What exactly makes a neighborhood's density desirable? I lived for many years in Barcelona's Eixample, and it wasn't until I left that I realized the exceptional volume of shops, offices, activities, institutions, hotels, restaurants, cars, pedestrians, and goods that circulate. It is very difficult to reproduce this dynamism in a new construction neighborhood, so different from the residential neighborhoods of Europe or the streets of houses between party walls in Maresme. There were few facilities and green areas, but I never missed them until I had daughters. I went to university libraries, to the municipal swimming pools by the beach, and to the cinema in Gràcia and the Gothic Quarter. The city never stopped and there was always some shop window well lit at night, as if to highlight the delicate details of the cornices of the balconies or the reliefs of the facades.On Còrsega, Lepant, Industria, and Padilla streets, there is an island of houses with homogeneous architecture on all plots: the same windows, the same heights, and the same proportions. If the entire Ensanche had been built with the same architecture, I think it would be unbearable. It is the diversity of colors of the stucco, from earthy to reddish to green, that makes us change our point of view at every corner. Cities are read involuntarily. While walking, people notice the balconies, the rhythms of the vertical windows, and the textures, from the plinths to the unique finishes that crown the facades. And then there are the flowers, the curtains, the shutters, the colors of the lamps at night, and so many other things that make us find a very familiar language in the Eixample, despite the incredible built density of a large part of the blocks.

In 2007, the magazine Ideas In an excellent article by Jordi Mas, the Rafael Campalans Foundation proposed a Catalan Housing System understood as a "protection system based on rental housing," outlining an equitable policy designed to prevent the privatization of public housing and its high turnover. The aim was to ensure that public land was allocated to rentals and to foster a fairer system, capable of truly serving the families or age groups in need. This system would guarantee that when the tenants' personal circumstances improved, their rental contracts would not be renewed, and the apartments could be offered to a new family genuinely in need. Young people who had managed to stabilize their income after a few years would then transition to the private housing market.

Why is density frightening? Because until fifty years ago, unless expressly prohibited, property owners could add floors, increase building volume, and change the use of their properties without any repercussions for the city. If more wasn't done, it was because the load-bearing walls could only support two or three additional stories, not much more. The resulting appearance of cities was quite wild, with blocks of streets that, overnight, had taller facades without any increase in street width, thus losing light and air inside the dwellings.

Barcelona is an expensive city. It's hot, and it will get much hotter. There are countless people on the sidewalks, on the subway platforms, on the beach, on La Rambla, in the shopping centers. And yet, it's a city that captivates. The city forges bonds as deep as a landscape or a farmhouse. And precisely because this sense of belonging exists, it's important to connect the past we've inherited with the future we're going to build. the metropolitan urban master plan The fact that (PDUM) has received more than 5,000 comments is indicative of how much the city matters to us.

To teenagers worried about the ban on social media until the age of sixteen, I would like to say that they will gain valuable time to observe and notice small things that aren't working in their environment. This is the key quality of good professionals, whether they are doctors, train drivers, architects, or truck drivers. By listening and taking notes, they learn exactly where they can add value, and this is a necessary skill for surviving in today's world.

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.

One of the most brilliant things about Paris is that the city is too ambitious to be consumed by mere glitz and glamour. After several failures, and a disastrous 1980s in terms of supposedly modern facades and pretentious architecture, Paris now builds buildings that subordinate their appearance to the harmony and proportion of the streets they surround. What a relief. The new buildings bring back the tones of limestone (off-white), zinc roofs, and Haussmannian windows, which are wide and tall enough to fill a dining room wall like a painting, but never disrupt the balance between solid and void on the facade. All of this allows those who stroll, appreciating visual coherence, to enjoy streets where it's barely possible to discern where one building begins and another ends. There aren't enough hours of sunlight to wander through Paris and imagine what three or four solid principles would make for a good new street in a newly built neighborhood.

In these times of declining expectations, I would like to speak with some realism about how difficult it is to transform cities. Digitization allows us to have images available in just a few hours and renders of future projects with every detail. Never before have those in power and architects been able to accurately visualize what projects will look like "after construction." Now it's done with such precision that, sometimes, it's even difficult to distinguish between the real and the virtual. To illustrate: we know what the Vallcarca neighborhood will look like next to the viaduct, but it's much harder to manage the relocation of all the people living in apartments that will have to be demolished, obtain permits, approve budgets, contract construction work... Managing all these processes is increasingly complicated. And the reality is that we have many drawings that never end up being developed.

The scarcity of final-use land (consolidated urban land) for building affordable housing is usually attributed to planning (to the technical complexity of urban planning), but Ignacio Ezquiaga, in a study for the Funcas Foundation, has another explanation, which seems convincing to me in light of what I know about Sareb.

"I just want to see hundred-dollar bills," Jordi Amat hums in one of the verses of his essay The Battles of BarcelonaBecause the book is a collage of authors, music, books, chronicles, conferences, projects, films, and family conflicts that make it very accessible: it's somewhere between a bibliography and a playlist of everything you need to read, see, and hear about Barcelona to understand the city's successes and failures. The book's thesis is well-known and shared by many: "The paradox of Barcelona's global success is that it strips the city bare." But Amat supports this with data and reviews that allow readers to compare the initial intentions of emblematic projects with their actual impact over the years.

The older I get, the less I understand cities. Not because they've ceased to fascinate me, but because I find it increasingly difficult to believe certain narratives. The contemporary world is immersed in urban debates that seem disconnected from reality: parameters, densities, land use, residual values… And I walk through my neighborhood and I'm only interested in the gardens, the smells, the morning mists, the squares, and the sunny terraces where I can have a coffee and read a book.

I'm writing from a mountainous landscape, past the Toses pass, among trees of warm colors, a prelude to winter. Leaving the AP-7 and the Eix Transversal has made me confront the stark reality of the half of Catalonia's municipalities that are losing population. You can see it from the roads: the closed restaurants, the shops with empty signs, the lack of life on the streets.

The FAVB has made strong objections against the modification of the General Metropolitan Plan (PGM) for the future Thyssen Museum, and reading them has made me think about the grand ideas that have governed the construction of Barcelona as a compact city. Cities are ideas, some conceived decades ago, that urban plans preserve or alter, even if they don't please everyone.

Browsing a real estate portal is torture today. A lot of renovation has been done in wealthy neighborhoods, and the result is many buildings renovated without any public aid. However, without regulation on sale prices or the accumulation of properties, the medium-term impact is refurbished apartments that are rented out by the day or sold to foreign buyers with the expectation that they will never lose value. And, at the same time, residents of Eixample, Gràcia, or Poblenou are leaving Barcelona because they can't afford these prices. The social cost of this transformation is high because the city is unable to capture the value it itself has generated, which generates powerlessness. We can't take 20 years to build an alternative public park because if we don't act now, the segregation between rich and poor cities will be irreversible.

Twenty-five years ago, several of us began our architecture studies at the Etsab (National Institute of Architecture), in the words of Lázaro Moix. Mayor Maragall had crossed the line, but we learned by walking through his legacy, the research of the Barcelona Urban Planning Laboratory, and the public land reserves of Joan Anton Solans.

The stallholders are the main victims of the transformation of La Boqueria. The transfers of their stalls (very few square meters) are paid in millions of euros, accumulated by certain groups, and those who have worked there all their lives suffer a massive influx of tourists who no longer buy cod or sea bass because they will have lunch on the cruise ship or at the restaurant on duty. They look, take photos, and watch as some Barcelona woman still fills her cart, but they don't go shopping. And a market where no one goes shopping is not a market: it can be a square, a decoration, or a shop window, but it's not viable to keep the mussels fresh if no one buys them. The word "mussels" is not in vain. market comes from the Latin root merx, from which the Latin verb is derived Merchant (to buy) and the name of Mercè (grace or reward), who is the patron saint of this city of merchants that was Barcino.

Urban planning (at least what we have now) has its limitations, and urbanity can only go so far if we let cities cook like pre-made hamburgers, drawing cities like someone preparing fast food to be devoured in a few minutes. That's why it's good to stop and take a mental step back. Two weeks with my little nephews have forced me to have no plans other than walking slowly, playing ball in the sand, and caring for all kinds of animals (and then drawing them). I've slowed down drastically and now I don't know how I can do so many things in winter, or if it makes much sense, frankly.

The city of Barcelona has initially approved the conversion of the former Comedy Cinema into a museum Dedicated to Modernism (Casas, Rusiñol, Mir, and Nonell) and haute couture gowns, at the initiative of an investment fund and the Carmen Thyssen collection. I write this sentence with care, the subject of which is "the city of Barcelona." The urban planning document has been made public, allowing for a detailed analysis of what Barcelona City Council proposes regarding the ever-more controversial assumptions of urban planning law: the community's participation in capital gains generated by urban development and the principle of the social function of the right to property.

Why are grand plans announced and then it's so hard to see any tangible impact on the city? Why are so many people registered on the Affordable Housing Applicant Registry, and only a very few lucky ones are eligible? The College of Architects has presented its analysis of building permits for the first half of 2025 and puts it in black and white: of the total of 8,107 new homes approved by the COAC (Council of Architects), only 1,453 are social housing, with a decrease of 18.6% in the housing surface area approved. In Barcelona city, of the total of 833 new homes approved, half (465) are social housing, distributed across twelve projects. In recent years, several cities have focused on the housing emergency, but it's still difficult to capitalize on the housing effort. And because it's a slow process, those responsible end up throwing in the towel and clinging to strategic projects that only require a render or a model are much more communicable.

It's a grey day in London, we've landed under a thick layer of clouds, but at least it's not raining. I have to go to the Prospect Magazine headquarters, where Alan Rusbridgerand the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have invited us to explain housing policies from different countries, and I've landed at Gatwick. Passport control; what a step backwards the United Kingdom has taken. Once I've passed the passport scan, the machine opens the doors to the kingdom. Gatwick is 40 km from London, and the train track runs through a completely urbanized landscape. It's as if Barcelona had houses and neighborhoods all the way to Sitges; as if the metropolis had swallowed up the Llobregat delta and the Garraf massif to turn it into a megacity. Later in the talk, we'll analyze why large cities haven't resolved housing inequalities either, but let's take it step by step.