Adaptive urban planning: Barcelona towards 2035

Barcelona is a consolidated city. Seen from the air, it could seem like a completed city, with no room for new transformations. However, as pointed out by Bernardo Secchi, an Italian urban planner and thinker of the contemporary city, "the territories and cities we see are the result of a long process of cumulative selection that is still underway." Barcelona is not a finished project, but rather finds itself in another stage of a history that remains open. The city we have inherited is the fruit of decisions accumulated over decades, but also of the decisions we make today and which will determine its future.Urban planning is precisely this exercise in selection. Choosing what we preserve, what we transform, what we intensify, and what we recover. And today, this selection is conditioned by two major challenges that will redefine urban living conditions: climate change and the affordable housing crisis.These challenges question many of the certainties upon which the imaginary of the progress of the modern city was built, but they also offer the opportunity to build a new urban agenda. An agenda that is not based on nostalgia or fear of uncertainty, but on the capacity for adaptation. As Zygmunt Bauman noted, "to navigate uncertainty" cities should prioritize the adaptability of their urban fabrics rather than the imposition of rigid and definitive forms.Barcelona's goal is, therefore, to prepare for this future. Adapting means changing ways of doing things, revising inherited mental frameworks, and assuming that we will have to obtain better results with more limited resources. Building more housing without having large land reserves. Increasing climate comfort in recurring drought scenarios. Improving urban quality by intervening in an already built city.

If we accept that the city is a permanent process of selection, urban planning does not consist only of designing physical spaces, but also of building the instruments that allow for guiding this selection. Adapting the city requires much more than executing projects: it implies modifying priorities, redefining procedures, revising regulations and rules, coordinating actors, and generating a new urban culture.The construction of the city is a slow, cumulative, and costly process that transcends any political mandate. In reality, each government inherits a set of ongoing projects, plans, and decisions, reviews them, refines them, and adds new priorities before passing them on to the next generation. This continuity is one of the essential characteristics of urban planning.Because if anything defines the city throughout history, it is its capacity to adapt to social, economic, technological, and environmental changes.In this context, the commitment to tidiness is understood, which goes beyond cleaning and the order of public space to vindicate an idea often underestimated by contemporary society: the value of maintenance. In a culture marked by novelty and immediate consumption, placing the emphasis on the care, repair, and conservation of urban assets is almost a countercultural exercise. Maintaining is also transforming, because it allows for extending the useful life of existing resources and reducing the need to replace them.For much of the last forty years, Barcelona has built its transformation through the incorporation of new land or the replacement of pre-existing urban fabrics. The large parks of the eighties, such as Pegaso, Espanya Industrial, or l'Escorxador, took advantage of disused industrial spaces to generate new green centralities. Subsequently, operations such as Nova Icària, 22@, la Sagrera, or la Marina del Prat Vermell have been examples of major transformations capable of redefining entire neighborhoods.This model has been extraordinarily fruitful, but it is based on conditions that are increasingly less present: the existence of large land reserves or areas susceptible to being transformed in an integral way. The Barcelona of the future will have to act, mainly, upon itself.

It is here that the logic of adaptive urbanism appears with force. It is not about expanding the city but reinterpreting it. Not about building on a blank sheet, but working on a densely consolidated reality. The metaphor of the tetris illustrates well this new way of intervening: the pieces are already on the board, and the task consists of reordering them, adjusting them, or complementing them to generate new opportunities.This approach requires, as a first step, an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the built city. Only by knowing its physical, social, and urban conditions can the gaps that allow for driving new transformations be detected. The great difference with respect to previous stages is that the objective is no longer so much to produce a new city as it is to increase the capacity of the existing city to respond to changes. This is, probably, the most precise definition of adaptive urbanism: an urbanism that assumes that the city is not a finished reality but an evolving organism; that does not act only through large projects but also through small cumulative modifications; that combines ambition and pragmatism; and that understands that building a city today means as much making as remaking and, in some cases, undoing.Because, as Secchi suggested, the city continues to be an ongoing selection process. If the urban planning of Barcelona over the last forty years was based above all on the transformation and expansion of the city, the responsibility of our generation is to make the selections that will allow the Barcelona of 2035 to adapt to new challenges. An adaptation that involves caring for it, reusing it, intensifying it, and improving its capacity to respond to new climatic, social, and residential challenges.