Barcelona Metropolis

NOTE: this article is one of thirty-seven texts that make up the book Shaping Cities in an Urban Age, edited by Ricky Burdett and Philipp Rode. This book is the third and final addition to the Urban Age series, published by Phaidon in collaboration with the London School of Economics and Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft.

The Charter was written in an accessible, manifesto-like style. Its technocratic paradigm was clear and unambiguous. It argued that the ‘four keys to urban planning are the four functions of the city: dwelling, work, recreation [and] transportation’ and that all new cities should be zoned accordingly, removing at one stroke the complex layering of multiple activities that define urban life and transactions. In stipulating that ‘high-rise apartments [be] placed at wide distances apart [to] liberate the ground for large open spaces’, it eliminated the street and all the associated human interactions that support trade and social cohesion and give a sense of connection. To be properly modern, the Charter recommended, ‘roads should be differentiated according to their functions: residential streets, promenades, through roads, major highways’ and ‘heavily used traffic junctions should be designed for continuous passage of vehicles, using different levels’, prioritizing the needs of fast-moving vehicles over the human individual. Despite their collective belief in social progress and improvement, the authors of the Charter were unambiguous in their attitude towards concentrated poverty: ‘unsanitary slums should be demolished and replaced by open space’.

Nearly a century has passed, but the Charter’s spatial prescriptions define much of the built reality of contemporary cities. Istanbul and São Paulo are still building dormitory towns on the periphery; many Indian cities encourage out-of-town shopping centres, business parks and call centres; flashy new CBDs are imagined for New Cairo, Kigali and the new towns of Kazakhstan and Vietnam. And Mexico City and Mumbai are still building flyovers to connect new monofunctional districts. Despite the significant investment made in China and South Korea in housing and public transport infrastructure, the character of hyper-dense residential districts remains disconnected, anonymous and devoid of everyday urban life. In addition to their functional separation, many of these projects are designed as enclaves, closed urban systems incapable of incremental change, inflexible building types bounded by lifeless public spaces.

A by-product of this functional reduction has been the erosion of the public realm. As a consequence, the potential for everyday transactions and unplanned encounter has diminished, often sucking the essence out of city life and deadening everyday urban experience. The strict separation of functions, prioritization of the car and elimination of the indeterminate and unexpected has resulted in a generic urban genre which indeed imposes a degree of order, but an inflexible and brittle one that reduces the level of complexity and negates the very sense of urbanity and the potential for cityness.

While the Charter ends with the exhortation that ‘private interests should be subordinated to the interests of the community’, its application has encouraged land speculation and increasing ghettoization. For example, the oversized 1980s office complex of Canary Wharf in East London was conceived as a zoned enclave that provides jobs but is severely cut off from its surrounding communities. Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires follows the same exclusionary spatial principles, while Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic ‘legacy’ project is ending up as a segregated development (concealed behind walls) rather than an open, connected, mixed piece of city.

Many of these typological interventions, especially those in rapidly urbanizing regions of the world, result directly from planning legislation rooted in Charter of Athens ideology. Zoning regulations, which determine the quantum and type of development, actively promote the designation of segregated industrial zones, education zones, leisure zones, commercial zones and tax-free zones alongside the ubiquitous Central Business Districts, residential quarters and shopping centres. Entire urban districts in or around Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, New Delhi and São Paulo are planned in discrete functional sectors, often separated by wide freeways, heroically scaled traffic roundabouts and large expanses of surface car parking. While new residential suburbs of Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou provide modern accommodation for the emerging Chinese middle class, the wide spacing of repetitive towers creates a lack of active edges along oversized roads, and their lifeless daytime character is determined by municipal regulations hatched in the post-World War II era.

The conditions and the forces that shape the urban environment have changed dramatically since the mid-twentieth century. The exponential rise in urbanization and globalization, the steep rise in migration and informal growth, the transformative effects of new information technologies, the impact on climate change and awareness of resource scarcity, and the profound increase in inequality have impacted the dynamics of urban growth. In the face of such a complex, interconnected set of causes and effects, a reductionist paradigm appeals to anyone concerned with ‘getting things done’. In this ideology, cities are seen as ‘problems’ that have to be ‘solved’, rather than fragile metabolisms that need to be shaped, steered and nurtured. It is the paradigm and not just the solutions that need to be reframed.

Time is critical to urban growth. It takes generations to build up the spatial, social and cultural depth and richness that make cities attract flows of people, goods, money and ideas. Equally important is the ability of a city’s built fabric to adapt and absorb urban churn. Since its conception in 1811, New York’s Manhattan grid and building typology has sustained a variety of activities, from industrial warehouses to housing projects, artists’ studios, bankers’ lofts and fashion houses. The transformation of the city’s waterfront owes as much to the resilient design of the building stock and urban form as it does to Mayor Bloomberg’s rezoning policies. The commercial and popular success of the High Line relies on a relatively simple intervention of retrofitting a disused railway line. The democratizing effect of Manhattan’s street layout has been instrumental in increasing the city’s capacity to react to radical shocks to its economic, social and structural systems over a period of time. Yet, despite the challenges of gentrification and the exorbitant cost of real estate, New York is not divided up into inaccessible gated communities. It remains, spatially, an open city.

Barcelona’s famous diagonal grid with chamfered corners, implemented by Ildefons Cerdà in the mid- to late 1800s, has also stood the test of time. Developed by an engineer to support the city’s expansion and to house the emerging middle class, the urban structure has become intensified and enriched over the last two centuries, but the basic streetscape has remained the same, endlessly adaptable to change. At the time of writing, the city’s mayor is exploring ways of transforming sets of nine Cerdà blocks in central Barcelona – three blocks by three blocks – into car-free zones, adapting the nineteenth-century city conceived for horses and carts into a contemporary model of urbanism that reduces car traffic and pollution, and maximizes sociability.

Designers, developers, investors and policy makers are faced with increasingly tough choices as to how to intervene in changing urban physical and social landscapes. How do you maintain the DNA of the city when it undergoes profound transformations? Who is the city for? How do you reconcile public and private interests? Who pays and who gains? The city planners of London, Paris, Barcelona, Hamburg and New York are grappling with the same questions as the urban leaders of African, Latin American and Asian cities, even though the levels of deprivation and requirements for social infrastructure may be of a different order of magnitude. Yet, the design and planning solutions – often imported via international professional offices and consultants – offer remarkably similar solutions whose roots can be traced back to the mid-twentieth century.

Since 2005, the Urban Age project has provided a specific lens on the way cities are changing, focusing on the interactions between the physical and the social. Through this perspective, the process of urbanization appears incomplete, messy and organic. None the less, many solutions implemented on the ground are prescriptive, finite and rigid. To address this imbalance, there is an emerging consensus among urbanists for the need to re-examine and reframe the assumptions that underpin planning practices worldwide. The strict functionalist separation of activities should be questioned in favour of clustering multiple activities at higher densities in well-connected places. Formal solutions that promote segregation and isolation should be revisited in favour of more elastic environments that tolerate heterogeneity and accept change. City making should embrace a broader time frame, with an openness to the past and the anticipation of an uncertain future.

Ultimately, the Urban Age project recognizes that urbanization is a necessarily open process that is both iterative and incomplete. The understanding of current urban practices suggests that we need to move away from the rigidity of the technocratic, generic Modernist model inherited from the Charter of Athens, towards a more open, malleable and incremental urbanism that recognizes the role of design, time and space in making cities more liveable.