Often we forget what a city is. The city is not one building next to another, or a sequence of streets, or even people living next door to each other. Nor is it a table of economic values and investments. The city is what we do collectively. The city acquires meaning when collective life becomes possible there, when it becomes possible for diverse people to interact and collectively shape their habitat. As Jane Jacobs told us, “cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody”.¹

The social and cultural dimension (civitas) and the political dimension (polis) make up the physical dimension (urbs). And vice versa, the physical dimension enables, enhances, facilitates and conditions social, cultural and political life in the city. The city is, then, not strictly its physical form, but what its physical form makes possible. People who live collectively. The city is the reflection of a way of living, a way of understanding how to live.

Barcelona is a global city and, at the same time, a city of neighbourhoods. Before us lies the challenge of striking a balance between the global dimension of Barcelona, with its positive but also its negative impacts, and the everyday life that its inhabitants need. That is, what makes it a real city, a collective habitat.

This is precisely what this book captures by means of photography. How the action of living in the city of Barcelona is practised by means of the urban planning and architecture that have been promoted and carried out in the last decade. How daily life in the city is reclaimed, preserved and enhanced. In projects of public space, public housing and facilities, we perceive a city in transformation, adapting its morphological conditions to generate the conditions that make it possible to live collectively in the city.

Barcelona does not stand out as a representative city of a specific historical period, like some other cities do. Yet it is a city where we find examples of architecture of the utmost relevance from various historical periods, and examples of pioneering, keynote urban transformation that have prompted a leap in the global model of the city. The construction of Carrer de Ferran in the first half of the 19th century and the definition of a new concept of street; Cerdà’s Eixample plan of 1859, establishing a new idea and scale of the city, or the project of new areas of centrality in the eighties as a proposal to rebalance the whole show that Barcelona is a city that has been permanently attentive, at each historical moment, set on adapting to challenges and demands. And, even more importantly, that has had the determination and the technical, political and social capacity to come up with answers and situate itself at the forefront, exploring and taking risks, in search of innovative technical and aesthetic solutions to existing needs. Barcelona is also characterized by internal discussions and controversies about innovative projects and ventures in contrast to positive international recognition. An urban history with its ups and downs, its successes and mistakes, but always with an idea of city as the driving force of its evolution.

In this way we can trace the history of the city through significant periods of its evolutionary process, in which it has changed its status, always looking towards a new way of understanding how we should live collectively.

We are now at one of those significant moments when the city reconfigures its model. Manuel de Solà-Morales explained that, to create city, two things are needed: support infrastructure and an idea of urbanness.² These are precisely the two principles that the city is currently transforming to address today’s environmental and social problems and challenges. What must the city be like today to truly be a place to live healthily and collectively, without exclusion?

The city of Barcelona has historically been closely linked to urban planning and the design of public space. There are some constants that have made Barcelona a city with a recognizable and internationally recognized urban model. Perhaps the fact that it is a relatively small city, if we compare it with other big cities, has made it easy in various recent moments of transformation to approach changes from an overall vision of the city, from a desire for systemic change.

The interventions carried out in the eighties, with the restoration of democratic city government, became global benchmarks in the world of architecture, urban planning and design. The General Metropolitan Plan of 1976 is the most obvious example of this, with its desire to restructure and re-equip the metropolitan city after the period of unbridled development, establishing a new structure and new standards for public space and facilities that led to their creation and, therefore, improved urban conditions in all districts of the metropolitan city.

When the new areas of centrality³ —a fully-fledged urban planning operation on which the Olympic project was based— subsequently came under consideration, they visualized a new polycentric order for the entire city, with the aim of providing new spaces and uses for territories that lacked spaces of reference, and redistributing transformative interventions in order to rebalance the whole.

With the slogan proclaimed by Oriol Bohigas, “Recover the centre, monumentalize the periphery”,⁴ public space was seen as a tool to balance and bring quality to the entire city, from the most central neighbourhoods to those that were considered peripheral at the time. Seeing public space as a space of urbanness, as a strategic space, as a catalysing space to rebalance the city, became the real revolution.

This strategy crystallized in a way of doing things and a formal language that responded to the needs of that moment, which, along with a series of international events and foreign policies, made Barcelona recognized around the world. These interventions responded, with their virtues and flaws, to the challenges of the city at that time.

Today, 40 years after those interventions, the city and the world are set in a different context and face other challenges, some of them very urgent. What are the new demands and challenges guiding Barcelona’s present-day urban model?

Barcelona is a small, compact, continuous city, with a surface area of just 102 km² and a population of 1.6 million inhabitants, making it one of Europe’s most densely populated cities, with 16,378 inhabitants/km². These conditions mean that the urban fabric, thanks to its urban intensity, can be very efficient and generate living conditions of proximity and a pericentric structure, provided public space has the appropriate characteristics to provide the social and environmental services required by population density. Despite the city’s good morphological conditions, we are currently facing some major problems and new challenges. The pandemic and restrictions resulting from Covid-19 have shown us the importance of having a decent home and basic services and facilities within a short distance.

The idea of proximity is a quality that Barcelona has applied since the eighties by creating networks of public facilities throughout the city. The new facilities are clearly intended to create city; they adapt to their urban context and improve it, they open up and relate to public space. But the briefs, typologies and construction technologies are evolving in response to new social and environmental demands. Changing briefs have given rise to new amenities such as the Lgtbi Centre, in Carrer del Comte Borrell, and the Centre for Digital and Democratic Innovation at the Canòdrom, in response to new social needs. At the same time, a series of pioneering facilities have appeared, like the Porta Trinitat building or the Turó de la Peira sports centre, which incorporate sustainability criteria into construction and functioning. Particular mention must be made of the new García Márquez Library in Sant Martí de Provençals, an amenity that represents an important typological advance as a library seen as a diverse, user-friendly space, adapted to all profiles, as well as an advance in the construction systems and materials used.

When we talk about proximity, we obviously refer to well-distributed facilities and a mixed-use city, but also and above all to the need to guarantee that everyone has access to decent housing. Unfortunately, Barcelona has a significant historical shortfall of public housing policies that allow everyone access to housing. An enormous effort, the biggest ever, is now being made to change this situation, expanding and rebalancing public rental housing stock throughout the city. Firstly, the instruments to increase stock have been diversified, making use of the right of trial and retraction to buy properties and establishing mechanisms to manage surface and delegated rights or new planning instruments, such as the mandatory cession of 30% of social housing in new housing licenses and the change in planning conditions in the 22@ district to increase its residential capacity. Secondly, innovation in industrialized building technologies and solutions make for faster construction by reusing materials, as in Aprop in Ciutat de Vella and Les Glòries.

The idea of proximity is closely linked to the preservation and valorization of built heritage as an environmental strategy that avoids unnecessary demolition and as a new paradigm of what should be considered heritage. The modification of the Metropolitan General Plan (Mpgm) for the Gràcia district and the future plan for the Can Peguera neighbourhood represent a new sensibility towards the idea of heritage, extending heritage protection to the things that shape the identity of neighbourhoods, the urban landscape of everyday life and what we recognise as collective memory.

The transformation of enclosed historical sites into new public spaces also creates proximity. The transformation of the former La Model prison will serve not only to preserve the memory of the place, but also to create a new hub of facilities for the Esquerra de l’Eixample district, as well as creating new public housing. Another example is the transformation of the Port Olímpic, a space that had become distanced from urban dynamics and now, with its physical and programmatic transformation, is reincorporated as a new urban space.

The development of the industrial city starting in the mid-19th century was based on mobility using private vehicles, and the occupation and design of public space was firmly conditioned by the presence of this means of transport. This preference is reflected in streets and lanes designed for private traffic, with pedestrians and citizens moved to the sides, while private vehicles occupy the centre and also end up invading the edges and even parts of squares and gardens, congesting the city and reducing useful space for the citizen to the minimum expression.

At present, over 50% of the surface area of Barcelona’s streets is set aside for use by cars. There is a major deficit of green: the global index of the city is 6 m² of green area per inhabitant, well below Who recommendations of between 10 and 15 m² per inhabitant.

This situation has hugely negative impacts in environmental terms, but also in the social sphere. Donald Appleyard’s well-known book Livable Streets⁵ demonstrated that the intensity of traffic in a street is inversely proportional to the social relations established between the people who live there. Furthermore, it is an entirely unfair situation, with vehicle users, who are in the minority in quantitative terms, occupying much more space than the rest of the users, who are the majority.

To advance towards a city with muscle and social cohesion, it is necessary to act to change this situation. Regenerating the city also involves reclaiming space for citizens, enhancing everyday uses of public thoroughfares and promoting connectivity between neighbourhoods on foot, by means of healthier, more sustainable means of transport (bicycle, scooter...) or by collective public transport for longer distances. There has been a considerable increase in the cycling network in recent years, especially with the creation of bike lanes along major city axes at the metropolitan scale such as Carrer d’Aragó, Carrer de València and Avinguda Meridiana.

The design of public space also has to adapt to everyday life to make it more user-friendly, applying a gender perspective and prioritizing the needs of the most vulnerable groups, such as children and the elderly.

In this sense, schools have become a strategic space for intervention. The Protect Our Schools programme has already improved the environs of 200 schools and hopes to improve the surroundings of all of the city’s schools, some 600, in the coming years. These interventions have served to increase the public space available at the entrances to schools, to the detriment of vehicle space, and make it more liveable by means of street furniture and urban greening. In some cases, like Escola Lavínia, a school street has been created for the exclusive social use of children and families; in others, the pavements have been tactically widened, as in the case of Escola Grèvol, and Escola Xirinacs School, located on a corner of the Eixample grid. Safety is also improved by reducing the maximum speed of vehicles to 30 kph, with new graphic signposting that allows everyone, and specifically drivers, to identify that they are driving in a school area.

The interior spaces of schools are also transformed. The Shelter Schools programme has to date transformed 11 of the city’s schools into climate shelters by incorporating urban greenery, trees, shade elements and water into their playgrounds to create spaces that are protected from the impact of heat waves.

Another vector driving the transformation of public space is children’s play. In 2019, Barcelona City Council approved the Play in Public Space Plan, aimed at the year 2030.⁶ The basic idea of this plan is to make a child-friendly city by encouraging play as a healthy physical activity that is also collective and social. It sets out to create an ecosystem of playable spaces of different sizes and types, distributed regularly throughout all of the city’s neighbourhoods according to the criterion of proximity. Flagship interventions of the programme include the whale, in Parc Central in Nou Barris; the octopus, in Parc de La Pegaso, and the new children’s play area in Plaça de Sant Miquel.⁷

Today there is scientific consensus on climate change, its irreversibility and its effects, and a growing general awareness of the need to mitigate them as far as possible and to adapt to those that are already irreversible.

The Barcelona Climate Emergency Declaration of 15 January 2020⁸ sets out a series of specific strategies and actions as part of a change in urban model, and includes the climate variable in all the processes of transformation and management of the urban form: greening, making the city more permeable, recovering natural soils and decarbonizing built fabrics, economic activity and mobility.

It is important to clarify that naturalizing does not only mean increasing urban greenery; it essentially means recovering healthy environmental conditions. Therefore, the first step is to stop polluting. There is no point in greening the city unless we first reduce sources of pollution. As described in the Climate Emergency Action Plan 2030,⁹ a third of the city’s CO₂ emissions are produced by transport. This is why measures of mobility management, such as the low-emission zone, are essential, in the first place, to start reducing transport emissions. It is equally vital to recover the space used by motorized vehicles for new green infrastructures and social uses, and sustainable mobility, and this must be planned, structured and connective. Green has to be functional, not just contemplative, ornamental or decorative. It must be ecologically and metabolically functional, sustainable and resilient, and fulfil all the functions and potentiality it can develop to provide all possible socio-environmental services.

Recent years have seen an unprecedented increase in greening, both in quantity and diversification: from new urban parks like the Jardins del Doctor Pla i Armengol, Plaça de Sóller, Parc de l’Aqüeducte in Ciutat Meridiana, Parc Santiburcio and Parc Central de la Marina del Prat Vermell to the greening of new street projects such as Carrer de Cristóbal de Moura and Carrer de Bolívia, and other new streets in the Bon Pastor district.

In addition there is the move to extend the process of naturalization to built fabrics. The Green Roof Contest¹⁰ has encouraged the recovery of Barcelona rooftops as spaces to incorporate nature but also for community life. An outstanding project is the one for the Porxos d’en Xifré building. Another is the recovery and improvement of party walls as spaces to support urban greening, like the wall of Plaça de les Dones del 36.

The most outstanding of all the interventions is the new Parc de les Glòries, the transformation of a huge raised concrete traffic infrastructure into a new park. Conceived as a new urban centrality, it organizes existing fabrics and new building and facilities around it, establishing continuities between neighbourhoods that had historically been separated by a huge road infrastructure. With a total surface area of almost 10 hectares, the new park is a great canopy and incorporates various functional areas for playgrounds, public events and sporting activities, among others.

Greening the city to support natural infrastructure offers many different functions at a variety of scales that improve the quality of the city as a whole and also the quality of life of its inhabitants in the private realm. When well distributed and maintained by the territory, urban greening also offers a democratic, egalitarian service and infrastructure for all citizens.

Stopping pollution, reclaiming space, increasing and connecting green infrastructure and fostering community relations: the programme that best illustrates this process of greening and the promotion and improvement of everyday life is Barcelona Superblock,¹¹ based on a simple but powerful idea: building a new more efficient model of mobility that pollutes less and takes up less space, prioritizing public transport, bicycles and pedestrians to free up one of every three streets of through traffic to turn them into green axes for social use and more green infrastructure. The first experiences in Poblenou and Sant Antoni have shown that the implementation of superblocks improves environmental conditions, significantly reduces both atmospheric and noise pollution, encourages collective activities in public spaces and boosts local trade. This idea recovers the spirit of Cerdà’s Eixample project, and places public health and hygiene at the centre to create a more egalitarian urban fabric.

This model can be applied to all transformations of public space, like the case of Avinguda Meridiana, where grey space for private vehicles has been reduced to incorporate a central strip with more trees and urban green, and a new bike lane. Another example is Carrer Gran de Sant Andreu, where the creation of a single roadway and traffic calming improve habitability and encourage local trade.

This is the construction of a genuinely environmental and social infrastructure for the entire city, a real systemic change that will mean improved environmental quality and more spaces for social use throughout the city.

According to a study by ISGlobal presented in 2019,¹² 664 premature deaths could be avoided every year if the superblock model were implemented throughout the city. The study indicates that to ensure an equitable distribution of its beneficial health impacts, the model must be implemented consistently all over the city.

It is therefore urgent to reclaim space used by motorized vehicles to create green infrastructure, social uses and sustainable mobility, and this calls for new instruments. The fastest, most efficient way to do this is by means of tactical interventions that make it possible to functionally modify the space using few resources and advance towards its definitive transformation. Tactical interventions carried out in the Superblock areas in Poblenou and Sant Antoni have given these areas a new habitability. Thanks to the Opening Up the Streets programme, streets that are usually crowded with vehicles, like Carrer d’Aragó, Carrer de Sants and Carrer Gran de Gràcia, are closed to traffic at the weekend and opened up to people.

Barcelona Superblock also represents a new collaborative city model with the participation of associations and residents to define and develop the project by creating a steering group open to all citizens, with sectoral boards and committees on accessibility, environment, trade and mobility, among others. It also uses new digital instruments such as the Decidim [We decide] open-source digital platform to organize the various processes, as well as guaranteeing traceability.

Unlike other moments at which the city has tackled the transformation of large areas, we are now talking about multiple transformations distributed throughout the city, smaller in scope but very ambitious: the overall improvement of the city. We need a systemic regeneration to address the two major urban challenges of the moment: social justice and climate change.

This book, then, is not a compilation of photographs of brilliant projects, but a testimony to a moment of global change in the city. A book that presents tangible proof of “new places to live” thanks to the most significant urban planning and architectural interventions of recent years in the city of Barcelona (2015-2022). Projects concerned with the things that give meaning to the collective and community dimension of the city.

It is also a vindication of necessary public action in the city as an instrument that looks out for the community. It is the reflection of a moment of change driven by public policies that take citizens as their argument and justification, with the conviction that the city must, above all considerations, be a place to live, a place for people, and especially the most fragile and vulnerable. A feminist, inclusive space.

It is a book that is unquestionably an optimistic, hopeful message for the future of cities. In the face of pessimistic messages foreseeing a tragic fate for cities, the processes of transformation and the resulting places in Barcelona that this book shows demonstrate that it is possible to build a better future for cities.

Xavier Matilla  is the Chief Architect at Barcelona City Council.