Cooperation

The UIC Barcelona School of Architecture aims to offer subjects with a clear commitment to society, both on its Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture and on its Master’s programmes. For this reason, we offer compulsory Cooperation I and Cooperation II subjects to 4th year students.

The Master’s Degree in International Cooperation: Sustainable Emergency Architecture, part of the Erasmus Mundus Urbano consortium, is an advanced master’s degree programme that prepares architects to develop and rebuild communities affected by rapid urbanisation, poverty, conflict and natural disasters. It is delivered jointly by four European universities: Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU-Darmstadt) — as the coordinating university for the consortium—, Université Pierre Mendès France (UPMF), the Universita degli Studi Roma Tour Vegata and the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture.

UIC Barcelona helps build a children’s park in the area of Peru devastated by the coastal El Niño

Students from the Official Master’s Degree in International Cooperation: Sustainable Emergency Architecture took part in an international workshop aimed at restoring public spaces in the town of Pedregal Grande (Peru), an area devastated by the flooding of the Piura River during the coastal El Niño phenomenon over two years ago.

The workshop was organised in cooperation with the University of Piura with support from NGOs that have been active in the region since 2017. The aim was to develop a pilot project to restore a public space in El Pedregal. Together with local authorities and residents, the decision was made to construct a children’s play area as an initial step towards creating the so-called “Parque de la Memoria del Niño Costero”, a park to remember the victims of the coastal El Niño event.

The 26 students from UIC Barcelona worked hand in hand with 14 architecture students from the University of Piura (Peru) and five students from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology-RMIT (Australia). “Before travelling to Piura, we worked with our students to analyse the area’s territorial system and ecological conditions, mobility and accessibility criteria and socioeconomic reality”, explained Carmen Mendoza-Arroyo and Raquel Colacios, director and assistant director of the master’s programme.

The final project involved building a children’s “parkrefuge” with recreational equipment designed to promote the psycho-motor activity of the boys and girls from El Pedregal, while also creating a highground refuge as part of a hypothetical evacuation route.

Architecture students submit plans to improve accessibility to Montjüic for the neighbourhoods surrounding the mountain

Students from the Master’s Degree in International Cooperation: Emergency Sustainable Architecture took part in a local workshop, whose main objective was to transform Montjüic into a more inclusive and diverse green infrastructure for the city of Barcelona. The workshop forms part of the master’s degree’s academic programme and is inspired by the objectives outlined in the Montjüic Action Plan (20192029) developed by Barcelona Regional. The workshop was led by Carmen Mendoza Arroyo, director of the master’s degree; assistant director, Raquel Colacios and lecturers Marta Benages and Apen Ruiz.

Thanks to this initiative, students had the chance to work on the ground and devise plans to improve accessibility for the many neighbourhoods that border Montjüic. “Montjüic has become a tourist attraction thanks to its museums, gardens and the facilities and stadium built for the Olympic Games in 1992. However, these urban design projects that were launched as a marketing strategy to help the city to grow, have accentuated the economic and physical gap and overlooked the possibility of more egalitarian urban developments that take the adjacent neighbourhoods into consideration”, explain Carmen Mendoza and Raquel Colacios.

Students presented their proposals later on and outlined the barriers, spatial vulnerabilities, facilities and cultural and civic activities they had detected along four routes leading into the Montjüic park. In response, they proposed a series of strategies that would allow for greater connectedness between the city and the mountain.