Contra la indiferència: catalitzadors de la urbanitat.

Abstract

Research and experience ¿Urban catalysts. Against indifference¿ is a piece of work about public space that has been developed through research and experience. It¿s an exploration with the intention of discovering how the urban spaces of relation of all times have been built throughout the years; a thesis encouraged by the interest of understanding what makes a public space become a place of relation between people. The personal experience of living the transformation of Barcelona, thanks to the result of the inoculated renovation of the public space, has lead me to recognize the importance of the empty space in the city. This is a work that tries to infiltrate in the recreational dimension of the cities, trying to figure out their unwritten and hidden laws. It¿s an open research motivated by the personal verification of the renovation of my own city and not limited to the study of Barcelona but willing to understand what the origin of the cities¿ public spaces is. Transitory intensity ¿Urban catalysts. Against indifference¿ is an atlas of public urban situations; a research that, in a moment where cities and landscapes are being gobbled up by this indifferent and generic urbanism, I would like to reveal the value of intensity as a reference to build identity spots; a non-exclusive study that tracks down the uncertain boundaries of urban intensity, that understands that in many occasions the intensity becomes apparent too in a transitory way. ¿Skin is the deepest.¿ P Valery This thesis doesn¿t propose a futile discussion between formal or informal attitude, a dilemma between confronted architectural options, but tries to discover the capacity of transformation of what the anthropologist M. Delgado calls, in his book The public anim, ¿aesthetics of the event¿. ¿Therefore, urban anthropology should be presented more like the anthropology that defines the urbanity as a way of life: made of dissolutions and simultaneities, made of cold and minimalist negotiations, made of weak and scarce bonds connected to each other to the infinite, but in whom the short circuits are always present. This urban anthropology would be mostly similar to public spaces anthropology.¿ In this thesis we tried to investigate what is the catalyst of all urban related things, the aesthetics of the event. We did a meticulous and hyper-realistic study that wants to recognize and grant the actual transformation value of what is capable of activating the public space. Small scale We tried to bring urbanism closer to the smaller scale; to focus our attention on apparently insignificant situations, to discover the power of catalyzing the public space of the lighthearted actions, both the projected ones and the spontaneous and ordinary ones. Hyper-realistic drawing The key to understand the true urban importance of apparently irrelevant elements and actions to convert the public spaces of the cities has been to measure and to draw them. We have been able to discover the transcendence of these evasive situations through the attempt of representing and fulfilling them in an almost obsessive, precise and hyper-realistic way. We have tried to make a research about the non-muscled part of architecture and public space, a similar attempt, to R. Sennett proposes in his book Flesh and stone: ¿When L. Mumford wrote The city in History, he recounted four thousand years of urban history by tracing the evolution of the wall, the house, the street, the central square ¿basic forms out of which cities have been made. My learning is lesser, my sights are narrower, and I have written this history in a different way, by making studies of individual cities and specific moments- moments when the outbreak of a war or a revolution, the inauguration of a building, the announcement of a medical discovery, or the publication of a book marked a significant point in the relation between people¿s experience of their own bodies and the spaces in which they lived.