Ideas, strategies and projects that give rise to pilot projects. They tackle the challenges raised by the stakeholders involved and which are found in particular places in Barcelona or Medellín.
Torre Baró is one of the 13 neighbourhoods that make up the district of Nou Barris in Barcelona. Standing right on the Collserola hillside, it presents a singular morphology, situated between the hard infrastructural barriers of roads and railway lines. The difficult terrain protected it from development until the waves of immigration in the fifties and sixties and the subdivision of private plots of land gradually shaped a self-built neighbourhood with no planning or design. The result is today’s mono-functional neighbourhood that lacks services, public facilities and commercial activity. Its urban structure is one of low-density dwellings, some in a very poor state of construction.
Now, after municipal interventions (2004-2008) aimed basically at urban development and connecting the area with the public transport network, the neighbourhood still requires a holistic urban improvement plan. This complex reality increases the need to recognise and assess urban and social deficits with a view to bringing about the necessary urbanity and civic spaces.
While analysing the social and spatial values among the Torre Baró community, the master’s degree students applied a place-making methodology during a two-week on-the-spot workshop. Work was directed at understanding the place as part of a series of spaces with civic content that can help identify and construct social and spatial links. Participants in the workshop explored the strategic value of spatial and cultural resources with the aim of strengthening local identity and community participation. Spatial and social analysis centred on various aspects: mobility, the ecologic and open space matrix, housing and the system of mobility. At the same time, special attention was paid to shops, services and amenities as ways of encouraging economic diversification and innovation. The aim of this analysis was to promote creativity by improving the creative economy, in that the incorporation of a diversity of activities may be more significant for individuals than for companies.
The diagnosis produced by socio-spatial analysis is that self-built dwellings play a major role in the neighbourhood, becoming its essential value. Self-construction has generated a feeling of belonging, becoming a factor of social mobilization for the neighbourhood. Likewise, the open spaces and the existing ecological grid have great potential for becoming a pole of socio-economic regeneration for the inhabitants of the neighbourhood.
