone can understand how we want to circulate there in the future. But for me the most difficult thing about city politics and politics for the future is how we communicate. How do we explain that we are actually making a city that has a future? As an architect, I understand the reasons why certain things are being done, but I think that citizens sometimes find it difficult.
JSActually, I think that’s the big challenge. At first, using your car less might seem like a sacrifice, but when you realize that it’s harming the cognitive development of our children, or that the possibility of living or breathing healthily is in jeopardy, it becomes very clear. This has been the disruptive element prompting people to adopt the strategy. We intervene to ensure the sustainability of the city, in terms of what kind of city we’re leaving to future generations, and also what city we have, because today’s city is not a healthy city. It’s a city where we breathe polluted air, one that doesn’t allow us to guarantee access to housing or to move around in a sustainable way. Reversing all this is a process of transition and change, but I think that right now there are a lot of people in the city who are demanding it of us. Not only do they accept the need for it, they are actually saying that if we don’t change it, they’ll leave the city. This is the challenge: to ensure that there are residents in the city who want to live in it and who can do so.
MJI understand the work of the urban planner and the architect, and all the policies that are made in the city to support citizens. But it’s true that if it doesn’t come from the citizens, it’s a difficult change to accept. One narrative that I think is great is slow mobility —slow mobility connected to the city’s large green spaces. Barcelona is an extremely dense city, but because it’s compact, it has magnificent green open surroundings. And since it cannot be de-densified, and the ecological issue cannot be solved by the Superblock plan alone, I think that connectivity with large metropolitan areas will be vital to ensuring that quality free spaces are available to all neighbourhoods, and that the connection between inside and outside the city is not by car but by slow mobility. I think that the development of this slow mobility, along with reinforced public transport, will be the way to push cars out.
CPWe connect outside and inside so that everything is more fluid and interconnected. We’re not thinking so much about the city as about the territory. Being able to get to the Besòs area, as Margarita says, by bicycle, on public transport, is something we all have to work on together. People in Barcelona, with the Catalan territory, with greater Barcelona.
EFBarcelona is a city of its residents, but it’s also the city of many people who don’t live there. It’s necessary to understand this relationship of capital, cultural responsibility and inspiration in relation to the rest of the territory. How do you get to the city? Where do you leave your car? How do you access the public transport mobility system? This calls for coordination and metropolitan collaboration that is very difficult to achieve. Perhaps this is another of the big questions: the idea of how many Barcelonas we have and how many Barcelona residents there are. Because we have a large migrant population, we have a large tourist population, we have a large population of Barcelona-born people who don’t live in Barcelona. Before, we were talking about different dynamics and being able to design a city that is capable of offering benefits to all of us in a way that doesn’t compromise anyone’s future.
JSOne of the important reflections here is: do we want to be a tourist city or a city with tourism? Because we’re making a whole series of efforts to reconnect with nature, make better use of our resources, to be less extractive of the territory, to improve interrelations, to commit to public transport. Then a cruise ship arrives and fills the city for four hours with visitors who all go to the same places and don’t engage with local businesses. This has to change. We want to be a city with a kind of tourism that is well governed and managed, deciding what this tourism means and how the city can integrate it. This ties in with another central issue: housing. Who has access to housing, who uses these resources? One of the things I found when I arrived in the city was precisely that we had more tourist housing than social housing. We had 10,000 tourist flats in Barcelona and just 7,000 social housing units. This is a gross imbalance.
CPThese problems are global. With tourism we’ve created a society that is not happy with itself and that, deep down, travels to escape. Because cities also exclude us. I believe that if you make a city that encourages coexistence and where you’re happy, where, after work, you go for a walk and have a coffee with someone else, people will surely have less desire to travel as a means of escapism.
MJBarcelona has policies that are rightly directed at curbing this predatory neoliberal discourse of cities that inflate themselves with tourism. Tourism is an easy economy but it perverts the city’s form of life. It is very important to resist. To resist the global dynamics happening in many cities around the world, like New Orleans and Venice. It is important to resist and, at the same time, to try to find alternatives. It’s not easy to generate alternative economies. A great deployment of laws and creativity is needed to promote circular economies that allow people to continue to live off their activity. It’s a difficult task, but we have to find a way to encourage these low energy consumption local economies on a territorial, Mediterranean and European scale.
JSWe’ve covered many topics, challenges and proposals, but I’d like to round up the conversation with a message of hope, of this pride that all three of you have expressed about what Barcelona has done, is doing and can do to guarantee a city that makes life possible, a city designed for the girls and boys of all its neighbourhoods, that fills its parks with huge wooden whales and octopuses where they can play freely. Or the city that sets up libraries like the Gabriel García Márquez amenity in the Besòs area, that incorporates this view of historical justice, of social justice. These are spaces that had historically been overlooked by the city, which is now regenerating them, giving them first-class amenities. Or this whole project under way to regenerate industrial estates, which are part of the urban fabric. They have to be a productive urban fabric, with a product that provides a service with added value, quality and decent wages that generates opportunities to make this life possible. I defend regeneration as a vital mechanism, as a declaration of optimism about the city: the city that promotes the Superblock model and proposes all this across the board, on all scales, in all neighbourhoods, in all fabrics and for all uses, in order to make life in the city possible and desirable.
EFWe’ve talked about different initiatives, different projects that Barcelona has produced throughout the history of the city. When we feel proud to be Barcelona, we bring with us all this past, this vision, and now we have been talking about initiatives of design and innovation in legal matters. Barcelona has always been a great laboratory, proposing new ways of making the city. The Eixample was one such, and I believe that the Superblock project is a principle that can serve to rethink what a street is, what this interstitial space between private properties is, the public realm and how to redesign it. As for typological questions, you were talking before about the playable city, about this great reinvention of what a playground is. I think we need more typologies. Apart from libraries, apart from civic centres, which are typologies that we invented, that have been able to produce new communities, new interactions, new relationships, I think we need other typologies where anyone can go, where they can find people. We have to sit down and create these new amenities in the city. And I think the third part is innovating by producing new materials, from floors to walls, or façades or roofs. We have to understand that innovation on an urban scale is not just about infrastructural and legal planning; it’s also about tactile things and what we are capable of doing.
Barcelona is a city that has great human, social and cultural beauty, but now we have a debt to the planet, to ourselves and to the future. As we said a few months ago when we started the Model – Architecture Festival of Barcelona, “the future is going to be strange”. But it’ll be an interesting future. This is why we have to continue to produce experiments. I don’t know what the future will be like, but I do think that Barcelona could be one of the great cities that helps other cities find their future, too.
CPWhat I would say is that we’ve been talking about a very physical city. We have to talk about the city that promotes culture. I think it all comes down to giving people culture and education. One library is not enough; lots more have to be created, and always be open, with museums you can visit on Sunday afternoons, a city that is a breeding ground for culture, that people identify with. When you have culture, you’re more aware of others, and you’re not so fixated on yourself. The City Council should be responsible for making a city that is not just people-friendly, but capable of stimulating culture for everyone.
MJBarcelona has always been a city of innovation and leadership among Mediterranean cities, but also on a global scale. This legacy is very important. But I think there’s a challenge in which Barcelona could be a pioneer. As well as resisting the march of capital and the devouring dynamics of global neoliberalism, it is also important to be able to work with capital by means of innovation mechanisms. Global neoliberal capital has very strong predatory tendencies. Capital sets out to extract resources and money. We have to be able to take advantage of these dynamics of global capital, while establishing strict conditions: investing in the city and contributing to regeneration. We need to have plans for a greener, more permeable Barcelona, a Barcelona that creates its own energy like a non-profit organization. But it’s also necessary to find spaces for collaboration with the major economic forces so that the city can achieve what it wants and develop its city project. You have to explain the city project as you develop it, its new narratives; you have to explain that the aim is to create a quality of life in the city that improves over time. Resistance alone is not enough.
EFI think we need to start talking about regrowth. We have to continue to grow and invest, but with different principles and values. Obviously, the superblocks have to be built, and that calls for investment, capital and materials, and new functions. But this is regrowing in a different way.
JSThis idea seems very important to me: regrowth to redistribute quality of life. I think this is the aim: degrowth of things that are not good for the city and the planet, and growth of the ones we need to make a decent life possible for everyone. We have to promote as many eco-feminist policies as possible to make Barcelona a place where people want to live and can do so.