Facilities That Make the City. The Rehabilitation Intervention in Recent Barcelona

Abstract

Beyond the service they provide, facilities play a key role in urban planning and the shape of our cities. On a large scale, they play a structuring role, in order to guarantee the equal distribution of basic services for the whole city. Local facilities contribute to articulating the city as an aggregation of elementary units of coexistence - neighborhoods and districts - with an increasing degree of complexity and autonomy. Emblematic cases are the new cities planned during the first half of the s. XX, if we find precedents in some expansion projects of the s. XIX. Secondly, we will address the role of equipment in the morphology of the city, moving from the urban plan to the physical reality; from the abstract order to the concrete building that provides the service. While large city-scale facilities become landmarks, many of them iconic buildings of exclusive architecture, other smaller-scale facilities contribute to order a structure of centers and sub-centres, to regenerate degraded fabrics, to energize the public space, to act as catalysts for urban activity, to complete the urban tissue with a new passage or to build an edge in transition to natural space. Too often architecture publications and magazines emphasize only the building as an object of design, of magnificent design, but decontextualized from urban tissue. In the construction of our urban environments, the implementation of an equipment building on public land, with public money and with a program decided by the administrations, is a golden opportunity to "make a city".