Busquets, Joan. Barcelona: the urban evolution of a compact city.
Rovereto, Italia: Nicolodi,
[Cambridge, MA]: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2005.
BCN is situated on a plain that slopes gently down towards the sea, delimited by the rivers Llobregat
and Besos and the coastal mountain range of Collerola, with its highest point of Tibidabo. The
Barcelona Plain is only interrupted by the mountain of Montjic beside the sea and the tres turons, or
three hills in the north.
Physical dimension/ old territorial configurations and at the same time perpetuates the social
practices of preceding generations.
it is therefore essential to interpret the content of these-
the approach taken by this book is based on the constitution of Barcelona, picking out the
operations to shape or design the city that have been crucial to its development.
Understanding of the cultural evolution of urban development.
as in the controversial case of the development of Cerda’s Eixample, which therefore became the
paradigm of the symbolic identification of the city.
the histories of cities reveal overlapping processes, and their projects and proposed changes cannot
be seen simply from the point of view of the plan or the finished work.
the city’s general history and a summary of studies of urban history, mainly concerning Modern
Barcelona.
formation of the medieval city on its Roman origins, which we can identify as a traditional city with
its streets, squares and neighbourhoods. While the old town had these elements, their form and
content were redefined. Others such as the town walls and main streets are continually
reinterpreted.
continuance of street layout/ what the pre-industrial city was like/
it was with the arrival of the industrial city that urban development schemes became more
document-based with the creation of a series of urban planning guidelines that throw some light on
the construction of present-day Barcelona.
the 19th century city marked the entrance of industrial into the city with the definition of new urban
forms. This was the time of the great new town project, the Eixample, of suburban development and
the demolition of the Citadel.
the great urban explosion probably took place in the 20th century, when industrialisation organised
the city in accordance with its strong technological development. This was also the period of
consolidation of urban development as a technical and social practice. They city was laid out like the
big European cities and new morphological proposals took shape.
