A Joan Busquets lecture

Busquets (left) and Hans Harms.

On 12 March 2014, I heard a lecture at Berkeley CED by Harvard Professor Joan Busquets, best known as a planner of his native city, Barcelona, where he has an architecture and urban planning firm. Busquets has written a number of books, one of which - Cities X Lines - formed the basis for his talk. X in this case means 10. He used the word tracks as a synonym for lines, but I would call them types of urban intervention. His talk focused on four of them - extending, decentralizing, transforming or restructuring, and re-qualifying or upgrading - using his own work as case studies. 

Along the way, he made some interesting observations. He noted that the Shanghai metropolis and the Netherlands are both developing 80 new towns. (This was part of a discussion of decentralization.) He noted that Toledo has an urban pattern typical of traditional Arab cities, with the blocks subdivided into plots less than 20 square meters each, which leads to three-to-four-story buildings. Discussing a project for Toulouse, he noted how the computer's ability to layer makes possible a quantum leap in the richness of plans, since every component (trees, for example) can be considered in detail by specialists, and then integrated with the whole. He said, in reference to putting a train line that serves and passes through the center of Delft in a below-grade tunnel, how much planning owes to and learns from engineers.

An aerial view of Barcelona.

Turning to Barcelona, he compared it to two other gridded cities, New York and San Francisco. Barcelona's grid was a 19th-century extension of the historic city. As the aerial photo shows, it has a very uniform pattern of midrise, attached buildings on separate sites that define the street front and enclose a large inner open space. The pattern accommodates a remarkable variety of architectural styles without losing its coherence. He also showed the redevelopment of the harbor, parts of which followed the morphology of the waterfront. We may quarrel with the way some of it implemented, he said, but the attention to context - mediating between the city grid and the harbor, creating a public beach, and solving the environmental problems that Barcelona had heretofore caused for the Mediterranean, like raw sewage pouring into it - made the area's redevelopment a success. 

Cities are complex, Busquets noted, but we finally have the tools to contend with their complexity. If plans were simpler in the past, this reflected the real limits of the planners' understanding - their analytical tools were inadequate. Some bemoan the loss of this simplicity, but in fact we should be grateful to find ourselves with "fantastic tools" that can assist our analyses and our designs.