Walking on Barcelona, and thinking about city design

I'm walking on a gigantic aerial picture - high resolution - of Barcelona, Spain. The picture is maybe 35 meters in diameter, hosted under a white inflated dome on the central Plaza de Catalunya square. Key city infrastructure is located on it and described. New infrastructure, that is: this is the "Metropolis Barcelona" showcase, part of Barcelona's strategic metropolitan plan.

I'm always amazed, each time I come to this city, at the quantity and ambition of projects underway, many of which are on display across this "old-media" version of Google Earth: new regional rail and tram lines, the MareNostrum supercomputing center, the b_TEC park devoted to sustainability (in energy, water, mobility, architecture), the Parc Barcelona Media (picture below), the rehab of old neighborhoods such as Poble Sec or the remodeling and redeveloping of the Badalona seafront or the transformation of the 200-hectares Poblenou quarter - which used to be, during the 19th century, the center of Spanish industrialization - in a tech and business hub called District22, innovative social-work spaces such as Porta22, a research center on nuclear fusion, a new desalinization plant that will produce 200'000 cubic meters of freshwater a day, a center for aerospace tech - and the list could go on.

Barcelona started a radical re-creation of itself in 1992, leveraging the Summer Olympics as both a reason for massive infrastructural investments and a global advertising billboard. The Barcelonites played both cards so well that that year their city's name started being increasingly associated with "cool". Since, the reinvention of the city has not stopped. Design, arts and culture (think Fura dels Baus, Ferran Adrià, etc), and technology are its new hallmarks. "But statistically, we're not the most innovative city - yet", Francesc Santacana told me yesterday over coffee. He is the coordinator of the strategic plan for the metropolitan area of Barcelona - a network of 36 cities with about 3 million inhabitants. A region with all the problems of all metropolitan regions: saturated territory, insufficient public transport systems and persistent car congestion, social fragmentation, etc. But a region that is very busy in pushing change. It's no easy challenge: "We have been shifting from an orderly structured and designed urban model of the industrial era to a more or less chaotic space, occupied in an erratic way, with a rather blurred logic and in which multiple economic activities, cultures and values coehixt", says Francesc.

He and his colleagues have read Richard Florida, for their top goal is to "generate, attract and retain creative and innovative talent". Promoting infrastructures is only a part of this, of course. Much more important is to promote the right kind of infrastructures, to properly re-design both the city and the ways it can foster interaction and "fecundation", to quote Jorge Wagensberg, the director of the city's Science Museum. Re-imagining a city, he writes in an essay published in the catalog accompanying the Plaza de Catalunya exhibit,

is about increasing the probability of the collision of creators (all the citizens are creators, to a greater or less extent, in one subject or another). And this is achievable by creating suitable scenes in the city, credible meeting places, ambients which favour the diverse wherever it comes from. (...) The vast majority of auditoriums and conferences halls in the city are still conceived more to underline the solemnity of the act and the authority and prestige of the speaker than to invite participation and discussion. (...) What the Greeks discovered from their theatre (...) is forgotten when designing spaces dedicated to knowledge in our cities. Even the design of a public square, a park, a bus, an office, a factory, a school or a concert hall can include this aspect, stimulating the search for participation, for collision, for fecundation. (...)

Yes, perhaps "fecundation" is the keyword. There are spaces which favour fecundation and spaces which invite sterility. (...) Scientific specialization means that ideas don't fly across the boundaries of disciplines anymore. But the city can create spaces where two scientists, two innovators, can collide; where an actor can get into a conversation with a sociologist; where a painter can run into a manufacturer. (...) Fecundation, in essence, means collision of two ideas in order to create a new one. City design should be all about facilitating that collision.

Comments

[ludo]

Barcelona has a history of planning and reinventing itself, possibly starting with the extension outside the city walls, planned by Ildefonso Cerdà in the XIX century, which forms a huge part of the city you see today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ildefons_Cerd%c3%a0

[Barcelona Photoblog]

Thanks for such comprehensive post on Barcelona, not just the common touristic opinion. I think readers will appreciate the quality of your article and all the useful links.

[BrunoG]

Thank you - although I don't really consider myself a tourist in Barcelona, as I have been visiting on a regular basis for the last ten years or so... :-) Happy day. B.