Study for urban model revision

Badia del Vallès is a mass housing estate built in the 1970s. Its citizens, with the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (ES) authority and the municipality, jointly drew up an Integrated Action Plan for the city, under the URBACT project sub>urban.

This plan, known as Imagina Badia, established three objectives:  

1. Reconnect the city, breaking its spatial and mental isolation
2. Create a healthier city, reducing pollution and enhancing high-quality public spaces and adaptable facilities
3. Achieve a more inclusive city in terms of housing, economic promotion and peaceful community relations 

Building on this, the project’s second phase developed a catalogue of flexible and adaptable tools for intervening in the public and built space.  

This practice is transferable to similar neighbourhoods in other EU cities. 

The Imagina Badia study for the revision of the Badia del Vallès urban model includes a catalogue of actions aimed at three strategic areas, making the city more connected, healthy and inclusive.  

These actions are designed to be used by the municipality in line with opportunities available at any given moment, guaranteeing their adaptability and adjustment to current needs. Here are some examples:

• Connectivity and relationship with the region: improving public transport, accessibility and supra-municipal connectivity.
• Mobility structure: developing a hierarchy in the road system to enhance city navigability and reduce occupancy of public space by private vehicles.
• Intensifying and planning the use of public space: moving towards intensification and rationalisation, and creating public areas that can adapt to changing needs. This can be achieved by intensifying relationships between built space and empty space in order to create a new collective space.
• Showcasing cultural and natural heritage and social assets, and optimising natural resources.
• Diversifying and intensifying building use and density: introducing new uses and typologies that generate a truly complex city and offer new opportunities. For example, one way to enhance the human scale is by adding elements to ‘break up’ façades. This helps generate filters that accompany citizens on their daily journeys, promoting more carefully defined and safer spaces. 

Following the identification of the principal issues confronting the municipality, through a participatory process, efforts were made to consolidate proposed actions into three strategic areas, integrating all the challenges. The challenges identified reflect the problems commonly associated with this type of residential structure, where the combination of morphology and localisation leads to social and economic issues.

The main challenges facing Badia are:

• Spatial isolation
• Monofunctional and monotype land and buildings
•  Underused or unused open spaces, buildings and resources
• Ageing and shrinking populations, and economic problems
•  Scarce municipal public funding 

The following three strategic areas encompass socioeconomic, environmental and territorial structuring objectives:

• Connected city: connecting physically but also generating social and economic synergies
• Healthy city: rehabilitating buildings, rethinking public space and facilities
•  Inclusive city: visualising the needs of citizens and their cultural values 

Finally, a catalogue of actions was developed to implement the strategic objectives:

•  Connectivity and relationships with the region
•  Mobility structure
•  Intensifying and planning use of public space
•  Showcasing the cultural and natural heritage
• Diversifying and intensifying building use and density 

An Integrated Action Plan (IAP) was developed using the URBACT methodology – which is founded on a participatory approach. From the start, a local group was responsible for co-writing and jointly overseeing this action plan. Within the local group, there were various sub-groups, whose composition evolved in parallel with the project: 

Central debate group: responsible for boosting and driving the IAP. Its members were citizens (some involved in local associations), the town council and Barcelona Metropolitan Area staff.  

Expanded group: members were elected representatives and other stakeholders.  

Open sessions: two open sessions were scheduled in which other stakeholders and all local residents could participate and make suggestions.  

It was decided to divide the decisions on the actions implementing the strategic objectives according to whether they were geared towards open spaces or built spaces. A diagnosis determined that local public space could serve a larger number of objectives. Priority was thus accorded to further examining the open spaces, rather than attempting to address all of the issues simultaneously. 

Nonetheless, the local group and the town council were committed to completing the IAP once the URBACT programme had concluded. This involved defining and scheduling actions for built spaces. The results of this second phase were shared with Badia local government officials and representatives. 

A concentration of social groups with lower incomes and greater social needs can be observed in the districts with the greatest urban shortfalls, namely housing estates constructed in the 1960s and 1970s. An especially important issue is how to balance the density of districts requiring special attention with reducing their social and urban deficits. Key challenges relate to urban segregation and the exclusively residential nature of such housing estates.

This practice highlights the challenges of social inclusion related to demographic particularities, poor image and urban deficits through a participatory approach. The process allows citizens and the officials involved to reflect on, and overcome, certain prejudices.

In relation to demographic challenges, the diagnosis helps to focus the efforts of different public agents in a more specific and integrated way. Emphasis should be placed on population density, the high percentage of dependent (elderly, teenagers, etc.) and immigrant population, and the high level of unemployment in areas characterised by urban segregation. The municipal government is currently promoting the construction of new buildings and improvements to public space.

Finally, this experience has served to enrich Barcelona’s new Metropolitan Urban Master Plan (PDUM), the urban framework that will govern the metropolitan area and its 3.3 million inhabitants for the next 30 years. 

After accommodating an influx of internal immigrants, many mass housing areas are now home to new waves of immigrants from abroad. The revision of such neighbourhoods, which exist in many European cities, is particularly urgent, especially for those built in the mid-twentieth century.

This is because sustainable growth involves recycling the existing city, protecting open spaces, and strengthening a transport-oriented development.

The context of climate change is also a factor. The buildings in these neighbourhoods have low energy efficiency ratings. Renovating them will contribute to achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

Finally, focusing on mass housing areas to improve the living conditions of vulnerable citizens will have a major impact on urban social cohesion and equality.

These goals demand clear visions and flexible and adaptable tools. This project provides just that. It represents a strategic approach that establishes a working system and lays the foundations for an adaptable intervention within the built urban context. To ensure its successful implementation, mechanisms and instruments must be adapted to the local policy framework.

The catalogue provides strategies and actions designed to address common urban situations, after adjustment to the particular circumstances of each site.

Cities adopting this practice will require the political will to initiate a complex but very enriching process involving a multiscale approach. Once neighbourhoods with similar characteristics have been identified and their social, morphological and economic characteristics analysed, it is vital to initiate a participatory process to pinpoint particular identity issues in the specific cultural context.

The practice has been shared widely, including among students in Land Architecture and urban regeneration at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Barcelona Tech University UPC. It also featured at the 4th Congress of the Hispanic Network of Urban Morphology (ISUF-H) in 2020.