D’Oriol Bohigas (Barcelona, 1925-2021) a Serra d’Or (VII-1964). On this day in 1858, the Barcelona City Council announced that the architect Antoni Rovira i Trias had won the competition for projects to expand the city. Two years later the plan of the engineer Ildefons Cerdà i Sunyer, despite not having participated in the competition, was chosen to deploy that ambitious urban reform. A century later, Oriol Bohigas, the architect with the most social and political will of his generation, published this shocking article in which a pan-Catalan conception of the national territory radiates from Barcelona.
Surely the most serious urban planning problem that needs to be considered urgently is that of the review of the General Plan of Barcelona. We have said it often and, unfortunately, we have to repeat it again, because it seems to us that we continue without remedying it. This situation can be explained by the absence of effective administrative and urban planning instruments, because the awareness of the problem, on the other hand, has become clear in all the technicians who directly or indirectly intervene in directing the overwhelming evolution of the city Indeed: in recent times we have seen the appearance of fractional plans of considerable scope: some produced by Public Works engineers, others by railway services, others by municipal technicians, others by port councillors, others by provincial urban planners, and some even by various private initiatives. But, always, without correlation, almost without an attempt to coordinate it in a coherent plan. What has become of the Tibidabo tunnel? What will happen to OP’s road links plan? Is the intention to create a new core of tertiary activities beyond Llobregat true? What role in expansion corresponds to the Vallès and the Maresme? What about the Pelai-Vergara Island plan? There seems to be a lack of a coordinating and executive body. The Urban Planning Commission, which has such strong effectiveness in matters of pure processing and which could also play this coordinating role, does not have the necessary executive intention, perhaps because by statute it does not correspond to it, or perhaps because it interferes with certain structures already established that do not allow him to take the reins. It is possible that one of these structures corresponds to the excessive centralism of Barcelona City Council and, consequently, to a certain centralism of our municipal technicians. It is clear that the expansion of the city must be thought of in a much wider sphere than that of the limits of the municipality itself. We have always defended the criterion that we cannot strangle the growth of Barcelona, because this would lead to the strangulation of an economic and cultural evolution that is difficult to compensate for in other areas of the Catalan territory. But when we talk about Barcelona we always imagine an urban complex beyond the current borders, constituting a city-region unit. This complex can be ordered in a very different way, if we look at the city from the inside out, or from the outside in. The new “intercommunal” plan of Milan, now in the drafting period, is an example of the second type of vision, that is, the one that goes from the region to the city. The Barcelona plan needs a similar kind of vision. A whole plan for Catalonia or, at least, the Principality would suit him beforehand (…) Since the plans are the work, above all, of the technicians or the administrators of the Barcelona municipality, they all suffer from centralism, we are if the growth of the city were purely a show of concentric waves to glimpse from the balcony of Plaça de Sant Jaume. (…)
Source: www.ara.cat
