“Barcelona’s mission must be to invent the city of the future and build it in the present, for the well-being of its citizens and to inspire the world” – Vicente Guallart highlights in La Vanguardia’s Catalan daily.
IAAC’s founder and MAEB Co-Director Vicente Guallart writes this week in one of the most relevant newspapers in Spain La Vanguardia about the role of Barcelona in the leadership of urban reinvention and transformation. Guallart, who was chief architect of the city of Barcelona (2011-2015), argues in the article that current political decisions in relation to urban planning are focused exclusively on short term plans without having any kind of far-reaching projection or consistent foresight.
Thus, according to IAAC’s founder Barcelona is gradually losing its exemplary role in the field of urban planning and architecture, which it held years ago, to the extent that cities in its European surroundings, such as Paris, is taking over and assuming this leadership role with initiatives such as “Reinventer Paris”. A competition to define how to face the numerous challenges that arise within the French capital, especially in the field of housing and in all matters of density, diversity, energy or resilience, in order to find new collective ways of shaping the metropolis of the future.
