IN-PERSON Barcelona Livable Cities. Section A

Abstract

This presentation will look at the history of the smart city as it is related to Barcelona. Focusing on one understudied historical case study, the transportation networks developed by Constantinos Doxiadis for Cataluña between 1970 and 1976, this presentation will extrapolate lessons that are critical for current city planning. Through an in-depth examination of original archival material, this presentation will demonstrate that Barcelona was at the forefront of the use of computers for urban planning and design in the early 1970s. This example shows a shift in planning methodologies, from computational techniques that were based on the extrapolation of past and present trends—a mode of knowledge that is concern with certainty and precision, and that points towards a single, optimal future—towards computational methodologies that were concerned with “dynamic,” “open-ended,” and “modifiable” methodologies. This case study will be placed in relation to other similar investigations into urban infrastructure conducted at that time, such as the Doxiadis’ computational study of the study of the Urban Detroit Area, and to contemporary questions regarding the automation of urban planning and urban design solutions. The presentation will denaturalize such computational techniques for collecting data and taking decisions about urban space. It will situate them within a historical genealogy, illuminating how we arrived at our contemporary fascination with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Through this lens, Barcelona appears as a case study that can point to alternative imaginaries of the possibilities and potentials of smart technologies and infrastructures, particularly as they relate to urban space.