Urban quality, mobility, quality of life. A grammar for the rebirth of the city. A proposal for the new "industry quarter" in Sant Adrià del Besòs, Barcelona

Abstract

A strict connection exists between mobility patterns and urban quality. You don’t need to be an expert to appreciate how some places are more welcoming than others and how, most of the times, those same places are the ones deprived of an object that has been affecting our lives for decades: the car.

The automobile allowed the diffusion of settlement patterns characterized by urban sprawl - clearly inspired by the United States - which, where not well regulated, became a “mandatory” instrument for transportation.

The big contemporary cities, dominated by the car, have grown following the model of “urban sprawl” in which public space has completely lost its role of “urban armor” and the criteria of urban quality have been completely set apart.

Following this growth pattern, the city appears today comprised of fragments that, integrating with the consolidated or historical fabric, produce friction.

Today the concept of “sustainability” imposes a change in the settlement patterns, abandoning the globalized culture of suburbanization in favor of urban regeneration.

Within this context, public space must once again play a fundamental role in mending the urban fragments produced during the decades of incessant growth of the city and in restoring its quality.

Furthermore, urban fragments and residual spaces, too little valued and often forgotten, represent today for the communities that inhabit them an opportunity to rescue their own feeling of belonging and community.

Citizens must therefore “reclaim” these parts of the city through the (re)construction of public space, basing on criteria that ensure the urban quality of the project:

- participation: since the inclusion of the people who will have to animate those spaces cannot be underestimated, but rather, plays a key role;

- cultural valuation: since the recovery of what were the places of memory, the foundation of the community, cannot have a marginal function;

- quality of the environment: since guaranteeing biodiversity and the requalification of the existing one in favor of a healthy and revitalized environment is one of the pillars on which the very concept of urban recovery is based.

The cities that have favored public transport, bicycles and pedestrians at the expense of private cars, are those today characterized by a superior urban quality.

Today, more than ever, mobility planning is an effective urban regeneration tool.

Therefore, it is proposed in this context to investigate the evolution that mobility planning, urban policies and government of the territory have registered in recent years, with the aim of dealing with the degradation caused by urban fragmentation, mobility models and the degradation of public space.

To achieve that, it is presented a study on the contemporary city and the elements that compose it in order to understand the role that each of them plays in planning. Always with a look at the international scientific scene, studying in detail the phenomenon object of this work, the causes that generate it and the aspects to take into account to stop or interrupt it.

As an intervention tool, inspired by a hypothesis developed by the Italian urban planner Marcello Vittorini in 1988, an “urban grammar” is proposed, expressed through a “theoretical grid” aiming to reconfigure urban mobility structures, and oriented towards the regeneration and sustainable development of the city.

Taking into account the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, where mobility plans consistent with the criteria of the theoretical grid have already been implemented, a study is presented on the municipality of S. Adrià de Besòs (in the AMB), an urban fragment consisting of a former industrial area of approximately 4 square kilometers. This study is intended to mend this urban fragment and insert it between the fabrics of the municipalities of Barcelona and Badalona, so to re-connect the consolidated city through the application of the “theoretical grid”.