IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section A

Abstract

The concept of Urban Resilience is not homogeneous but susceptible to diverse and even competing approaches.. Engineering Resilience – as the ability to recover (bouncing-back approach) functions in the face of stochastic events – usually ignore the role of self-organised processes as evidences of the complex functioning of the urban system and the scale at which grassroots processes take place as real triggers for urban reactivation, especially facing urban obsolescence and stagnation (urban shrinkage). To fill this gap, this paper stresses the architectural scale of urban form and its capacity for transformation and adaptation (bouncing-forward approach) as a crucial issue by embracing and enabling user-led self-organised strategies for socio-spatial dynamisation and thus the enactment of an adaptive Socio-Ecological Urban Resilience. Findings of the comparative analysis of two contrasting self-organised initiatives in Barcelona – Can Masdeu and Can Fugarolas – for the recovery of two derelict buildings – a partitioned versus a diaphanous structure – reveal similarities and differences in their adaptive potential under social performance resulting from the conditioning factors of their architectural design. From the perspective of spatial adaptability and transformability as a measure of Urban Resilience at the architectural scale, and along with similarities in terms of parallel spatial depletion and social stagnation, differences regarding strategies of spatial appropriation, spatial diversification and spatial fragmentation are evidenced between the two. Further discussion will imply the need to consider the architectural layout of the built stock as a major issue in order to release such an embedded resilience repository of Urban Resilience.