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A little follow-up about the idea that denser urban environments need a much more careful design and how it can be achieved.
Many years ago I visited "La Mina" neighborhood in Barcelona, as part of an urban planning cours study trip with the University of Sant Cugat del Valles
Many years ago I visited "La Mina" neighborhood in Barcelona, as part of an urban planning cours study trip with the University of Sant Cugat del Valles
"La Mina" is a typical post-war social housing complex, with all the related problems of criminality, exclusion, poverty and social segregation, especially because it was intended to house mostly gypsies**
**but only the US has segregation and racial issues, they say
**but only the US has segregation and racial issues, they say
When a political decision was taken at the regional level to improve social housing estates, there was a huge debate between planners and activists about how to implementi it in the specific case of La Mina: demolish all the crumbling towers, just improve the public spaces, etc.
But to make the transformation economically viable and break the sense of spatial segregation, the planners and the city decided instead to bring new people in, building new housing in the empty space typical of these modernist complexes + making room with selective demolition
Not everybody agreed with this approach, as it was seen as another way to allow even more speculation during the booming mid-2000s, in a part of the city, the Forum, under rapid transformation. But the plan finally was approved after an intense public participation process.
The money generated by the new development were used to pay for a complete renewal of the social housing stock and, even more importantly, for a massive makeover of the public space and the construction of new facilities (schools, a library/community center) within the n'hood
Another main point of the intervention was the creation of a new "Rambla", a linear public space typical of Barcelona, cutting through the whole neighborhood and carrying a branch of the trambesos tramway network, physically connecting the isolated Mina with the surround areas
The Rambla de La Mina is only the spine of a more diffused improvement of public spaces that PRECEDED and ACCOMPANIED the densification process, to materialize immediately the physical benefits of bringing new people in.
That strong attention to the quality of public spaces everywhere in the city, but specifically in the peripheral disadvantaged areas, is the materialization of a longtime strategy for urban quality that Oriol Bohigas summarized as "monumentalizar la periferia"
The Barcelona everybody praises today for its high quality public spaces or ideas like the Superillas was a dense but very quality-less environment. While it's getting more dense in terms of buildings, the continuous investment on public spaces made it a much better place overall
And this is not just La Mina: I visited many less known interventions, always accompanied by planners, designers and city officials, but in every case the design of the public space is an integral part of the city transformation process, like the Poble Nou plan, Terrassa, etc.
That kind of outcome (dense but very livable) needs a planning process more similar to design than management, that is : based on an overall idea of the city, not the building by building, little project by little project that prevails in NA with no overall public guidance.
