When it comes to air pollution, cities are fighting a permanent pandemic. In light of the magnitude of the problem, Barcelona architect and curator Olga Subirós recognised the urgency of addressing the climate crisis and public health emergency from an urbanistic point of view. Using Barcelona as a case study, the project Air/Aria/Aire analyses data sets to showcase the impact of air pollution from the urban scale down to the street level. An exhibition about Air/Aria/Aire, curated by Olga Subirós, will be presented at the International Architecture Exhibition 2021 in Venice, exploring the notion of air as a common good that is vital to people’s health and striving to respond to the Biennale’s theme of ‘How will we live together?’ – an even more vital question in times of coronavirus.
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Air pollution is the second leading cause of death from non-communicable diseases after tobacco smoking, according to the WHO. Worldwide, nine out of ten people breathe air that exceeds the safe limits set by the WHO guidelines. Last year’s EU report on air quality in Europe stated that air pollution “…is currently the most important environmental risk to human health”. In Europe alone, an estimated 400,000 people die every year from exposure to fine particulate matter in polluted air.
Air as a common good
In light of the magnitude of the problem, Barcelona architect and curator Olga Subirós recognised the urgency of addressing the climate crisis and public health emergency from an urbanistic point of view. Noticing the absence of any major exhibitions with a focus on these issues at the previous Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018 she decided to enter the competition to represent Catalonia in Venice in the latest edition, curated by Hashim Sarkis, which has now been postponed until 2021. A unique interpretation of the Biennale’s theme “How will we live together?”, Air/Aria/Aire acknowledges and explores the notion of air as a common good that is vital not only to live but to survive together. The spotlight has been shifted from the built environment to the void that surrounds it, a space often neglected by architects.
Urban analytics and data curation to examine complex environments
Using Barcelona as a case study, Air/Aria/Aire meticulously analyses large data sets in order to showcase the impact air pollution has on the city, from the urban scale down to street level. With 6000 cars/km2, Barcelona has the highest vehicle density in Europe. Around 500,000 cars enter and leave the city every day. Streets and parking lots occupy 60 per cent of public space. Like Madrid, the city consistently breaches EU rules on nitrogen dioxide values and has been referred to the Court of Justice because of poor air quality. To map the city for Air/Aria/Aire, Olga Subirós teamed up with the award-winning local firm 300.000 Km/s, an architecture studio specialising in the use of digital technologies to harness open data and citizen-generated data. With projects such as their Land Use Plan for Barcelona’s old city centre, they reinvented the traditional master plan with new methodologies of spatial analysis. According to the firm’s directors Mar Santamaria and Pablo Martínez, “The city will belong to those who map it”.
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Citizen participation is crucial
Traditional urban planning tools are no longer adequate for investigating and describing the complexity of our fast-changing urban landscapes. “This is why studying the city using big data and the models derived from it is invaluable to improving knowledge and, most of all, empowering citizens and allowing people to make collective decisions about their urban environments.” Data sets from the European Space Agency and weather stations as well as models established by Catalan research groups, such as an air pollution simulation by the Barcelona Super-computing Centre, Lobelia Earth’s predictive air pollution model and health impact studies by ISGlobal and the Barcelona City Council’s Public Health Agency were all used to produce the maps. Big data doesn’t necessarily tell you who uses the city. This is why the inclusion of qualitative individual data obtained through citizen participation is crucial. In addition, Air/Aria/ Aire used information gathered through initiatives such as the citizen science project xAire, where air pollution data was collected by Barcelona school children. Subirós also mentions the importance of grassroots movements such as Recuperem la Ciutat (Let’s Reclaim the City) and Eixample Respira (Eixample Breathes) to raise public awareness.
The unequal distribution of vulnerability and impact
Air pollution and public health in general have been subject to an intense public debate since the coronavirus outbreak forced us to reconsider how we inhabit our cities. A recent scientific study published in Cardiovascular Research estimates that about 15 per cent of deaths worldwide from coronavirus could be attributed to long-term exposure to air pollution. The current pandemic has been described as the crisis that exposed the fragility of marginalised groups, the social and economic divide within our society and the climate emergency. Air/Aria/Aire visualises correlations between the environmental crisis and social and spatial inequalities.
In their maps and cartographies, 300.000 Km/soverlaid the physical features of the urban fabric with the invisible characteristics of the city. “A closer look at the distribution of health data with regard to space shows us how equal levels of exposure, lead to different levels of mortality,” they explain. This phenomenon can be observed due to the different levels of vulnerability among citizen groups, depending on demographics, social and housing conditions and the urban environment. Air pollution is neither evenly distributed nor stagnant: it can disperse and shift. Nitrogen dioxide emitted in the Barcelona metropolitan area is transformed into ozone, which in turn is dispersed and can be found on the outskirts of the city and even in the Catalan countryside.
40 m2 of living space and 6 m3 of air per inhabitant
There is, of course, a long history of public health and hygiene as driving factors of urban planning. Indeed, Ildefons Cerdà’s pioneering concept for Eixample, Barcelona’s 19th century urban extension, envisaged a green city full of fresh air and light. But the district fell victim to an unregulated housing market and property speculation. Now one of the neighbourhoods most affected by air pollution, Eixample’s percentage of green spaces decreased from 30 per cent to 0.6 per cent over time. Its original planning principles, set by Cerdà to optimise the size and proportions of housing blocks and units, envisaged a minimum provision of 40 m2 of living space and 6 m3 of air per inhabitant.
Designing space, and specifically public space, using the concept of three-dimensional volumes measured in m3 instead of m2 is an important shift in perspective, required to successfully design the urban environment and guarantee the essential right to breath clean air, stresses Subirós. So, how exactly can we redefine the relationship between urban design and public health? In recent months, we have seen pop-up bike lanes appearing in cities all over the world. Parking spaces have been converted to outdoor terraces, and streets closed to traffic. Paris has introduced the concept of the 15-Min-City, while Barcelona is accelerating the implementation of its Superblocks. The research institute ISGlobal predicts that a rollout of all 503 of the initially planned Superblocks could prevent 667 premature deaths every year and lead to an annual economic savings of 1.7 billion euros. Ambient Nitrogen Dioxide pollution could be reduced by up to 24 per cent. Yet, Subirós argues, “We need more ambitious measures that include congestion charges and traffic-free zones and a faster implementation of other measures described in our research.”
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“Modify the relationships that the city has with its urban area in order to ensure an environmental balance”
Though Barcelona has just launched a 10-year-plan to introduce new green spaces and turn one in three streets in the Eixample district into green zones, the proposal will neither sufficiently alleviate the public health crisis nor reduce traffic significantly, Subirós suggests. Moreover, factors of urban morphology like the street canyon effect or the radical need of a mixture of uses have not been taken into account. Air/Aria/Aire introduces twelve measures to help reorganise the city and “modify the relationships that the city has with its urban area in order to ensure an environmental balance”. These measures include the elimination of traffic, the expansion of the public transport network and promotion of sustainable mobility, the reduction of parking spaces and the creation of new public green spaces to mitigate heat island effects. Another key factor is the creation of mixed-use neighbourhoods to counteract the decentralisation of workplaces.
Urban density and the control of new uses is up for discussion
Urban density and the control of new uses – also a hot topic since the current pandemic started – is up for discussion, as some areas will have to be deurbanised and desaturated, while others can still be densified. Last-mile delivery is another aspect that will play an important role. The demand for home delivery is increasing rapidly and much of the traffic on our streets is generated by the supply of goods, which can be addressed through a consolidation of the distribution within the city and public management of the system. The last measure reacts to the housing crisis Barcelona is experiencing, which often exacerbates inequality and health issues. Poorly ventilated flats, ill-fitting, leaky windows, bad insulation and furnishings can all harm the health of people inhabiting such spaces. The upgrading of flats and provision of equal access to high-quality housing are therefore two of the most signification actions to undertake.
Bringing health to the forefront
Air/Aria/Aire presents a vision of a more citizen-centred, equal city. Due to its focus on public health and local action, it delivers a more tangible strategy for combating climate change while at the same time creating a sense of urgency. The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that quick and radical action is possible. Olga Subirós hopes the maps and planning tools created with Air/ Aria/Aire can be a catalyst for change both within the architecture community and the local administration.
Through the exhibition, she aims to reach the wider public on a more emotional level with a multi-sensory installation. “The longer you work on this project,” she concludes, “the more activist you become.”
Read the full text in topos 113 – urban mutations.
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Digital Talk on Air Pollution vs. Healthy City
Join our digital talk on 1 Feb 2021 on “Air Pollution vs. Healthy City – Urban data for new challenges: The project Air/Aria/Aire”
What kind of solutions do the project Air/Aria/Aire offer in regard to the climate emergency and public health crisis? What role do architecture and urban planning play in this context? How can we use Big Data to improve city life, empower citizen and make our cities more liveable, healthier, greener and more equal? Join the talk on 1 Feb at 6.30 p.m. and learn from architect and curator Olga Subirós; Co-founder of 300,000 Km/s and urban planner Mar Santamaria; Carolyn Daher from ISGlobal and landscape architect Sigrid Ehrmann.
How to join? Click here to register.
With mobility from a gender perspective and climate action in mind, and on the occasion of World Bicycle Day on June 3, Metropolis – the global network of major cities and metropolitan areas – is organising an online meeting with mobility experts to address mobility management and planning at the metropolitan level.
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In the current pandemic it seems that mobility is synonymous with contagion, especially in densely crowded urban spaces. Walking or cycling re-emerge as the healthiest, most sustainable andequitable mobility options that, in addition, favor the so-called “social distancing”. Now, in the vast metropolitan areas around the world, with movements between neighborhoods and to peripheral municipalities, the reality is that the networks of public transport, cycling and pedestrian systems reveal shortages in comparison to daily educational, work and mobility of care requirements, according to the latest report from the World Association of the Major Metropolises (Metropolis): “Rights and claims for metropolitan mobility”.
At least on Bicycle Day we have to ask ourselves: For whom does the infrastructure work?
From Dakar or Lisboa, passing Berlin or Delhi, to São Paulo or Montreal, we find diverse metropolitan transport systems that have been designed principally to cover work mobility, without considering that direct trips for work reasons do not represent the movements of the majority of the people.
Women are the population group with the highest mobility rate
To give just one example, the so-called mobility of care – which covers travel related to household management and maintenance such as errands and daily shopping, as well as all travel undertaken to care for dependent persons – represents the highest percentage of trips and is mostly done by women. On average, mobility of care represents nearly 40% of trips in large metropolises, compared to 20% work-related mobility (the rest is distributed between travel for study, leisure and personal affairs), according to the aforementioned report. Moreover, 29-to-49-year-old women are the population group with the highest mobility rate, for reasons related to caring for children and dependents. Walking or cycling can therefore only address internal accessibility to the municipality or neighbourhood. However, access from the peripheries to the vital activities located in metropolitan centres would very likely require mechanised transportation.
Public transport has been restricted due to the pandemic
What is more, the situation is compounded in the context of a pandemic like COVID-19, since most of the essential work in cities – in hospitals, care homes, cleaning and food services – is done by women. Public transport has also been restricted due to the pandemic, impacting the subsistence of women informal workers who live on the outskirts of cities and for whom accessible and safe public transit is their livelihood.
More bicycles less gas emissions
“At the level of the metropolitan area and its far-flung municipalities, therefore, it is crucial to rely on public transport networks with affordable, accessible and nonpolluting mechanised mobility services”, asserts Floridea Di Ciommoa, an economist and urban analyst with expertise in equity and transport, inclusive technology and sustainable logistics. And, we emphasize the sustainable aspect since, statistics show that at the global level, transport is responsible for 23% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Sustainable Development Goals
With mobility from a gender perspective and climate action in mind, and on the occasion of World Bicycle Day on June 3, Metropolis, with the support of the International Organisation for Public Transport (UITP) and the City Council of Barcelona, is organising an online meeting with mobility experts to address mobility management and planning at the metropolitan level, advocating for sustainable, affordable and inclusive mobility that leaves no one behind, especially in these times of crisis, and that contributes to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of vital importance to the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.
More bicycles more quality of life for citizens
There is an urgent need to make major cities and metropolises find new ways to manage complexity, increase efficiency, reduce expenses and improve quality of life. This is where metropolitan governance comes into play: establishing a modern, metropolitan, multilevel and intersectoral governance that responds to the plurality of visions and needs, such as a gender perspective, in the process of project design and development, constitutes the most powerful framework to conceive more sustainable, safe and inclusive metropolises that offer a better quality of life for citizens.
The webinar “Commuting across metropolises” is open to anyone and completely free. It will take place on June 3, 2020, from 11:00 to 12:00 (CET), and will be held in English.
Click here for more information and for participating.
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World Cycling Day is celebrated on June 3: It was adopted on April 12, 2018 as an official UN day of awareness of the social benefits of bicycle use.
After the announcement was made, General Secretary Bernhard Ensink of the European Cyclists’ Federation announced that cycling has social, economic and environmental benefits and brings people closer together. He went on to say that the UN Declaration was a recognition of the contribution of cycling to the 17 UN goals for sustainable development. (Source: wikipedia.org)
International incentives for cycling
bike to work is an annual participatory campaign in Switzerland to promote cycling and health in companies. The campaign takes place in May and June and aims to encourage commuters to use their bikes more often on their way to work. To motivate all participants who cycle more than 50% of their way to work, prizes worth over CHF 100,000 are raffled off. bike to work is a campaign run by Pro Velo Schweiz. (Source: wikipedia.org)
More safety for cyclists
Cities must create plans for a safer situation on the streets. The number of people who have died in a bicycle accident is still far too high. The Ride of Silence was launched to draw attention to this fact and also to commemorate the road deaths. It is an annual cycling event that takes place in the manner of Critical Mass, but the cyclists ride in silence.
The participants are mostly dressed in white. The parade goes to places of misfortune marked with white painted bicycles (ghost bikes) and holds a minute’s silence there.
The first Ride of Silence was held in 2003 in Dallas, Texas. Since then, the Ride of Silence has been held every year on the third Wednesday in May. In 2015 Rides of Silence took place in 340 cities in 20 countries worldwide. (Source: wikipedia.org)
Faced with the current situation, the Scientific Committee of the 11th International Landscape Biennial of Barcelona has decided to extend the deadline for submitting projects until the 30th of June.
The Rosa Barba International Landscape Prize, by Fundació Banc de Sabadell, integrated into the International Biennial of Landscape Architecture, will take place in Barcelona, on the next 30th September to 1st and 2nd October 2020.
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After closing the submission of landscape and planning projects, created around the world from 2015 to 2020, the International Jury will select 7-11 finalists.
The winner and finalists will present their projects during the symposium that will take place on the 1st October 2020. The projects selected by the International Jury will be published in the catalogue of the 11th Biennial, displayed on the Rosa Barba Prize exhibition by Fundació Banc Sabadell and published on this web under Biennial ATLAS tag.
For more information click here.
The Catalan architecture and landscape studio SCOB completed a remodeling project for the historic city center of Ódena, located near Barcelona. The project is based on a new structure that organizes and defines the public space according to criteria of simplicity and formal clarity – while still referring to history and heritage.
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From road crossing to meeting point
Prior to its remodeling, Ódena’s Plaza Mayor was actually not a square at all, but simply a central space where the six main streets that intersect the old city center met and converged.
To reverse the image of a road junction where cars were the protagonists and left only the remaining urban spaces to pedestrians, the project team extended a uniform stone paving throughout the entire area. This surface material does not specialize or delimit, but instead joins all the spaces of the square into one that allows people to move easily, safely and with priority over vehicles.
To resolve important level changes and achieve areas with softer slopes for use as meeting places (mainly in front of the Church and the City Hall), a common system is used that is deployed throughout the area in the form of stands or stairs. These new places, in turn, become shared benches, playgrounds, meeting spaces and meeting points. The result is a continuous public space, well connected and essentially devoid of obstructions, ready to become the stage upon which a renewed urban community life is projected.
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A legacy that remains
The town of Òdena is located on the border between two geological formations comprising clay and marl. The encounter between them is beneficial to the presence of chalk, a material that characterizes the geology of the place. This mineral, with its typical grey-whitish hues, is employed as a reference to the town and its close links to landscape, history and social development. The project features white lines that create partitions within the uniform paving that spreads across the plaza. They also emphasize the color scheme, symbolizing and enhancing the meaning the town has possessed for generations. As a result, the town now has its own representative memorial space at the Plaza Mayor.
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Guidelines for future public spaces
The economic situation of small towns such as Òdena does not allow them to devote many resources to the maintenance of public space. Once they obtain a subsidy or other help to carry out a project, they must ensure that the desired functionality, the quality of the materials, the proposed technical solutions and their implementation are as successful as possible, in order to ensure use, durability and low maintenance costs.
The commission, therefore, not only included providing a solution for the plaza as a central and symbolic element of the town, but also developing a system of interventions in the public space (pavement, furniture, lighting, trees, facilities, etc.) that could extend, in the future, to other streets within the urban core.
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Project: 2013
Work: 2017-19
Authors: SCOB. Sergi Carulla and Oscar Blasco
Location: Ódena. Barcelona.
Data: 5,100 m2, 1,186,481.16 €
Promoter: City Hall of Ódena
Team: C. Ruiz, S. Sana, G. Yubero, A. Montesinos, M. Usai
Surface: 5.100m2
Photography: Adrià Goula
Throughout history people have devoted their lives to their city, from Tony Wilson sparking a cultural renaissance in his native Manchester to activists of the Austrian Socialist Party laying down their lives to protect their social houses from the fascist tide.
The city of Manchester was forever changed by the establishment in 1978 of Factory Records, the record company behind Manchester bands Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays, as well as the Haçienda, one of the clubs which brought acid house and rave culture to the UK during the Second Summer of Love. One man was integral to Factory’s founding: Tony Wilson. Born in Manchester, Wilson went to university in Cambridge but came back shortly after he finished, with an eye to bringing creating a new cultural situation in his hometown, which was at that time still reeling from the decline of traditional heavy industry.
Wilson had a big ego, but as the brilliant biopic 24-Hour Party People shows, he was never really in it for his own personal enrichment. The deals Factory struck with its bands were bad from a business point of view (50/50 split in profits, with the bands owning the rights to the songs) and his steadfast refusal to close the loss-making Haçienda in the years before rave caught on are testament to his priorities. Wilson died of a heart attack in 2007, well before his time, but the Mancunians who lined up to praise their native son proved he had already become more than worthy of the nickname “Mr Manchester”.
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Ildenfons Cerdà’s radical urban plans
Wilson’s contribution to Manchester puts him alongside a long line of people who have devoted their lives to their city. Such commitment can take many forms. Take for instance Ildefons Cerdà, the radical urban planner who designed the Eixample neighbourhood, the 19th-century “extension” of Barcelona. Pioneering for its time, Cerdà’s plan was characterized by long straight streets, a strict grid pattern crossed by wide avenues, and square blocks, all of which remain hallmarks of the Barcelona so many people flock to today. Cerdà spent his whole life trying to push through his radical plan, and yet he died penniless, having never been paid for his massive contribution to his city.
Burghers of Calais
The same spirit of sacrifice can also be taken even further, with many people throughout history demonstrating their willingness to lay down their lives for their city. Perhaps the most famous instance of this is the burghers of Calais, six noblemen of the city of Calais who, in 1346, are said to have given themselves up in order to save the rest of the city from starvation, after the forces of Edward III of England had lain siege to the city. The French sculptor Auguste Rodin immortalised this apocryphal story in his “Burghers of Calais” sculpture. Completed in 1899, copies of the sculpture stand in twelve cities across the world as a symbol of civic pride and sacrifice.
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Activists of the Austrian Socialist Party
A more recent expression of this can be found in Vienna in 1934, when activists of the Austrian Socialist Party died valiantly trying to defend the remarkable transformation their party had brought about in the city. Perhaps their biggest contribution in the years prior to the civil war was a massive house building programme, so it’s fitting that the activists used some of the most impressive and imposing housing blocks as defensive fortresses during the fighting, eventually making their last stand at the beautiful Reumann Hof, named after Vienna’s first socialist mayor Ernst Reumann. A plaque remains at the block to this day, commemorating the activists who died defending the revolution they had initiated in their city.
People’s loyalty to their city
A city’s success is always the product of a lot of other things that are outside any one citizen’s control. Manchester was primed for the kind of cultural renaissance it saw in the early 1980s, Barcelona actually benefitted from the fact that Cerdà’s rigid plans were never fully realised, the Burghers of Calais were probably out to save their own skin, and with or without their last stand, the houses in Vienna remained all the way through the period of fascism and are still standing to this day.
But still, it’s nice to hear about these moments of civic sacrifice, if only to realise how loyal people can be to their city.
This year’s slogan of the International Landscape Biennial, “Performative Landscapes”, emphasizes the need to create landscapes which face today’s threats, playing ecological, social and political roles at the same time. The event, the 10th in a row, was organized by the Catalan Architects Association and the UPC University and took place in Barcelona from 25th to 29th September.
What does „Performative Landscape“ mean? The ‘Rosa Barba Prize’ Jury had chosen nine landscape projects from around the world, either already built or only planned and designed, but all of them created between 2013 and 2018 to answer to this question. Finally, the Rosa Barba Prize went to Landslag from Iceland for the Saxhóll Crater Stairway.The company has participated in many winning proposals in architectural competitions and has gained much experience in large-scale landscape design under the harsh Icelandic circumstances.
Stairway to heaven
Saxhóll is a 45 meter high volcanic, oval-shaped crater. It rises up from the moss-covered lavafields in Snæfellsjökull National Park on the Snæfellsnes peninsula West Iceland. The walk to the top of Saxhóll follows a path that was formed through time by visitors climbing the easiest way to the top. With the fast growing numbers of visitors in recent years the hillside´s loose and materials were beginning to deform and the way up was already splitting into parallel and deformed paths. In 2014 a decision was made to step in with an intervention to prevent further damage to the vulnerable landscape. A stepping path made of black steel was built in units to stabilize the path. It consists of two curves meeting halfway uphill in a small resting spot with a little bench. The total length of the path is 160 meters and the number of steps is 396. The path was completed in 2016 and the surface of the black steel rusted quickly and blended well into the red shades of the volcanic crater and the arctic vegetation. The result is that almost every visitor now stays on track. On social media the path is often named „the stairway to heaven“ or „the orange stairway“.
topos had the opportunity to talk to Landslag landscape architect Þráinn Hauksson about the winner’s project.
You are the winner of the Rosa Barba Prize – How would you describe your project “Saxhóll Crater Stairway” and what is so special about it?
Our project is a simple stairway winding its way up the hillside of a 40 meters tall crater shaped like an oval. It creates a kind of “infinity walk” as there is always something new around the bend. The 1,5 meters wide stairway is made of units 3 meters in length that are connected like a chain or a necklace along the hillside. I guess our project is special in its simplicity and, if I may say, beauty.
How did you approach the crater and the surrounding landscape?
We studied the crater´s topography very thoroughly and especially traced the existing path up the hillside that was rather worn out. Our approach was to make as minimal an impact on the landscape as possible, but still create something safe and solid. We wanted the project to blend in with the colours of the lava stones and the alpine vegetation.
What was the biggest challenge you faced when creating the stairway?
The biggest challenge was to make sure the calculations for the gradings and the curving of the pathway were correct and would lead to the correct amount of units. We surveyed the crater with a drone. That was a first for us. And we weren’t certain how accurate that would be. But it all worked out in the end.
Iceland has a very special landscape – how do you cope with the harsh Icelandic circumstances, when it comes to realizing landscape architecture projects?
Most of our work is situated in urban settings and established with quite similar methods and results as in other nordic countries. But when we work in the open landscape and in the natural environment, it becomes a different thing. We have to take into account the strong forces of nature and, not least, the weather. This calls for strong and durable solutions. We approach our work in the countryside with great respect for the landscape and experience feelings of both excitement and anxiety while doing so.
What does Landslag EHF stand for?
Landslag stands for respect for the natural and cultural environment and creativity for the benefit of the people within the urban environment.
What was the first thought that came into your mind when you realized that the Rosa Barba Prize is now yours?
I took me quite a while to realize. I felt a bit like a thief who had taken something that someone else had deserved. All the other finalists presented fantastic projects. But very soon the feeling changed into appreciation, pride and joy. And I thought that this achievement was priceless, for my team and the profession of landscape architecture in Iceland.
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The finalist projects were:
Linear Park, Cuernavaca Railway
Ciudad de México (Mexico),
Gaeta-Springall Arquitectos
Saxhóll crater ladder
Reykjavík (Iceland),
Landslag ehf
Remodeling of the Tel Aviv seafront promenade
Tel Aviv (Israel),
Mayslits Kassif Architects
Open spaces and project of the historical park of Sacca Sessola
Venice (Italy),
CZ Studio associati
Performative and Transformative: Quzhou Luming Park
Beijing (China),
Turenscape
Cohabitation landscapes
Athens (Greece),
DOXIADIS+
Outdoor Museum of San Michele in Gorizia Karst
Camorino (Italy),
Studio Paolo Bürgi
Proposal by Jiahe River Country Park at the risk of urban flooding
Haidian District (China),
Beijin Foresty University
Halle Pajol, garden Rosa Luxemburg
Paris (France),
InSiTU
The members of the jury were:
Gary R. Hilderbrand – Landscape architecture professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design and FASLA.
Walter Hood – Professor and former director of Architecture of the Landscape in the University of California, Berkeley, and director of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, CA.
Kathryn Moore – President of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) and Full Professor Landscape at the University of Birmingham City University, UK.
Teresa Moller – Landscape architect and founder of the firm Teresa Moller Asociados 27 years ago.
Michael Jakob – Professor at HEPIA and at HEAD in Geneva, Switzerland. Professor at the Grenoble University, France. He is the founder and director of the magazine COMPAR(A)ISON.
Bees are humming and butterflies are flying between the green sea of leaves, vegetables and flowers. It is hard to believe we are in one of Europe’s densest cities – in Barcelona.
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Only 18 months ago this thriving community garden Hort de la Font Trobada was abandoned wasteland. Now 90 families and 11 entities cultivate their plots with an estimated 200 people sharing and enjoying the gardens. ‘Do you want some tomatoes? We have seedlings from Galicia!’ someone shouts while filling the watering can at the Font Trobada, one of the local fountains which gives the garden its name.
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Nestled between the suburb of Poble Sec and Montjuïc mountain, the area with its natural fountains was used as agricultural land since the 15th century, and later became a popular spot for weekend excursions. Much of the 20th century the mountain was covered by barracas – informal settlements – until major development set in for the Olympic games. The gardens and fountains disappeared until the city council granted a petition for a self-managed community garden and recovered the Font Trobada before handing the land to the community association.
The agricultural practices in the community garden are strictly ecologic and based on the Parades en Crestall method from Mallorca, an efficient method to cultivate small plots of land in hot climate areas in which constant moisture is achieved through a thin layer of humus topsoil and foliage density.
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Next to food production and ecology, the community garden has a strong social and pedagogical focus. Members of La Rimaieta and El Petit Molinet, two self-organised family childcare centers active in the garden, explain how important it is for children and adults to get their hands dirty, connect with the community through collaboration, share food and experiences, create knowledge and learn about the growing process. This is how through collective effort, a green oasis has emerged to escape the city life and be amongst butterflies and bees.
