It is clear that even if the Cerdà plan was provident, it was not planned for the extreme amount of rapid vehicles crossing the site daily. While other parts of Barcelona seem lively with both vehicles and pedestrians in the same street level, the Glòries area somehow achieves an inhuman character with the heavy traffic, barriers and the large scale.
With concrete walls and parking lots, Glóries looks nothing like the heart of Barcelona. It was built in the 1960's like it appears today, but with further additions in the 1990's. As of early 2000’s however, the site was included in a large scale urban plan of northern Barcelona named 22@, including Sagrera and Forum. The Torre Agbar by Glòries, made by the French architect Jean Nouvel, was the first project set up to symbolize the start of the project, and even the King of Spain came to inaugurate it in 2005.
The plan for Glòries is to dig down the heavy traffic and construct a green large scale square on ground level where the roundabout now is situated. A major train station is planned to be built underneath the square in addition to the highways. A public library, a public clinic, a sports centre as well as a museum of design is also a part of the plan in addition to buildings like the National Theatre already completed nearby.
To discuss the possible result of the new Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes, it is important to draw the line to the whole 22@ project and the results allready seen. As the 22@ plan was rapidly built out, mostly in Forum during the economical capitalism of the early 2000’s, it’s already brought to daylight that the plan suffers major in the lack of human scale. Large buildings, highways and squares makes Glòries and Forum seem like a ghost town, only with presence of heavy traffic in the highways. There is no focus on housing quality, but instead based on capitalistic values of rapidly earned money in private projects, like office buildings and hotels. The result is that many of the buildings are abandoned and the area suffers both in lack of urban intensity, money and housing after the economic recession.
While most of the squares in the rest of Barcelona have a clear hierarchy, alternating between small places like respites in the city and large squares as node points, this principle seems lost in the 22@ plan. There must always be a relation between the size of the urban space and people living and staying in the neighborhood. There’s already huge public spaces constructed in the area, like the Jean Nouvel park, the Forum port and the midway of Avinguda Diagonal all the way from Glòries to the port. It might not be wrong to have a large square where the heart of Barcelona was planned, but one must be aware that in order to make it work like an urban space, it’s depending on a wide range of different parameters. Housing is one, public services is another. The fact is that Glòries is not the living heart of Barcelona today, even though it was planned to be. And maybe that’s ok. It is, however, the infrastructural heart of Barcelona, and the way we see the area turn into, I have a hard time seeing that this part of the city will be where the living heart beats in the future.
There is no right or wrong in how to plan this area, and I don’t have the answer how it should be made. However, it is obvious that the plan fails in the approach to human scale, and that it would be wise to reevaluate the it now that one have seen parts of the result. I think where the project fails the most, is the direct translation between spaces for rapid vehicles and pedestrians. While rapid vehicles takes up a great amount of space, especially in crossovers and roundabouts because of speed and acceleration, more defined exchanges of space is experienced to work as a cityscape.
As mentioned, it’s not necessarily wrong to dig down the traffic and make space for a square with fewer barriers. It’s just that one must be more aware of the possible pitfalls that have failed in the Forum development. What we can learn from the Forum development is also that private developers have less interest in participating in the making of an urban area as a whole. In order to match the importance of for instance Parc de la Ciutadella, and make another node point of the city, the project needs a strong will. The focus on public services is definitely one of the perimeters that can make this project successful, and is a step in the right direction. Maybe even the Zoo should be moved here in order to give it an identity and draw attention, and at the same time solve the communicative problems in Parc de la Ciutadella?
Infrastructural problems exist in every city, and are always most fatal where different kinds of infrastructure meets in one point. As all vehicles need continuous paths, one is forced to divide in levels with the heavy traffic we witness today. I could take many examples of this theme from Oslo, but I can’t think of a similar situation. I will draw the line to the area around Oslo Central Station and the nearby area Bjørvika which is at this time under strong transformation from industrial port to a new city district. The Bjørvika plan is developed at the same time as 22@, and has many similarities both in the design of the plan, buildings and the financing. Like Torre Agbar, the Oslo Opera was built as the symbol of the start of the project. However, where I think 22@ failed by making it a private project, the opera has turned into a very successful public space, drawing a large amount of visitors daily. The Barcode buildings, however, are much discussed because of the heights which do not match the typology of the city and is claimed to turn into a wall, the space surrounding and the private developers prioritizing offices and hotels instead of housing.
This new city district Bjørvika, is cut off from the rest of the city by the fjord, a railway and a highway. In order to make Bjørvika a natural extension of the city, the traffic problems are much discussed. For now they have made large bridges for pedestrians crossing the rail- and highway, and they’ve made a tunnel under the fjord to remove through passing traffic. There have also been different competitions of how to solve the railway station to connect the city in a better way. The plan is to make a new major avenue, holding cars, trams, bicycle lanes and pedestrians, but critics say that this street will appear just as much as a barrier as the one existing today does. The whole plan suffers from major disagreements, and the same discussions of human scale and housing are important questions on the agenda.
