10
introduction The Gates to a New Barcelona
8
Antoni vives 10
The Renaturalisation of Barcelona
111
reflections
proposals
The Edges of Barcelona: From the Sea to the Mountains in 10 reflections
Gate 1. Diagonal
428
AVINGUDA DIAGONAL - SANT PERE MÀRTIR
188
Gate 2. Pedralbes
maria sisternas
CREU DE PEDRALBES - CAMÍ DE LORDA CAMÍ DE LA FONT DEL LLEÓ - PASSEIG DE LES AIGÜES
204
Gate 3. Sarrià
PLAÇA de SARRIÀ - PARC TORRENT DE LES MONGES DESERT DE SARRIÀ - MIRADOR DE SARRIÀ
218
Gate 4A. Vallvidrera
VIA AUGUSTA – VALLVIDRERA
Improving the Urban Fabric
234
Gate 4B. Les Planes
Beth Galí
VALLVIDRERA - LES PLANES
250
Gate 5. Bellesguard
PLAÇA de la BONANOVA - MANDRI - TORRE VILANA PASSEIG DE LES AIGÜES
266
Gate 6. Tibidabo
PLAÇA de john f. KENNEDY, JARDINS DE LA TAMARITA TORRENT DEL FRARE BLANC - PLA DELS MADUIXERS (PASSEIG DE LES AIGÜES) – TIBIDABO
282
Gate 7. Els Penitents
AVINGUDA de VALLCARCA – els PENITENTS
298
Gate 8. Sant Genís
PARC DE LA CREUETA DEL COLL - CAN SOLER FONT DEL BACALLÀ - FONDAL DE SANT GENÍS
314
Gate 9. Montbau
CAN TRAVI - CAMÍ DEL TORRENT DEL GENERET PLAÇA DEL CARGOL, PARC DE LES HEURES - SANT CEBRIÀ, CAMÍ de les LLARS MUNDET - PASSEIG DE LES AIGÜES
330
Gate 10. Horta
PARC de l’AVINGUDA DE L’ESTATUT de catalunya - VELÒDROM LABERINT D’HORTA - CAL NOTARI - TURÓ I PORTELL DE VALLDAURA
346
Gate 11. Canyelles
TURÓ DE LA PEIRA – SANt LLÀTZER – CAN FERRER
362
Gate 12. La Guineueta
PLAÇA de LLUCMAJOR - PARC DE LA GUINEUETA CARRETERA DE ROQUETES - COLL DE LA VENTOSA
378
Gate 13. La Trinitat
PARC DE LA TRINITAT - PARC DEL BESÒS - MIRADOR DEL BESÒS
394
Gate 14. Torre Baró
SANTA COLOMA (CARRETERA DE RIBeS) - VALLBONA PARC de la FONT d’en MAGUÉS - TORRE BARÓ
410
Gate 15. Ciutat Meridiana
VALLBONA (TORRENT DE TAPIOLES) - FONT MUGUERA PASSEIG DE LES AIGÜES
44
Adolf sotoca - oscar carracedo
vicente guallart
The Natural Park of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area
12
48
60
Mapping
16
Integrating the Metropolitan Infrastructure
58 The Infrastructures antoni Alarcón
Teresa franquesa
hàbitat urbà 72
Guaranteeing Accessibility and Mobility
82 84
Accessibility in Collserola: Proposals Andreu Ulied - andreu esquius - Judit Requena
Updating Facilities and Public Services
94 96
and Collserola
Regenerating the Urban Fabric
70
Two Scales: The Park and its Gates Carlos Ferrater - Jaume Barnada
Renaturalising Public Space
106 Toponymy ramon bosch - Bet Capdeferro 108
Rediscovering the Landscape
118 120
The Landscapes of Collserola Carles Casamor - Josep Mascaró
Recovering Agricultural Uses
130
Active Agriculture. How to Recover the City’s Agricultural Landscape
Jordi Mansilla - Laia Mestre
132
Optimising the Urban Metabolism
142 The Urban Metabolism Ramon Folch 144
156
beyond Metaphor
Enganging Citizens
154
epilogue
Opening the Gates to Citizen Involvement Laia Torras i sagristà
Rethinking Planning
166 Planning for Ricard Fayos
the Collserola-City Border
172
The Open Code Transformation of a Living Space
Competition of the Gates to Collserola Participants 432
“After opening up to the sea in the 1980s, now Barcelona needs to open toward the mountains, its traditional natural border, with the aim of acknowledging the natural, landscape resources of the territory that is central to the metropolitan area.” Competition for the Gates to Collserola, Urban Habitat September 2011
the edges of Barcelona: from the sea to the mountains in 10 reflections 44
With this statement, three years ago Urban Habitat kicked off one of the most exciting challenges in urban design in the city in recent years: the Gates to Collserola competition. Conceived to draw participation from a large number of teams involving professionals from different disciplines, the competition served as the framework for a focused reflection on a new relationship between the city of Barcelona and the mountains of Collserola, recently declared as a Natural Park. Thus, the idea that many of us had been promoting for some time was consolidated: in addition to being a maritime city, Barcelona is also a city with mountains. As obvious as the statement may seem, it had never crossed over into our city’s urban policy. The Barcelona side of Collserola, which had been the setting for historically fragmented urban growth that lacked a global vision, was one of those unregulated outlying areas that are so common in contemporary cities. With the Gates to Collserola competition, Barcelona acknowledged this area; similarly to what happened with the seafront, the city rediscovered the particular characteristics of its territory. It is worth noting certain similarities, as well as extremely important differences, between the now consolidated recovery of the seafront and the future reconnection of Barcelona with its mountains. First off, we need to underscore the presence of an INFRASTRUCTURE with an enormous physical impact: the ring roads (Ronda del Litoral and Ronda de Dalt). They were conceived in a context of poor planning definition, which had characterized Barcelona’s relationship with the sea and the mountains for an extended period of time. The careful design of these infrastructures, held up as a lesson in the design of ring roads around the world, only slightly minimized the enormous impact on the city’s potential relationships with
the territory. In the light of the proposals compiled in this book, reuniting the city with Collserola needs to address this question in a very different way from how the city jumped over the Ronda Litoral to meet the sea. The design of the infrastructures themselves and the topographical conditions for crossing the ring roads are not comparable in both cases. This is the first of the differences between the recovery of the seafront and the rediscovery of the mountainside; however, it is not the most relevant. We intend to highlight a number of significant differences, which can be listed in relation to two overarching ideas: the consolidation of the urban milieu, on the one hand, and the potential uses of the natural environment, on the other. With regard to the consolidation of the urban milieu, we are especially interested in highlighting the regenerative potential of future interventions along the edges of Collserola, contrasted with the logic of urban renewal that dominated the seafront project. The characteristics of the urban milieu, in one case and the other, are the result of a very different urban growth process over time. The recovery of the seafront in the 1980s and 1990s was based on the substitution of a largely industrial fabric, which had proven obsolete at the end of the 1970s. This is not at all the case with the Barcelona side of Collserola, where the efforts are unequivocally invested in improving the existing URBAN FABRIC. This section of the territory serves as the daily living space for more than a quarter of a million of Barcelona’s inhabitants. The city’s mountainside neighbourhoods, diverse in their morphology but hugely consolidated and with a high degree of urban development, need to participate as active agents in the transformation of this part of the city. Reuniting Barcelona with Collserola emerges as an opportunity not only for interventions on a city-wide scale, but also for improving the day-to-day living conditions of each particular neighbourhood. These improvements, according to the competition brief and the proposals that were presented, are founded on three strategies: universal accessibility, collective facilities and the renaturalisation of urban space. Among all of them, guaranteeing ACCESSIBILITY in these neighbourhoods is the most decisive due to the topographical conditions of the area. In contrast to the seafront, which provides a flat space for contemplating the seaside
45
46
ambience, Collserola is the backdrop for an active relationship between Barcelona and a mountain setting that has the potential to be enjoyed, explored and travelled through in all its depth. The future relationship between both worlds is dependent on rediscovery, conservation and consolidation of the routes that will strengthen the connections between the city and the mountains. These cross-cutting axes of relation, designed as continuous and universally accessible, need to become the link between the different existing and proposed collective activities on the Collserola mountainside. Optimizing collective PUBLIC facilitiES, true infrastructures for socialisation, is another of the future challenges for improving the quality of life in mountainside neighbourhoods. The current situation with respect to this question is paradoxical: while a large number of facilities are located in this area of the city, for the most part they have been built on a metropolitan scale, and their morphological and social integration is evidently in need of improvement. Readapting obsolete facilities, renovating buildings that have fallen into disuse and creating new facilities are tools that should be used to promote the urban regeneration of this area, paying special attention to maintaining a scale of relation that is in keeping with the existing urban fabric. The third of these strategies for improving the mountainside neighbourhoods is centred on open spaces, more specifically on planning open spaces to serve as transitional fringes between the natural environment and the urban milieu. Although these neighbourhoods border on the mountainside, many of them still suffer from remarkable deficiencies in the quality of their PUBLIC SPACE. This precarious condition can be transformed into an enormous potential through the implementation of strategies for the renaturalisation of urban space founded on the introduction of Collserola’s characteristics into the urban fabric. The urban limit condition in many of these neighbourhoods invites an exploration of new strategies in planning and designing public space which are less reliant on the standards of urban development and provisions of green areas and more attuned to Collserola’s particular landscape qualities. As such, we can conclude that an improvement in the conditions of the urban milieu in
Collserola, as in most other situations, is tied to intervening in the systems that structure the city: public space, public facilities and transportation systems. The approach, therefore, might seem largely conventional. But the novelty of the proposals presented here does not lie in the “what”, but in the “how”. Instead of providing new public facilities, the challenge here is to optimize and adapt the existing public services; in addition to guaranteeing universal accessibility to mountainside neighbourhoods, they also need to be provided with meaning and programmatic content. Rather than a standard for the urban development of public space, what Collserola needs is to truly discover and understand the potential relationships that can be established with Collserola Natural Park. It is through this discovery that the Gates to Collserola competition presents a truly meaningful contribution: the natural environment is no longer a passive element for contemplation; it becomes an active agent in ordering the urban milieu. The potential for use of the natural environment, the second formulation introduced at the beginning of this text, implies a rediscovery of its LANDSCAPES. Although Collserola is surrounded by continuous, mature and compact urban areas, it is large enough to encompass significant biological diversity and a wealth of different landscapes. Recognizing this wealth and incorporating it into all of the future interventions is part of Barcelona’s new outlook on its mountains. The idea is not just to recognize the mountains as a new public space for leisure activities and the enjoyment of nature. This new perspective on Collserola involves reintroducing the mountain’s natural attributes into the city as well. In short, the question is not to bring more people up into the park, but rather to extend the park down into the city. This new attitude becomes especially relevant when we consider farming activities, which have historically been highly present in this area of the Catalan coastal range. AGRICULTURAL USES are no longer considered contrary to or incompatible with the construction of the city. Rather, they are viewed as an added value to be preserved in our contemporary metropolis: local agricultural production, the growing sensitivity for eco-friendly production systems or the socializing, pedagogical and even formal and landscape values of agriculture are no
longer minority options and have been gaining ground among a population that is increasingly aware of this type of issues. This new attitude has been translated into specific proposals which, in addition to the inclusion of urban vegetable gardens for recreational uses, transcend the abrupt city-country dichotomy. Instead, they define transition areas between the urban milieu and the natural environment through including fields for farming in planning initiatives. The benefits of this strategy can be read through three lenses: landscape, metabolism and the social context. In the first case, when properly treated, fields for farming are elements that generate landscape units with a marked aesthetic and formal value, as we have already remarked. Secondly, farmland can provide a significant contribution to rationalizing the URBAN METABOLISM. Agricultural uses are not only potential food producers, they can also be an active part of the other cycles that constitute the series of flows in sustainable urban environments: from the production and distribution of energy to the water cycle and waste management. More and more frequently we find sustainable approaches which understand that cities cannot go on acting as mere consumers of resources. Rather, in our metropolises, we need to anticipate and plan for the generation of resources and, above all, their networked distribution. Centralized production creates evident imbalances in territories and, what is more, it requires large-scale distribution which is inefficient by definition. A more sustainable approach, based on reducing marginal cost, requires a collaborative integration of processes which, on a city-wide scale, translates into integrating cycles within the urban space itself. Finally, agricultural uses also have a noteworthy social function. In this respect, it is especially enlightening to read the conclusions of the different CITIZEN PARTICIPATION workshops that took place in February of 2012 within the framework of the Gates to Collserola competition. Although the majority of participants were residents of fully urban neighbourhoods, a large portion of their demands called for preserving Collserola’s agricultural uses and reasserted their role in social cohesion. Very often, agricultural activity becomes the initial argument for a much wider awareness on the part of residents with respect to the territory. Issues
such as recovering our (built or natural) heritage, mobility within the neighbourhoods and access to public facilities on a local scale all appear every time the residents make their voices heard. Their participation and representation in territorial management is, most definitely, one of the other challenges that – contrary to what occurred with the seafront – will be fundamental in Collserola. More than twenty years after recovering its seafront, Barcelona is taking on a challenge that is comparable in its impact and its ambition: reconnecting the city with its mountains. Despite the echoes between one challenge and the other, the characteristics of the two processes are quite different. And not only the natural environment and the urban milieu are different, but the context for the reconnection between Barcelona and its mountains is also distinct. In recent years, the Barcelona side of Collserola has shown us the limitations of traditional URBAN PLANNING. The successive changes to the Metropolitan Master Plan in this area of the city have left many issues unresolved, which, in some cases, has generated situations characterized by a lack of definition and an increasing state of neglect. Taking advantage of the current circumstances, we need to move forward by proposing new innovative tools for urban planning and territorial organization that are adapted to the new metropolitan reality, where Collserola stands as one of the most highly valued elements. The series of 111 proposals contained in this book present 10 ideas that we have only introduced here, and which are worth keeping in mind. First, these 10 questions display the differences between Barcelona’s two urban limits – the sea and the mountains – which have their own particular characteristics. Second, and more importantly, these 10 ideas serve to point out an important paradigm shift with respect to twenty years ago, in addition to revealing some of the future concerns that will be central to the challenges in the city’s urban planning. The ten chapters in the pages that follow are the initial examples of a process that will most certainly continue to develop in the years to come. Adolf Sotoca
PhD. Architect
Oscar Carracedo
Architect and Urbanist
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Naturban. Barcelona’s Natural Park. A Rediscovered Relation
In collaboration with Barcelona City Council Editors
Adolf Sotoca - Oscar Carracedo Coordination of the edition and graphic reworking Berta Garriga Coordination Barcelona City Council
Ricard Fayos Maria Sisternas Authors Antoni Alarcón, Jaume Barnada, Ramon Bosch, Bet Capdeferro, Oscar Carracedo, Carles Casamor, Andreu Esquius, Ricard Fayos, Carlos Ferrater, Ramon Folch, Teresa Franquesa, Beth Galí, Vicente Guallart, Jordi Mansilla, Josep Mascaró, Laia Mestre, Judit Requena, Maria Sisternas, Adolf Sotoca, Laia Torras, Andreu Ulied and Antoni Vives.
Graphic design spread: David Lorente - Tomoko Sakamoto in collaboration with Claudia Parra with the help of Bet Puigbò and Manuel Cuyàs Translation and proofreading Angela Kay Bunning Josephine Watson Printing Grafos SA, Barcelona All rights reserved © to the edition, Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya, 2015 © to the texts, the authors © to the translations, the authors © to the photographs, the authors © to the graphic documentation, the authors DL: B. 719-2015 ISBN: 978-84-96842-62-5 Barcelona, 2015
439
Photographs and graphic documentation Barcelona City Council, except: Collserola Natural Park, pp. 14-15
Laura Cantarella, pp. 10–11, 428-431
Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya Plaça Nova, 5 08002 Barcelona www.arquitectes.cat
Published by
In collaboration with
Urban Habitat, pp. 16-41, 170-171, 426-427
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Published by Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya