2019 - Territori - Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona

2019 | Metropolis Barcelona, a city of cities

Under the title “Collective City”, the 2019 edition of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (SBAU 2019) was aimed at creating a space for communication and engagement of the public in the transformation of their cities, as well as at developing new collective strategies of participation and empowerment in the socio-urban dynamics of the city.

In the Cities Exhibition, one of the four major components curated by Dongwoo Yim and Rafael Luna, more than 80 cities presented their projects. The AMB showcased “Metropolis Barcelona, a city of cities”, an exhibition that brought to the fore the metropolitan area of Barcelona as a very dynamic and increasingly complex economic and social reality. This metropolitan territory, structured by important natural spaces between which different cities have been settled, demands new approaches, tools and instruments of urban planning – based on the geography of the land – to preserve the identity of its peoples and to ensure environmental sustainability, economic competitiveness and social cohesion.

In this highly consolidated territory, urban planning needs to focus on the renovation of existing fabrics, transformation of obsolete areas, preservation of heritage and landscape elements, urban integration of infrastructures and adaptation to an immediate future marked by such profound dynamics as those associated with climate change, the technological revolution or increasingly complex social demands.

In this context, green infrastructure is considered to be the metropolis’s main supportive system. A set of spaces of great environmental wealth that represents more than 52% of the metropolitan territory, plus all those urban spaces with the potential to become green spaces. Streets, squares, urban parks and even roofs or facades can connect to the expansive surrounding natural parks and thus form an interconnected network of green spaces, reaching up to 75% of the territory.

The exhibition was a reflection on the strategic, core role that natural and open spaces can have in the territory and how connecting and re-connecting roads and streets can bring people's activities closer and improve the functioning of our city of cities.