Landscape as infrastructure

LANDSCAPE AS INFRASTRUCTURE: Ideas for Urban transformation of Placa de les Glories as a new public node for Barcelona, Spain.

KEYWORDS

Urban landscape, Infrastructure, Urban transformation, public node, public space, open space, inner city, urban projects, residual space, Barcelona.

“Every generation reinvents the city and brings it up to date. Barcelona is not complete, nor will it ever be, because the concept of completing the city is contradictory in itself, but Barcelona is prepared to continue its process of definition”

Jordi Hereu

Mayor of Barcelona, (2006 – 2011)

OBJECTIVE | LANDSCAPE AS A STAGE AND NOT A BACKDROP

In 1964, cultural historian Leo Marx wrote the machine in the garden, which explores an inherent contradiction in American ideology of space. Free economic competition and technological progress are valued equally with the tradition of landscape pastoralism, thus Marx observed, in our landscape the machine is accommodated in the garden. Today it is fair to say that machine is not so much in the garden as it is indistinguishable from the Garden, they are inexorably intertwined2.

This paper seeks to find various possibilities of using landscape as a tool for designing residual spaces in the city of Barcelona, concentrating on one of its major urban transformation project; the redevelopment of Placa de les Glories3, to be completed in 2013. This residual space has historically resisted attempts at development. It acts like an urban void in time and space in the city’s fabric. Within this context of the new centrality, this paper questions on how landscape can become a new machinery to absorb the dynamic infrastructural flow of the city? how landscape can be thought of serving as an infrastructure? Also How can we think landscape as a glue between new urban developments within the city – a notion of new shared space.

In the case of Barcelona, where open and built spaces are well defined and the city has a strong geometric morphology, these residual spaces stands out as a deformity in the uniform texture of the city. But these deformities are not negative agents as it invites new interventions and creates opportunities for future growth. Also the outcome of these transformation could not only be made effective by construction of buildings and infrastructural systems but also by organizing sensibly the architecture of soil – the horizontal surfaces. Concentrating on horizontality rather than verticality as a conceptual idea for treating urban transformation and creating public spaces, which could be economically and culturally sustainable. Urban transformations for the city could be developed in such a way that intelligent intervention of landscape knitted with infrastructure in residual spaces can produce a positive impact for the city in multiple paradigm, and providing a meaning to new centralities within the city.

The term “ landscape, ” derived from the sixteenth - century Dutch word landschap , was originally used for the demarcation of land but has subsequently become associated with a way of seeing space from a distance. The term “ infrastructure ” has been used since the 1920s to refer to the basic physical and organizational structures such as roads, power lines, and water mains needed for the material and organizational aspects of modernity. So how can we think about merging these two fields? Or how can one be morphed into another?

Infrastructure suggests that it has to perform some kind of function. It is through this concept of functioning that we understand the way landscape should act as the stage for activities to occur, and not merely a backdrop. In order to consider landscape as infrastructure, landscape must perform and also it has to provide an output, being infrastructural, however, is also about multiuse: they must fulfill the requirements of public space and must be connected to other functioning systems of public transport, pedestrian movement, water management etc. The multiuse nature of the landscape can be defined by its secondary outcomes such as unique recreational opportunities, improved flora and fauna reserves and dynamic landscapes, and also at the same time generating interconnectedness between fragmented spaces within the city.

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INTRODUCTION | BARCELONA AND ITS URBAN TRANSFORMATION

Barcelona is now widely known for one of the innovative planning in the world. Internationally, it is celebrated for its accessible open space and walk ability. It has survived the economic, environmental and social changes of the last decades through focusing upon the provision of great urban spaces that centralize activity on a variety of scales: city, neighborhood, and within each block. In short, Barcelona has been transformed into a city that provides an example of how to facilitate increasing density while maintaining a livable and relatively compact city.

The major catalyst of the modern urban transformation of Barcelona in the eighties to the present was the 1992 Olympics. With the end of a long dictatorship known as Franquismo, the city took advantage of its new found democracy as the Urban Social Movement began. Faced with serious problems of urban decay in both inner and peripheral districts, planners used the games to gain enough funding to complete an amount of reconstruction that would take any city decades to accomplish.

Olympic facilities were built on neglected urban areas, with the Olympic Village, developed on brown fields close to the coast. The rail lines that cut and divided the city from the sea were opened and for the first time in its history, Barcelona has been able to turn and face the sea with pride. Six artificial beaches were created to handle the capacity of tourists that would be in the city for the upcoming Games. This change was championed by one planner in particular, Oriol Bohigas, who used the Games as a springboard to built more than two hundred parks, plazas, schools, and other public facilities in Barcelona. Most of these amenities were inserted into derelict areas where crime was high. In one area in particular, El Rival, buildings were retrofitted to house a modern museum, police station, and other amenities.

Public space, mobility infrastructures, major facilities, and large scale services, provide the support for operations that help to establish the city’s new structuring mechanism. These urban projects serve to supply links between less structured parts and consolidate the city’s overall centrality, gradually phasing out fragmentation. The new structuring operations come together to reinforce the system of axes and infrastructures that establish the scale for the city as a whole, with morphological resources that combine building infrastructure, open spaces and services in one urban concept.

The big infrastructures that had to intersect some parts of the city were particularly relevant. Some of them had been built in the previous years and were already separating the parts of the city at each side. Some others had remained unfinished and left big gaps impeding urban continuity. In both cases they were been seen as an opportunity to be transformed into new focal points that could gather a series of activities around new public spaces instead of being breaking points with traffic intersecting the existing city.

EXCAVATIONS | PLACA DE LES GLORIES AS A NEW CENTRALITY

“Les Glories” Place, seen as the geometric centre of the city but it never served as a central square in the city. Now Municipality of Barcelona is planning a large park. This is a very simple representation of the project. The park will give a change of scale between the streets, the large infrastructural elements and surrounding built environments. Agbar tower4 by Jean Nouvel placed near the Glories area dominates the skyline and has a powerful landmark quality. The tower act as a signage/symbol for the glories area. On the southern side of the park, MBM arquitectes has proposed a design Museum, presently under construction that marks the end point of the park and indicating the relationship between the Eixample and the square.

The realization and the transformation of the 22@5 industrial hub, the focus has shifted to the need for this urban project, which at once resolved the road junction, extends connectivity by means of an intermodal center and grants the district city status. The concept will be accentuated by imposing clear geometric lines on the park layout at – grade streets to continue the Cerda grid. Existing Urban element like housing and facilities becomes the limits of the park.

The Parc de Glories will cover almost 12 hectares, with high proportion (3.3 hectares) given over to local and citywide facilities. The creation of local facilities within this landscape will correct the deficit in surrounding neighborhoods, and public services within that area will strengthen the district role as a new centrality of the city of Barcelona. It could become a cultural nodal point.

INTERPRETATIONS | URBAN CARPET AS A NEW ORDER TO ORGANISE THE CENTRALITY

The new Urban carpet in the Glories area is a conceptual proposal and it is an interpretation and confrontation to city council’s proposal. It retains the concept of centrality and goes deeper into integrating underground infrastructural functions with the ground level of the city . It challenges the idea of city council’s green park that covers the high profile infrastructure beneath. It tries to morph the landscape into infrastructure. It also retains the memory of the existing roundabout as a void. Unlike the linearity of the wall, the void act as a nodal point. It becomes the specificity of the new proposal, such as an entrance or a vortex rising from the ground towards the city and into the sky. The void works as a sort of anchor within the larger field its part of. Lower levels of the void forms an important public space knitted with landscape features directly integrating with high speed train stations, metro station and other important infrastructural lines. Openings at the platform at the ground level allows sun penetration into the underground spaces of the station and shopping areas. The bigger void enhances the idea of public centrality and retains the conceptual memory of the place. It is like a big circular public plaza inserted into the ground that also serves as a junction for the station and connected directly to the infrastructural lines beneath.

Thus a new centrality is being created by remaining ‘voiceless’. Spaces are sculpted by going downwards or excavating the soil in order to balance the polarity between the verticality and horizontality and laying an ‘urban carpet’ that forms a collection of different public spaces in that area. It’s like providing a catalogue of different public spaces integrated into one urban composition. An idea of inserting one urban system into another. Agbar tower dominates the skyline and has a powerful landmark quality. So the idea is not to compete with it but to take another route to create urban spaces that are enclosed, contained, and acts like a vortex in the present system of traffic mobility. Proposed urban spaces will try to absorb the streamline motion and generate a sense of buffer space between eastern and western ends of the city. Suddenly the junction of the main streets becomes an important ‘public courtyard’.

The overall impact of the master plan will be a field experience, comparable to an agricultural field and within that field there is an order in composing the elements like mass and void, landscape and infrastructure, built and open spaces etc. The urban space at the city level is well connected to the underground levels with different landscaped voids. These smaller voids allows sun and landscape to penetrate inside the station from city level. Here only the vertical element is considered as array of trees planted in a linear fashion that tries to connect northern and southern part of the city – acting as glue.

These irregular voids will act as a enclosure as well as give a sense of human scale by dividing the larger field into smaller parts which can become courtyard at times and also accommodate different public functions and cultural activities. These elements also acts like objects in the landscape and It determines the spaces of places.

On the southern end of the Urban carpet, conceptually soil moves above the ground and creates five built masses and ‘in between’ spaces are used as public streets and shopping areas that connects to the northern part of the city leading to the design museum. The public buildings accommodates leisure, sports, performance and exhibition spaces and becomes a collection of ‘cultural corridors’ created between the linear buildings. Some of the blocks have been designed as social housing. These housing blocks enjoys a very strategic location and well connected to public functions in relation to new centrality.

The slanted roof of these buildings have converted into landscaped gardens, that has a view towards the northern side of the city and also they become the part of ecological conservation as rain water collectors and provide different opportunities for public usage. These blocks also serve the needs of traditional flea market and well connected to existing nearby housing areas within the existing urban context.

CONCLUSIONS | THINKING INFRASTRUCTURALLY

In Transforming such areas the city is extending into a space that is not automobile dependent and enhances walk ability . Revitalization of such abandoned inner city are as have occurred in many parts of the world, and these transformation demands close association of community processes that has developed a vision for sustainable growth of the city.

These kind of urban projects are truly infrastructural because they operate instrumentally within the city, rather than they look like infrastructure. To negotiate the disparity between landscape and infrastructure, it needs a deep understanding of historical, geographical, and economic awareness of the way in which Barcelona have constructed landscape so far.

To conceive new meanings of landscape combined with infrastructure it is important to understand that infrastructure is more a process than a form, dictated by a multitude of parameters. The success of our engagement with infrastructure lies not so much in our ability to manipulate form, but rather in our ability to establish frameworks for the organizational strategies that themselves invents form. The marriage between landscape and architecture’s apparent infrastructural impotence lie not only with the genius of capital and engineering hegemony but within their own scope of operation.

Rethinking Urbanism while trying to establish a relationship between landscape and infrastructure marks the eco-logical and engineered vision of the contemporary landscape. Foregrounding the nascent reciprocity between ecology, economy and energy in contemporary urban transformation, the potential of landscape design opens a horizon on pressing issues facing cities today to recast the infrastructural and geopolitical role of landscape as base operating system for future urbanism. Investigating the potentialities of ecology for future cities and infrastructures, the idea is to construct a clear and contemporary discourse as the field of landscape becomes the locus of intellectual, ecological and economic change of significance, globally.

So when we think landscape infrastructurally, the important argument is – do we have current cultural interest in our mind? Do we really care about cultural, civic possibilities that underlay design, and more generally, a cultural production?

If the answer is yes, within current and future discussion of landscape , the idea of infrastructure can be applied to almost anything and we have to start thinking about our contemporary landscape infrastructurally.

NOTES

1. Barcelona, Transformacion, Planes y Proyectos, edited by Ajuntament de Barcelona ( city council of Barcelona ) p.7, text from presentation by Jordi Hereu.2008

2. Gary L. Strang, Infrastructure as Landscape in Places, P.4, 1996

3. Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes most often shortened to Glòries, is a large square in Barcelona, first designed by Ildefons Cerdà to serve as the city centre in his original urban plan. But nowadays relegated to quite a secondary position. It is located in the Sant Martí district, bordering Exiample, at the junction of three of the city's most important thoroughfares: Avinguda Diagonal, Avinguda Meridiana and Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes. Currently it serves largely as a roundabout of elevated highways.

4. Agbar tower or Torre Agbar is a 38-storey skyscraper / tower located between Avinguda Diagonal and Carrer Badajoz, near Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes, which marks the gateway to the new technological district of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It was designed by French architect Jean Nouvel in association with the Spanish firm B720 Arquitectos.

5. 22@ also known as Districte de la innovació (innovation district) is the corporative name given to a business development in Barcelona's formerly industrial area of Poblenou, in the district of Sant Martí, nicknamed "the Catalan Manchester" in the 19th century. Its aim is to convert Poblenou into the city's technological and innovation district, as well as to increase leisure and residential spaces. It's still under construction, centered around Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes, is part of one of Europe's biggest urban regeneration schemes, begun during the 2000s and still ongoing, spanning 115 blocks or 198,26 ha.

6. Urban carpet is a conceptual idea for the urban transformation of Glories area, presented as author master’s thesis at Politecnico di Milano , July 2011.

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