urban

Scale of information and public participation

ANNUAL PHENOMENON

Every July – August, tourists put to test Barcelona’s infrastructure, clearly witnessed in Metro congestion, shortage in natural resources like water and increased street crime. A prototypical Mediterranean city (1), Barcelona is more than the average mix of ancient city bazaar and sunny beaches. Ciutat Villa, characterised by narrow paved streets is dotted with museums and pubs while Cerda’s grid compact-s the whole city - architectural edifices, modern shopping hubs, bars & restaurants, housing & public services, all inclusive, consistently distributed and comfortably accessible by one way traffic roads. Together they accommodate 1.6 million ‘permanent’ residents. Complementing this man made landscape the coastline, enhanced by connectivity and programmatic diversity, is the day-time recreational venue. Municipal strategies have focussed on development of public spaces and Barcelona continues to function smoothly under such sudden pressures.

The debate from this introduction, related to the importance attributed to a city’s performance as a tourist hub should look beyond the usual ‘salesman’ argument of revenue generation and popularity. This article suggests a second perspective – participation in the city aided by information is the key to comfort levels and performance in a city. The scale of participation lies not only in the extent of using city infrastructure, accessing services and contributing to social or civic activities but also in adhering to norms & regulations as well as observing or accessing the information and responding to it, a phenomenon which largely constitutes local urban culture. Urban design influences culture, law and order, independency and public response.

THE NEGATIVE OF CERDA BLOCKS

Barcelona ‘ground plane’ as the negative of Cerda’s built grid is dotted with civic utilities (street furniture and dustbins), traffic regulatory amenities (lights, parking guidelines, dedicated carriageways) and substructure accesses (basement parking, subways, metro exits). Together they facilitate movement and flow on the street. The simplicity and repetition of this information (largely due to the grid) across the city makes the city more user-friendly. While the Barcelona blocks (positive) have stood for 100 years with minor alterations, the ground plane (negative) has been altered and updated rapidly. The advantage of grid design is not just organisation of built mass but also in the ordered flexibility ascribed to the ground plane. Without attention to elements on 1:1 scale the master plan is but an aerial representation of frozen form that can at best anticipate flows and land-use. In other words, master plan patterns represent political and ownership information but day to day psychological experience of citizens and tourists is based on the order of information distribution on ground plane which they interact with.

INFORMATION & PARTICIPATION

Simple determination of various scales of information and its transmission at ground plane through signage, material application and demarcation supersedes any annotation on a master plan or the land-use plan, making the social - civic space more transparent. To evoke participation, isn’t it the layout of information and how it percolates through scales down to the user that is more important, than the large scale formal design initiatives? What will be the means and elements of information for the future city plans would largely complement our social and security concerns.

1 – Introductory definition of Barcelona by Joan Busquets in The Urban Evolution of a Compact City

All pictures source - Author

© 2008 we have NO VISION.