The polarisation and segregation fuelled by algorithms may end up shaping the city. AI feeds off itself and, as if it were an infinite mirror, it insists on showing us what it knows, but it does not put forward alternative models. As citizens we must learn to use it, so to prevent it from taking over our decisions.
“Getting back to the city, the reverberations of AI may end up shaping it and giving rise to a more uniform social organisation, in which errors, the unusual, the random, the spontaneous and the bizarre disappear. That the economic and social model we oppose – a model in which poverty and opulence are part of the way it works – may end up not being called into question but, on the contrary, optimised. That urban space becomes an arena for micro-targeting. These are all risks that we will have to address and be constantly on the alert for. Let us resist the pleasure of a friendly, clear and clean city. Let us look behind it. Let the city make us uneasy, both in terms of what we see in it and in terms of the trouble we have in understanding it.”
article for the catalog of "Matter Matters. Designing with the world"
“En la década de 1970, la plaza de las Glòries de Barcelona estaba definida por un un trazado viario destinado a los automóviles que la atravesaba en todas las direcciones, segregando espacios intersticiales destinados a islas verdes (y también muy marrones) en los que se esperaba que la ciudadanía encontrase un respiro de la tupida ciudad entre barreras de ruido, humo y velocidad. Probablemente en aquel momento el imaginario del futuro que se le esperaba a la ciudad fuese muy distinto al que realmente es hoy, cincuenta años después. Si hacemos un repaso rápido a la ciencia ficción o incluso a lo que algunos urbanistas dibujaron, la Barcelona del futuro debería estar repleta de coches y humo, luces de colores, pantallas gigantes y trastos voladores. Sin embargo, en la actualidad, este espacio es un enorme parque del que han desaparecido los vehículos, y donde han surgido árboles, flores y frescas sombras. El verdor se dispone por doquier a pesar de que hoy tengamos que lidiar con los primeros embates del cambio climático.
La ciudad del futuro actual que nadie imaginó es un jardín. La plaza de las Glòries, también sede del Disseny Hub Barcelona, parece exenta de tecnología: no vemos pantallas, ni luces de colores, ni mucho menos coches voladores. Tampoco los edificios parecen sacados de Nueva York, Tokyo o del Los Ángeles de Blade Runner sino de una versión más amable, menos dura, más doméstica y afable. Este nuevo trozo de ciudad, aunque no lo muestre en su piel, es el resultado del uso intenso de la computación, de las extensas redes de telecomunicaciones, de los satélites que diariamente radiografían la tierra, de la miniaturización de los componentes electrónicos (que entre otros han dado lugar a los teléfonos móviles) y de tantos otros más avances tecnológicos que han modificado como observamos y describimos el mundo a la vez que cómo decidimos y luego operamos sobre él.”
The report prepared by the Spanish Council of Architects’ Institutes, in collaboration with the group of professionals comprising the Urban Regeneration Working Group, aims to establish a consensus among industry professionals. It seeks to define what urban regeneration projects entail, as well as their evaluation, benefits, phases, and stakeholders. The document is designed to provide a foundation and support for administrations embarking on these processes for the first time, while also assisting those already engaged by addressing strategic uncertainties they may face.
Spain, with a highly aged housing stock, must rise to the challenge of updating its urban fabric. This must be done in collaboration with the citizens who live in and care for these spaces, ensuring that the efforts made to adapt to climate change also result in a more equitable society. Furthermore, this collective effort should ensure that regeneration reaches even the most neglected areas. It is urgent to accelerate the transformation and adaptation of our municipalities.
We have successful case studies from which to draw lessons, data to underpin decisions, and identified challenges to improve our legal framework and funding instruments. The necessary pieces are in place; now we must make them work together in a coordinated and synchronised manner.
We have supported the final stages of this report, integrating all perspectives, contributing and complementing information where indicated by the committee of experts, and striving to ensure that the final document broadly represents all participants while helping the content to be expressed consistently throughout.
We have provided data and case studies. We have illustrated and charted the key content. But above all, we have enjoyed shaping this book, which we hope will assist in tackling one of the greatest challenges we face in the coming years.
topics: Territories, The commons, Public space, Livability, Health
How to Design Futures with Cities?
This book collects part of the academic results of the two visiting seminars held at the School of Architecture, Civil & Environmental Engineering from EPFL (EPFL-ENAC) during the academic years 2021 and 2022. The seminar ‘Designing Futures with Cities’ (directed by Mar Santamaria and Pablo Martínez) aimed at updating the toolbox to observe, analyse, anticipate, simulate, design and evaluate urban strategies.
Today, our capacity to work with the inherent complexity of urban systems is proportional to our ability to describe them. In the last decades, this complexity has evolved along with the tools and information we use to analyse and interpret urban matter. Indeed, our capacity to address urban complexity is mainly fueled by the unstoppable datification of the world. Today, big data sets provide information about buildings, inhabitants or the characteristics and uses of public space -collected by networks of sensors, administrative procedures or the use of mobile devices.
In this context, we invited the students to embrace this way of describing the world, organising theoretical and practical knowledge acquisition to recreate realistic case studies in the city of Geneva. The seminar was organised in three main phases. Starting from the data-gathering process (including digital collection and on-site observations), the students have developed a quantified analysis and a subsequent proposal that explores a transformation scenario.
Marked by COVID-19, this period forced the students to make the home a refuge, looking abroad with a desire to socialize. At the same time, this impasse has catalysed discussions about the city and its future. This same period has fostered the construction of a critical point of view on the part of the seminar’s students, which they have evolved and grown until creating inspiring proposals for the future city expressed through cartographic and quantitative scenarios that support the yearnings for a new desired urban environment.
The present is not as we imagined
Europe is once again a continent at war, in which the countries’ tolerance for slaughter is proportional to their dependency on fossil fuels. Dramatically, energy shortages have accelerated the desired transition of our energy model in the last months. Today, fear arises not only from the possibility of frigid winters but also from increasingly severe summers both in southern Europe and the nordic countries, where they never had to face high temperatures. Climate change is present clearly and forcefully amid a geopolitical crisis.
Both crises are widening the social differences that hinder the progress of society. They benefit investors while social inequality boosts and minimum poverty levels are optimized to sustain the efficiency of consumption processes -for instance, human development has regressed this year to 2016 levels. Consequently, the reduction of emissions and the consumption of fossil fuels requires a radical change of model as improving the effectiveness of processes is already insufficient.
This profound transformation must deal with the existing. We need to understand how the current model operates to dismantle it carefully and build a novel paradigm. For the first time, we are no longer proposing to make mobility more efficient but to reduce the number of daily trips. Instead of researching how to generate clean energy, we need to understand how to consume fewer power resources. On the waste side, recycling is as important as not throwing away. Unprecedentedly, degrowth has become a way to promote human development, socially and politically acceptable.
Cities are at the centre of this transition. They host most of the world’s population while, at the same time, they are the main extractors of resources. Cities define the limits of rural areas and demand a vast layout of infrastructures that cross the territory to supply them. Over the centuries, the concentration of human life has proven to be very positive. However, today more than ever, urbanity is shifting into management problems, functional inefficiencies and undesired health impacts. (…)”
When we describe a city, we usually talk about its boundaries, the elements that compose it, the organization of its uses, the depletion of its land and the flows that take place within it. This description of anatomical nature becomes more complex and precise the more detail it can incorporate. It is an explanation that is impossible to complete, faithful to the constant changes that occur in the object being described. Therefore, in the attempt to achieve a perfect description, we are at risk of generating an exact reproduction of the city we are trying to explain – just as complex and incomprehensible.
Madrid is a dense city with a complex urban fabric, from the center to the peripheral areas with their varying intensities. This map describes the different granularities of the urban fabric based on the variability of the size of the plots, the combination of small and large dwellings, and the combination of different building qualities resulting from the coexistence of historic buildings and new constructions in a single neighborhood.
The second volume of Ildefons Cerdà’s Teoría General de la Urbanización —a work that defines urban planning as a science for the first time— includes an extensive set of statistics and property registers of Barcelona that served as a basis for the design of the city extension plan and made it possible to establish relationships between urban conditions and their impact on mortality and to argue and justify the need to expropriate a generous amount of land to make new roads. Years later, under the motto ‘survey before planning,’ Patrick Geddes introduced in Cities in Evolution the need for observation and profound knowledge of the city and the territory prior to any urban planning action. This view accepting urban planning as scientific knowledge was conditioned by the method. Later, in 1970, Manuel de Solà-Morales emphasised in La ciudad y los juegos that ‘urban planning, as a social science, suffers from the difficulties of working with an ambiguously defined body with minimal testing capacity’. The aim of this statement was to establish the need to build abstract city models based on logical and mathematical formulations that would act as laboratories of reality where acting principles would be validated and not just the result of ideological apriorisms. Although this line of work was clearly identified by Solà-Morales, he did not continue it; instead he focused his activity on the knowledge of city morphology. (…)
Probably, today the idea of diversity is what best reflects European cities and, above all, large capitals like Madrid. Cities that concentrate a diversity of urban fabrics, with buildings of different characteristics, various uses, multiple ages, qualities and densities. A diversity that is the result of complex urbanization processes that are difficult to reproduce, the result of half-applied theories, political tensions, individual ambitions or collective impulses.
This issue, guest-edited by Josep Ferrando and Marta Poch, aims to reflect on the role of the architect in the construction of the habitat and architectural thinking through its project processes.
With a scientific approach and articulated in five methods, the publication analyses the design process of up to 25 architecture studies. Each of them shares how they have to face the current context from the architecture discipline. The studios featured are: 300,000km/s, Aixopluc, Arquitectura–G, Arquitecturia, Barozzi Veiga, Anna & Eugeni Bach, Bosch Capdeferro, Carles Enrich Studio, DATAAE, Albert Faus, Flexo, Goig, Grau Casais, HARQUITECTES, López Rivera, MAIO, Mendoza Partida, Mirla, Lluís Ortega, PERIS+TORAL, Núria Salvadó, Unparelld'arquitectes, Jorge Vidal, Ferran Vizoso and Vora.
Preventive Urbanism
2022
topics: Health
Throughout this long emergency period, urban and territorial pilot projects in different countries have shown how Covid-19 has been an accelerator for those cities that already had structurally questioned livability, urban and environmental quality, quantity and quality of public space, sustainable mobility, accessibility to services and territorial welfare, acting accordingly and experimenting with new strategies, tools and interventions. It is clear now that we need to rethink the concept of what we consider “healthy,” reinterpreting that cyclical relationship between the person, the city and the environment in order to overcome different ideas of health. However, challenges in the field of urban planning and health have changed: from poor ventilation and organic waste disposal capacity as the primary reason for the spread of epidemics, to contemporary issues of air and light pollution, overexposure to noise, sedentary lifestyles, chronic diseases, overweight, stress, extreme socioeconomic inequalities. Many of these issues are directly related to urban and spatial development patterns: the auto-centric mobility paradigm, poor-quality food accessibility, excessive urban density (or extreme fragmentation), energy production and supply systems, new forms of consumption and distribution, tourism, all dynamics exacerbated by climate change, the digital revolution and possible pandemics. Today more than ever, it seems relevant to ask how cities and territories can finally address the health issue in a structural way, shifting from a curative to a preventive approach, from an idea of individual health to a collective health.
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