From a city, the writer Italo Calvino said, you don’t enjoy “the seven or seventy-seven wonders”, but the answer it gives to your question. And the questions currently facing the world’s large cities are complex: how to respond to the climate emergency or to migratory flows; what can urban planning do so that all citizens have access to public space and facilities; what responsibility do private initiatives and the public sector have; what is more important, to have infrastructures, or the use that is given to them?; how the gender perspective is included in urban planning decisions; in short, how cities are advancing in the fight against inequalities in their many forms. Five academics spoke about all this on Tuesday at the conference Other ways of thinking about the city, ideas against inequality, organized by EL PAÍS with the collaboration of the La Caixa Foundation and held at the Palau Macaya in Barcelona.
Calvino’s phrase was brought up by Professor Carlos Moreno, scientific director of the ETI chair at the Sorbonne University in Paris, who gave the remote presentation. Moreno is an advisor to the mayor of the French capital on matters of urban planning and has promoted the concept of “the city of 15 minutes”, an urban model in which it has to be guaranteed that the citizen, wherever he is, has to have 15 minutes from all basic services. This idea has gained strength after the outbreak of the pandemic and a confinement that forced us to look around us in search of the closest solutions to the most basic needs.
“In an urban and highly digitized world that is under climatic urgency, which leaves us little time, the fundamental question we have in all latitudes is what city we want to live in,” Moreno said. The expert highlighted how “productivism” has led the citizens of the metropolitan territories to live in enormous distances, with a daily displacement of 70% of the population to one area, the work area, which is no more than 10% of the population. territory. “This pace of life dehumanizes, it strips back neighborhoods, which are only good for sleeping, and it strips back the places where we work when it’s not business hours anymore,” he said. Moreno prescribed a transformation of the city “not through infrastructure, but through the use we give it”, and listed the social functions that must be close (within 15 minutes) to all citizens: “Live with dignity, do our shopping nearby , access to physical and mental health, access to education and culture, biodiversity, work without having to travel an hour or more”. “We are talking about a decentralized city,” he concluded.
Moreno’s intervention gave way to a round table moderated by EL PAÍS journalist Clara Blanchar, with experts who highlighted the complexity of all the questions and challenges formulated. To begin with, by shared responsibility. Zaida Muxí, architect and professor at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Barcelona, stressed that “we are all participants in the situation of cities”. “We have to change the arc of thought, otherwise what we will have will be patches,” she warned. In this sense, the expert highlighted that the inequalities that affect cities are multidimensional, and not only depend on the income level of the neighbors. She focused on the gender impact of inequalities, as it is women who, for the most part, are still in charge of household chores. A gender perspective in urban planning would allow, Muxí explained, to address the need for the proximity of basic services in a more concrete way.
But to do it well there is a lack of data. “For example, until recently, walking was not considered a form of mobility, and it turns out that it is women who walk,” Muxí said. The architect and professor of urban planning at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia Miguel Y. Mayorga also spoke about the need to have information to make the best decisions. “We have to make the problems visible and measure them. In addition to urban notions, there are variable notions, and just as an architect needs a topographic plan to start designing a building, urban planners have to talk about urban life, for example, measuring biodiversity, talking about centrality based on proximity to different uses, and of an urbanity that does not deny the environment”, said Mayorga.
The architect Ana Falú, professor emeritus at the National University of Córdoba, in Argentina, who is also the former director of Unifem and advisor to UN Habitat on gender issues, defended that the transformation of cities can be undertaken from different points of view. “Who are the cities? The media, academia, entities and associations, local governments? The gender perspective and the issue of the proximity of basic services is something that there are parts of the cities that believe in it, but it is the governments that have to make the maps with the information to make decisions”, she said. Falú tried to contextualize the proposal of the city of 15 minutes of Moreno. “It is a very good idea for the rich cities of Europe, which are not the elusive, extensive and unequal cities of our Latin America. But proximity and having care infrastructure nearby is an instrument of social redistribution: the fact that I can take my elderly mother to a center that is close to home allows me to have time, something essential”, she argued.
Salvador Rueda, director of the Urban and Territorial Ecology Foundation of Barcelona, also explained that the proposal for the 15-minute city is, in reality, “the Mediterranean city”. The important thing according to Rueda, whatever the categorization, “is to look for this system of adequate proportions that allows everyone to access the city.” He gave as an example measures that have been undertaken in the Catalan capital, from the superblocks, which provide centrality to different parts of the city, to the new bus network whose implementation is yet to be completed. Rueda also brought to the table a fundamental element in the transformation of cities, and that is the role of the public sector as opposed to private initiatives. “The public is key because it was born to compensate for the dynamics that the private develops. The most important heritage that we Europeans have are cities, and there are private initiatives such as Airbnb or Amazon that dilute this heritage”, he stated.
All these challenges converge in cities, with their large concentrations of people and constant commercial interactions. The challenge is enormous, especially in the face of the urgency that climate change represents or in the face of supervening emergencies such as the covid-19 pandemic. The director of EL PAÍS in Catalonia, Miquel Noguer, highlighted in the presentation of the event some of the reports that in the last year have focused on these problems: from the greatest impact of the virus in the most vulnerable neighborhoods to the fact that In Barcelona, people sleep badly 112 nights a year as a result of the heat: “From the media it is our obligation to have this type of debate in a slow and rigorous way”.
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