Drawing the country: safe trains, mature cities

The Barcelona Urban Planning Laboratory (LUB) contributed to the Catalan Culture Congress from 1975 to 1977 with an exhibition of maps of Catalan cities and regions, which was called The identity of the Catalan territory: the countiesI haven't found any images of the exhibition, but I did find a collection of plans that several architects drew with great ingenuity, eager to capture the true identity of Catalonia, which has nothing to do with what is built in the United States or Northern Europe. The climate, the topography, and the waterways have shaped the cities we enjoy today. All of this was documented in the magazine. Notebooks on Architecture and Urban PlanningIn two issues dedicated to the identity of the Catalan territory and the regions, in the year I was born, in 1981. Such graphic maps have not been drawn again for 45 years.

Everyone has a mental image of Barcelona: the star-shaped Ciutat Vella, the Eixample district, the villas of Gràcia, Sarrià, Sant Andreu, Collserola, and the two rivers. The Diagonal, the Gran Via, and the Meridiana are the mental axes from which everyone can traverse the city, and with the new Glòries and Sagrera, the city is now shifting eastward.

In contrast, it's much more difficult to map Catalonia. The cartography offered by Google Maps is quite sterile: aerial photography, a grid of streets, places to spend your savings, and routes to choose from to get from one place to another. They are maps of consumption. But they don't show the differences between La Garrotxa and La Maresme at first glance. Those old LUB drawings allow you to understand, in two seconds, where the roads are, where there are watercourses, where there are hills and orchards, what the property shapes are (very large or very small plots?)... These maps convey a great deal simply with the technique of black and white. The drawings clearly explain that Catalan cities have very diverse shapes, categorized by Rosa Barba into the linear model (Granollers), the radial model (Vic), the concentric model (Mataró), the directional model (Vilanova i la Geltrú), and the dual model (Balaguer).

Even then, the dilemma between Barcelona's sprawling metropolis and other Catalan cities was emerging. Joan Busquets suggested that the concentration of population density and infrastructure in Barcelona carries very high social costs. If we also add the current pressure of housing prices, we can further highlight the consequences of the Greater Barcelona model, including the displacement of families with children and the elderly.

Busquets argued that spending on the metro, ring roads, railways, new road access points, and tunnels to Barcelona had enabled the expansion of the "regional suburbs" in the Baix Llobregat and Barcelonès areas as residential areas for workers, creating chaotic peripheries and draining resources that were not invested in Catalonia as a whole. This model consumed vast amounts of land and was incapable of generating large, high-quality public spaces.

Busquets proposed a thought-provoking idea, which I believe has never been fully realized, or at least not with a powerful enough visual representation to resonate with all Catalans when they have to explain the vision for the country. He suggested that the thirty cities outside the Barcelona metropolitan area, with populations between 10,000 and 100,000, had the potential to collectively form the second capital of Catalonia. I think I understand what he meant: mature cities with significant growth potential that hadn't been hampered by the major infrastructure projects crisscrossing the metropolis, and which had grown in a more or less structured way between 1930 and 1950: Badalona, ​​Sabadell, Terrassa, Lleida, Tarragona, Mataró.

London could be represented with a universal diagram when Harry Beck invented the city's Underground map in 1931, deliberately omitting distances between stations and using horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines to represent the different lines, each a different color. A map that, a century later, is still useful for anyone wishing to cross the city quickly. A way of depicting neighborhoods that all cities have since imitated.

It is quite surprising that, during the years when the Process was at its peak, no one was able to produce the necessary image of a Catalan territory connected by trains and cities, capable of generating a national identity that did not depend on the macrocephaly of Barcelona. I believe this is the image that needs to be commissioned now: that of safe and reliable connections between established cities, with current and future rail lines, and with the cities destined to better distribute prosperity throughout the country. And this is even more crucial now, when this sad rail crisis demands that the issue of trains be taken very seriously.