This September issue of A+U is devoted to new technologies in urban science and their applications in settings that range from the aesthetics of urban spaces to participatory democracy and public health. Edited by Yuji Yoshimura, It includes some of the projects developed by 300.000 Km/s such as Mercè, Geographies of the Lockdown, Nocturnal Landscapes, Ciutat Vella Land-Use Plan and Air/Aria/Aire -that explore how these technologies will change the ways in which architects shape urban spaces.
These and other projects from Barcelona, which has been at the forefront of using these new tools at the municipal level, are presented alongside recent efforts in the United States and Japan, covering not only “the physical aspects of cities”, but also “the systems and public-private platforms that have made them possible, and how cities can consider the issue of privacy.” We discover how information can be gathered, visualized, and used as a communication and design tool to plan a livable city, often with the government and citizens in partnership.
“(…) Precisely, this same public space that has been one of the vectors of Barcelona’s transformation (also from the economic point of view as it has generated capital gains) become inaccessible during Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. The sudden lack of public space reduced the health environments of many citizens to tiny, poor quality and highly saturated homes -depicted in the cartographies Geographies of the lockdown. This pandemic scenario revealed how that common thing, with which we have endowed ourselves with services and value, was not yet a right. Public space, as a separate environment to the domestic space, was not recognized. Again, this situation puts Barcelona’s urban model in crisis: a paradigm where urban growth is based on the construction of a common space which citizens have not had the right to use when they most needed it.
From nocturnal landscape, noise-based regulation or air pollution consequences to defining liveability, our practice focuses on the dichotomy between form and behaviour, sustaining a long tradition of city observation and representation with casual data as a new means of expression and thinking. “