300.000 km/s participates in the ‘Dream the City’ exhibition with a video featuring Mar Santamaria, Pablo Martínez and Ana Badenas.

“Dream the City” exhibition is an initiative by Palau Robert, a centre affiliated with the Directorate-General for Dissemination of the Ministry of the Presidency. Curated by the architect Roger Subirà, it will be open to visitors between 22 March and 11 June. The idea came about due to a series of conversations in difficult post-pandemic circumstances. The aim was to give a voice to a series of discourses in various knowledge areas capable of generating optimism.

The piece by 300.000 km/s is included in Room 4 and explains how new technologies can help understand cities and inform urban planning.

Students of the Master in Data Design show in the exhibition ‘shhh…’ their project of the same name, which is structured around unpublished data on the conflict of noise pollution in Barcelona. ‘shhh…’ visualizes this problem, considered the second most harmful environmental factor for health in Europe, after air pollution, according to WHO data.

The students have developed this work within the framework of the course “Data for the common good”, directed by the architect and exhibition curator Olga Subirós, with the collaboration of the urban planning agency 300,000 km/s. The exhibition is framed within the Model Festival 2023, Barcelona’s festival of architecture, as a space for reflection and celebration.

‘shhh…’ is a multisensory experience that invites visitors to reflection and public debate in order to demand public policies that enable a healthy acoustic environment. The data collected in the project are presented in different audiovisual, sound and graphic formats, such as radar graphics or sound installations. All of them have been obtained from the Barcelona City Council network and from citizens’ complaints to the Guardia Urbana for excessive noise.

With the aim of bringing knowledge about noise pollution to citizens, the exhibition seeks a more critical spirit in citizens through data from the year 2022 of noise levels in Barcelona. The exhibition opens on April 20th and can be visited until June 9th at the Agora hall of Elisava.

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Air/Aria/Aire is an exhibition presented by the Institut Ramon Llull as part of the collateral events of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. The project reflects on the Biennale’s central theme, “How will we live together?”, with an investigation into air as a common good that must be preserved to survive collectively. The exhibition highlights the role of architecture and urbanism in the context of two interconnected global crises: climate change and the public health crisis.

The curatorial project presents urban research commissioned to 300,000 Km/s and musical research commissioned to Maria Arnal and John Talabot. Both investigations are transformed into an exhibition, conceptualized and designed by Olga Subirós, which proposes an immersion in the radical experience of air pollution through a large multisensory installation.

Catalonia in Venice – Air/Aria/Aire starts with the study of the city based on the application of new digital technologies for the analysis of massive data, understood as a valuable tool for citizen empowerment and for architects designing more sustainable, healthy, and equitable  cities.

The exhibition and accompanying media outlets, such as publication, podcasts, and workshops focus on data analysis in the service of citizenship and identify actions aimed at rethinking urban design and the need for access to this open data.

The project was and continues to be particularly relevant in the context of the health crisis caused by air pollution, which according to the WHO is responsible for 7 million premature deaths per year. Numerous studies have linked air pollution to a higher incidence of Covid-19 cases in urban areas, a fact that supports the right to breathe clean air on which this proposal is based. Epidemics have always been an opportunity to accelerate the introduction of urban planning measures aimed at improving health in cities. This new public health crisis, together with the air pollution crisis and the climate crisis, pushes the need to adopt new sustainable and healthy urban planning measures supported by an interdisciplinary, collaborative, and participatory model mediated by data.