Tag: Cerda

Barcelona’s remarkable history of rebirth and transformation. How the city grew, from pre-Christian Romans to Cerdà plan.

Barcelona is in a perfect place for a city. Humans have been settling there, according to archeological remains, as far back as 5,000 BC.

The city’s origins trace back to the Romans, who settled in the area in 15 BC and, in the first century BC, built the medieval city of Barcino. It was small, surrounded by a wall roughly 1.5 kilometers in circumference, with the characteristic Roman grid of perpendicular streets.

In these modest beginnings are already visible two characteristics that would define Barcelona’s development over the years.

First, it began, and has always remained, a bounded and compressed city, dense from its founding. First physical walls and then the limits of geography have hemmed the city in and ensured that its residents are crammed tightly together.

And second, it has always been an intentional city, closely conceived and constructed by central planners. There have been very few periods of unplanned growth in Barcelona history. Unlike so many newer cities, it has not sprawled. Each new burst of growth has been on purpose; there has always been a plan.

Over the centuries, the city has been transformed again and again at the hands of visionaries, mostly notably architect Ildefons Cerdà, still considered one of history’s great urban planners.

How Barcelona’s walls finally fell

After the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century CE, the years saw a series of conquests — Visigoths, Arabs, what have you — but they all reused the existing city.

In the Middle Ages, the city grew and became more complex, the center of a region known as Catalonia. An extended wall was built in 1260, and then in the 15th century, the wall was expanded again to encompass the new Raval neighborhood. The part of the plain outside the wall was used for agriculture to provision the city.

In 1714, the War of the Spanish Succession ended and Barcelona was on the losing side. Upon its surrender, in order to suppress any future challenge, Philip V abolished many of the city’s institutions and charters, built a fortress citadel to keep an eye on it, and forbid Barcelona to grow beyond its medieval walls.

Remarkably, the wall around the city stayed in place — hemming in a growing population and almost completely separating the city from the sea next to it — for two more centuries. By the middle of the 19th century, population density was the highest in Spain, working conditions were miserable, sewage was out of control, water was dirty, and the city was struck by a series of cholera epidemics and riots.

By 1854, when the Spanish government finally gave permission to take the wall down, it was one of the most hated structures in Europe. Townspeople immediately went at it with crowbars and pickaxes; it took 12 years to completely remove it.

Then came one of the most extraordinary and underappreciated chapters in urban design history — a chapter that, though 175 years in the past, contains many omens and warnings for Barcelona’s current efforts.

Cerdà’s utopian plan for Barcelona
As soon as the wall’s demolition was announced, plans began for an expansion of the city. In 1855, the central Spanish government approved a plan by architect Ildefons Cerdà.

Cerdà was horrified by the conditions of the working class in Barcelona and set out to make his extension of the city — the Ensanche in Spanish, or in Catalan, as the district is still known today, the Eixample — a model of orderly, clean, safe, hygienic urban living.

Two things are worth noting about Cerdà’s plan.

First, he took what was, for the time, an exceptionally holistic view of urban quality. He wanted to ensure that each citizen had, on a per capita basis, enough water, clean air, sunlight, ventilation, and space. His blocks were oriented northwest to southeast to maximize daily sun exposure.

And second, his plan embodied what is — then and today — a striking egalitarianism. Each block (manzana) was to be of almost identical proportions, with buildings of regular height and spacing and a preponderance of green space. Commerce was to take place on the ground floor, the bourgeoisie were to live on the floor above (rather than in mansions at the edge of town), and the workers were slated for the upper floors. In this way, they would all share the same streets and public spaces, exposed to the same hygienic conditions, reducing social distance and inequality.

Each 20-square-block district was meant to be largely self-contained, with its own shops and civic facilities. Hospitals, parks, and plazas were to be spaced evenly throughout the city, to maximize equality of access.

In 1859, in response to criticisms, Cerdà released a modified version of the plan, with narrower streets no more than 20 to 30 meters wides and somewhat deeper buildings, with more room for commerce. The plan was approved by royal decree in 1860.

Though Cerdà’s manzanas were (and are) criticized for their uniformity — the sameness is said to leave no room for great monuments or idiosyncratic artistry — it is just that underlying uniformity that has proven so endlessly adaptable.

The repeating structure of the blocks means that as social and economic circumstances change, old buildings can be shifted in use or ripped out, or multiple buildings combined.

Originally, each of Cerdà’s blocks was to have buildings on just two sides (sometimes three), occupying less than 50 percent of the total area, with the bulk of the interior space devoted to gardens and green space. The buildings were to be low enough (no more than 20 meters tall and 15 to 20 meters deep) to allow for almost continuous sunlight in the interiors during the day.

The goal was to combine the advantages of rural living (green space, fresh air and food, community) with the advantages of urban living (commerce, culture, free flow of goods and ideas).

Though in many ways, Cerdà’s plan won in the end — its legacy is still clearly visible in Barcelona’s Eixample — it was compromised by commercial and political considerations from the outset.

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LA ENCICLOPEDIA COMO LUGAR SIN CENTRO. PAXTON Y LA ARQUITECTURA SIN CENTRO. CERDÀ Y LA CIUDAD SIN CENTRO

Suscitaremos pocas dudas si afirmamos que la organización de un diccionario enciclopédico, en su esencia más fundamental, prescinde de un punto único de referencia. En rigor todos sus elementos, todas sus entradas son, a su vez, referencia y diferencia. La comprobación es inmediata: basta iniciar la lectura por cualquier página para ser llevados, de una definición a otra y sin solución de continuidad, a través del total de páginas que conforman el diccionario sin un orden establecido. Un viaje que, al límite, nos hace entrar en un bucle donde la única escapatoria se produce cuando se introduce, externamente, un nuevo vocablo, una nueva definición que de inmediato pierde su referencia en beneficio del sistema general. El orden es irrelevante. Sistematizar alfabéticamente las entradas no presupone ninguna ley de inteligibilidad.

A Diderot, junto a D’Alembert, debemos el moderno diccionario Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, par une société de gens de lettres (1751); un titánico esfuerzo -cuyo origen se encuentra en la Cyclopaedia de Ephraim Chambers (1728)- por agrupar todos los saberes en 17 volúmenes de texto más 11 volúmenes de láminas donde a la colaboración colectiva e interdisciplinar en su producción se suma, por primera vez, un sistema de navegación que tiende a ser recorrido por azar o por curiosidad en lugar del habitual sistema lineal.

Cien años más tarde, en 1851, se celebra la primera Exposición Universal en Londres.The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations fue visitada por 6.039.000 de personas -Londres contaba con 2.300.000 habitantes. Hector Berlioz, compositor, designado por el Ministro de Agricultura y comercio francés para servir como representante de Francia y examinar los instrumentos musicales que allí se exhibían, describe así sus impresiones:

[…] This universal exhibition, the competition of all nations, and especially the vast Crystal Place where everything is exhibited, these are wonders which I will not attempt to describe to you. […]

Allí donde todo se expone, donde nada queda por mostrar, el visitante acaba por convertirse en un objeto más de exhibición, imposible de describir su entorno. Allí se exhibirá desde el primer inodoro con cisterna, el telégrafo eléctrico, microscopios, bombas de aire y barómetros, así como instrumentos musicales, de relojería, junto a elefantes vivos, cocodrilos, toda clase de pájaros, o una colección grandiosa de gallinas.

El Crystal Palace, de Joseph Paxton, será el diccionario enciclopédico construido; un lugar del que dirán, los arquitectos del momento, «no es arquitectura. No es extraño. Basta observar el primer proyecto publicado de lo que debería ser el edifico del Crystal Palace para constatar la estricta homogeneización a la que somete Paxton el proyecto, neutro contenedor de todo lo que allí deberá ser expuesto.

Teoría General de la Urbanización, y aplicación de sus principios y doctrinas a la Reforma y Ensanche de Barcelona, es un tratado de urbanística redactado por Ildefons Cerdà (1815-76) el año 1859, declarado de utilidad pública en mayo de 1860, y publicado en diciembre de 1863. Cerdà recoge, en el tratado, la urbanística como una ciencia.

Decir que se ocupa de la urbanística como una ciencia es decir que el procedimiento que sigue en el desarrollo de su tratado es científico: observa, estructura, razona, y deduce principios que pueden ser aplicados a otros casos.

Los dos gruesos volúmenes de la Teoría General de la Urbanización comprenden, tan sólo, la primera de las cuatro partes que tenía que desarrollar:

1ª, dedicada al análisis del hecho urbano en su esencia originaria y en su desarrollo histórico, como método para «hacer comprender y tocar, si así cabe decirlo, la causa primordial de ese malestar profundo que aflige a las sociedades modernas encerrada en las grandes ciudades»

2ª, consagrada a exponer «el sistema o teoría que debería aplicarse con provecho para extirpar el mal, teoría que consiste en la exposición de los principios generales cuya aplicación habría de conducirnos a una urbanización perfecta»

3ª, encargada de «reducir la rigidez de los principios teóricos a una conveniente elasticidad que los hiciese practicables, útiles y provechosos por medio de reglas prácticas»

4ª y última parte consistente en la aplicación, de todo ello, al caso de Barcelona.

Un método científico que Cerdà articula junto a la tradición en sus aproximaciones etimológicas para resolver la incorporación de cultismos con los que dotar de un nuevo lenguaje al proyecto que está por venir. Recuperar el uso de la voz urbs —vocablo con el que los latinos designaban la ciudad y término, a su vez, síncopa de urbum, arado—, para derivar de él urbanización y urbe, establece una relación nada casual entre la acción de arar un terreno con bueyes sagrados para señalar un recinto a ocupar, y la transformación de un campo libre en urbanizado.

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Cerdà’s was the first meticulous scientific study both of what a modern city was, and what it could aspire to be.

 

Constricted by its medieval walls, Barcelona was suffocating – until unknown engineer Ildefons Cerdà came up with a radical expansion plan. Rival architects disparaged him, yet his scientific approach changed how we think about cities.

In the mid-1850s, Barcelona was on the brink of collapse. An industrial city with a busy port, it had grown increasingly dense throughout the industrial revolution, mostly spearheaded by the huge development of the textile sector.

The city was living at a faster pace than the rest of Spain, and was ready to become a European capital. Yet its population of 187,000 still lived in a tiny area, confined by its medieval walls.

With a density of 856 inhabitants per hectare (Paris had fewer than 400 at the time), the rising mortality rates were higher than those in Paris and London; life expectancy had dropped to 36 years for the rich and just 23 years for the working classes. The walls were becoming a health risk, almost literally suffocating the people of Barcelona – who were addressed directly in the following public statement of 1843:

“‘Down with the walls!’ has said this province’s council, and ‘Down with the walls!’ has no doubt answered your town hall, which knows the importance of making this girdle disappear that is squeezing and choking us.”

Demolition work would finally start a year later. Now the city and the Spanish government had to design and manage the sudden redistribution of an overflowing population. It was a controversial and highly political decision – which ultimately led to the then unknown Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerdà’s radical expansion plan for a large, grid-like district outside the old walls, called Eixample (literally, “expansion”). In the process, Cerdà also invented the word, and study of, “urbanisation”.

By the early 19th century, the old walled city of Barcelona had become so crammed that the working classes, bourgeois society and factories all co-existed in the same space. “Everyone was suffering the consequences of an Asian-level density,” says the writer and essayist Lluís Permanyer, whose book Eixample: 150 Years of History chronicles that period.

As there was no more land left inside the city walls, all kinds of inventions were used to build more lodgings – houses were literally being created on empty space. Arches were erected in the middle of streets to be built upon, and a technique called retreating façades saw house fronts extended out into the street as they rose up – until they almost touched the building opposite (this practice was banned in 1770, as it prevented air circulation).

Traffic – in those days, horse-drawn carts – was problematic too: the city’s narrowest street (now gone) was just 1.10 metres wide, while around 200 were less than three metres across. This, combined with residents’ Mediterranean way of life (which meant being on the street whenever it was light – and in the case of some artisanal professionals, working there too), worsened an already severe lack of hygiene in the city.

By the early 19th century, the old walled city of Barcelona had become so crammed that the working classes, bourgeois society and factories all co-existed in the same space. “Everyone was suffering the consequences of an Asian-level density,” says the writer and essayist Lluís Permanyer, whose book Eixample: 150 Years of History chronicles that period.

As there was no more land left inside the city walls, all kinds of inventions were used to build more lodgings – houses were literally being created on empty space. Arches were erected in the middle of streets to be built upon, and a technique called retreating façades saw house fronts extended out into the street as they rose up – until they almost touched the building opposite (this practice was banned in 1770, as it prevented air circulation).

Traffic – in those days, horse-drawn carts – was problematic too: the city’s narrowest street (now gone) was just 1.10 metres wide, while around 200 were less than three metres across. This, combined with residents’ Mediterranean way of life (which meant being on the street whenever it was light – and in the case of some artisanal professionals, working there too), worsened an already severe lack of hygiene in the city.

Barcelona’s epidemics were devastating: each time they broke out, 3% of the population died, according to Montserrat Pallarès-Barberà, geography and urbanism professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Cholera alone killed more than 13,000 people between 1834 and 1865.

Into this came Cerdà. His plan consisted of a grid of streets that would unite the old city with seven peripheral villages (which later became integral Barcelona neighbourhoods such as Gràcia and Sarrià). The united area was almost four times the size of the old city (which was around 2 sq km) and would come to be known as Eixample.

This unknown engineer was revolutionary in what he envisioned – but also in how he got there. Cerdà decided to avoid repeating past errors by undertaking a comprehensive study of how the working classes lived in the old city. “He had thought he would find all these urbanism books, but there were none,” Permanyer says. So he was forced to do it himself.

Cerdà’s eye was as careful as it is fascinating. His was the first meticulous scientific study both of what a modern city was, and what it could aspire to be – not only as an efficient cohabiting space, but as a source of wellbeing (not a straightforward concept back then).

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