from ArchiKubik

“The key to preserving a suggestive, lively and attractive city capable of preserving the quality of living standards, lies in the hands of its citizens, the emotional (and functional) relationship they establish with it, and their ability to construct, to self construct even, its own identity. Not so much a collective identity, widespread and large-scale, but an intimate almost domestic identity, shared by those who are nearest to one another and in connection with what lies within closest range. A fast active identity sustained on a daily (not a centennial) basis. It is in this sense that the idea of Event is essential. Events are our means of approaching certain parts of the city; events weave an emotional web with places, acting as the raw material the city offers its users in order to transform them into citizens. Events are generated at a collective and programmed level (the Olympic Games, the Forum 2004 are examples of large-scale events designed for mass communities), and at a virtually private de-programmed level. If urban space encourages the incidence of close-range direct experiences, we are well on the way to creating an urban event culture. The crucial forms of expression that arise in urban environments include those produced on levels ranging from one-to-one, one-to-multiple, multiple-to-one and multiple-to-multiple basis. In emotional terms, our first kiss on a park bench will remain forever engraved in our memory, as will the football matches we played in a certain square and the concerts and parties we attended. Such situations, however domestic and unassuming they may seem, have the kind of impact that the Situationists termed psychogeography. We cannot trust that all our citizens will strategically and deliberately become Situationist converts, in accordance with the political terms discussed by the Situationist International in the fifties and sixties, but we should create a type of urban space – and above all a public space – able to stimulate relationships between equals. In other words, if identity is based on nostalgia and memory, we should be able to provoke reminiscences –– perhaps not general mythic memories, ideological or collective, but reactive, domestic memories generated from either personal or restrictively communal experience. Instead of encouraging action from a premise rooted in the past, we should seek to create continual action and intensive use of public space, a fundamental platform for social relations.
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The conditions of this type of public space are based on urban density, which favours frequent non-programmed encounters; on the neutrality (not the generic nature) of urban space, in other words avoiding the specialisation of public space (areas designed exclusively for children, for dogs, for bowls players, etc.); and on a certain degree of continuity in town planning –– streets aren’t dead areas, but on the contrary can be understood in a variety of ways as platforms for action. In the city of Barcelona we come across examples of an urban event culture in specific areas of the Raval district. In spite of its problems, Raval is an alfresco laboratory that analyses the challenges of the contemporary city, such as multiculturalism, diversity, a high density of population (over 20,000 inhabitants per square kilometre), lack of safety on the streets, etc. And yet it also presents the liveliest social fabric of today’s city. Recently opened restaurants and other amenities, ‘new’ means of expression and interethnic co-existence are some of the proposals convening in this central district, particularly in North Raval. So our intention is to ‘Ravalise’ the whole of Barcelona, spreading the cultural virus of the ideas in action proclaimed by organisations based in the district until they converge with the advantages of the new city, overcoming problems such as the insalubrity of old run-down housing, the exceptionally narrow streets and the lack of public facilities. To ‘Ravalise’ Barcelona means to stimulate the social fabric of the city starting from urban tactics, from well-equipped public space, meeting basic housing needs. If Raval is dense, then the density of the city in general should be emphasised; if Raval is multi-layered, we should ensure the whole town is multicultural; if Raval is mixed-use, the city should be re-integrated. The idea that this district’s identity is rooted in the past is not quite true, for until a short time ago neither nostalgic myths nor ancient history seemed to bear any traces of it. Raval is in the process of shaping its own identity on paper, and it is doing so from the worst conditions possible (multiculturalism, lack of social services, stifling public spaces, etc.). So our intention is not to see Raval in a mythical light, but to draw the necessary conclusions from the reality of its thriving social fabric that will enable the other “cities within the city” to create their own logic of events.

Raval is also plays significant in another fundamental aspect of town planning, as the former dichotomy between the city centre and the outskirts disappears as a result of the existence of more than one ‘centre’. The centre, as such, is a key feature for establishing distance (both physical and emotional) as a unit of measure. The centres of European towns influence their entire metropolitan areas. Conceiving the new city implies envisaging this new centrality.

Built-up urban areas in medium-sized European cities like Barcelona cannot continue to present one single unit of measure. On the contrary, while town centres are vital in some capacities, the outskirts prove central in others. The emergence of multiple centres gradually cuts into the isolation of the periphery, marking the need for a certain degree of specialisation –– the oldest quarter should not necessarily also embrace the political centre, the cultural and the social heart of the city. New centres must be generated in each of the city’s fresh challenges. Thus, Sagrera must take advantage of the intermodal railway station to re-centre the approaches to Barcelona. As the means of access to the city for millions of people arriving by train, it must be alluring and appear as another ‘Plaça Catalunya’ for those who are visiting the city for the first time. In its specialisation, the district of Sagrera must welcome the possibilities for economic exchange provided by business, and the opportunities for cultural and social exchange offered by tourism and recreational urban activities. Railway infrastructures have the advantage of penetrating into the very heart of the city (as opposed to the peripheral condition required by airports), a key factor in the new centrality of Sagrera. As the new city rises to the surface, it must display Barcelona’s main feature: its domesticity. Visitors find Barcelona (or should we say each of the various ‘Barcelonas’) striking, because all parts of the city are equally prepared for active public life. People can eat, go out for a drink, take a stroll, go to the cinema or shop in most districts –– in short, they can live anywhere. Barcelona is domestic and familiar, it is apprehensible, easily ‘understood’ and experienced –– the same cannot be said of all cities. Its value resides in the number of people liable to wander as they leave the railway station, and in its ability to administer this domesticity for the continual arrival of new and experienced visitors and residents.

Bearing in mind these considerations, the new Barcelonas will be ‘glocal’, acting on a global scale as poles of attraction to promote relations on a local scale between current and future inhabitants and urban space.

Public versus Private: The Sphere of the Possible

Cities have traditionally been divided into these two distinct categories, public space versus private space, with no intermediate areas. Yet if a city is able to knock down this mental (and often physical) barrier, its urban mass will be much more receptive, osmotic and permeable.

This can be done by broadening the scope of possibility between clear-cut public and private space, providing the city with a whole range of new intermediate areas. This does not mean mixing public and private, merely creating a buffer between the two, able to generate an active transition between what takes place on a large scale and what is individual. To a certain extent what is called for is a redefinition of the initial dichotomy by creating spaces that are semi-public, others semi-private, and spaces of approximation –– in short, enhancing the range of possible relations between citizens and their immediate environment. Although this is not a new idea perhaps it hadn’t been clearly expressed until now. In the refurbished inner courtyards of the blocks in the Eixample district designed by Cerdà, open public use of space co-exists with the private appropriation of these areas by adjacent buildings. These hybrid spaces are officially public, yet in practice they are enjoyed by local neighbours. Designing such spaces increases the possibilities for interaction between the city and its citizens. What the tourist may miss will be enjoyed by the city-dweller, the connoisseur of the town, district or street in question. The idea is to create an urban fabric on a scale smaller than that of great streets, squares and buildings; channelling public space towards the private spheres of homes and offices; designing not specific corners, twists and turns, but rather areas in which citizens can voluntarily disappear, sheltered from cars and protected from public gazes. The reinvention of the street, of front and back, of what is exposed and what remains secluded, lies precisely in this transitional realm between public and private, mass and individuality. Such polyhedral cities, full of delicate ramifications, encompass manifold interpretations and recuperate the Situationist idea of drift (dérive) or détournement.

Repetition versus Variation: The System

When we speak of a certain ‘model’ of city we usually resort to generalisations that are unable to capture the necessary nuances of living cities. The model refers to a masterly solution, almost an ideological vision of a solution, an idea that is usually greatly impoverished when the conditions in which it is applied are not those best suited to the model’s co-ordinates.

To model complexity is an extremely difficult task when it comes to contemporary cities. Variables are affected by the constant fluctuation of determinants, leading to models that are either too general (and therefore unable to assume the nitty-gritty of their actual application), or too specific with regard to local detail (and therefore not applicable in other suppositions). To counteract the dysfunctions of a given model we shall adopt the idea of the system.

The city considered as a system is understood as an unfolding of platforms intended to develop simultaneous situations, multiple actions and experiences. The variables of such systems must be clearly established, in particular the scope for transformation they are able to assume. Systems are more flexible than models; they have a wider range of application in changing environments and are more liable to provoke appropriate responses. A certain behavioural logic, certain guidelines and codes of reaction to change underlie all systems, guaranteeing adaptive transformations and pertinent solutions to varying demands.

The city appears a system of systems, all interconnected, interwoven and interdependent, systems covering different areas of the city superimposed on other systems of greater scope. Such systems are not conditioned by aesthetic precautions such as variations or repetitions to taste. Systems have a self-programmed logic that depends on the external forces to which they are subjected; in fact, systems are mutable and their forms are directly related to their own pre-existing conditions. Form, therefore, is not an essential feature, a trait neither definitive nor definitional of the system’s functionality. Form does not exist inasmuch as it is not established a priori; it exists as a final result of an urban process of calculation. The issue is not of course merely to translate the resultants of density, buildability, usage, etc., into spatial factors, but to work out the degree of density of the event in programmatic-spatial terms, the definition of all sorts of variables (immigration, mobility, scheduled uses, interaction, dependence, independence and interdependence, etc.), using algorithms that will express the extreme yet necessary complexity of cities.

In Favour of a Liveable City

As opposed to the inhumane breaking up of the generic city and the romantic tyranny of the recognisable city, with its nostalgic codes of identity and associations with totality, we propose a polyhedral city –– a city of multiple gazes, a macro-regional, macro-architectural, macro-territorial and micro-urban city. A city of encounters, of voluntary drifts and on-demand references; a city of the hustle and bustle of shopping and of our first furtive kiss; a city of urban event culture and private domestic culture; a city interconnected with the world and intra-connected with our most intimate imaginary. We propose a city of multiple identities rather than official identity; a city of artificial domesticity and urban naturalness; a city that reacts to indifference, to all that is generic, to shallow standardisation. We propose a city that welcomes the tension of contradictions, of exchange and responsibility. A city both functional and emotional; a city of experience and invention; a city that is increasingly POLIS and decreasingly MEGA. A city of value and countervalue, of tradition and innovation, of narrative and poetry, of confluence and dispersal. A city that offers a choice, a city that adapts; a city of public space charged with capacities and possibilities; a city that must be re-visited from without and re-envisaged from within. A complex city with coincidental limits; a city not of perplexity but of paradox. In short, we propose a city mirrored on the men and women who inhabit it, a city to live in… a Liveable City.” Archikubik

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