When the city is a living and changing organism

Reflection and looking at the city has been a constant and often an obsession for me. We are the direct product of our experience, of our coexistence with the environment, with the city, with each of our cities. In my case, Barcelona.

This curiosity to observe the city began when I was little, walking with my grandfather through the gray Barcelona of the seventies, to which he superimposed the even grayer and more sordid Barcelona of the war and the postwar period: his city had many Ramblas. and a lot of Chinatown, a lot of port, a lot of boxing and a lot of prostitution. In parallel, my maternal grandmother’s non-look at the city. Married at a distance to my grandfather and sent from a village in Teruel to a city that he never knew, with which he never interacted and in which he never integrated, among other things because he was not interested in him. Then, the Barcelona of my mother, the beautiful only daughter of that first emigration of Aragonese workers. She first works at the company her father worked for from age 13 until his retirement, then goes on to work in accounting at Sears. With her first salary, my mother subscribes to the Palau and she goes to the Liceu whenever she can. “Climbing up that staircase I felt like she was in my place.” But that bourgeois-Catalan dream ends when she meets my father, who becomes her boyfriend: a down-to-earth young man from Albacete who is forced to come to Barcelona to work. He never recognized himself in that group of poor workers, because he always considered himself, and in truth he was, a gentleman, but without money and without a career. If something marked my father’s life, and consequently that of his children, it was the shame of failure and class pride. An explosive mix in a city where he starts working as a salesman selling stoves. This will lead him to found a designer furniture publishing company, Sellex, important in the years of the transformation from the gray Barcelona of the seventies to the modern Barcelona that was consolidated as a brand in ’92. Thanks to him, all this was achieved. I saw, like a girl looking from behind a curtain, and I liked it so much that that’s why I am an architect. From my grandmother’s house to the Olympic city with Montserrat Caballé and Freddie Mercury, everything is Barcelona and Barcelona is a city. A mess, many desires and many pains…, but a living and changing organism. The city is always an unfinished project.

Architects have the audacity to intervene and transform with actions and decisions that material reality that belongs to everyone. That implies an enormous responsibility. I believe, therefore, that it is necessary for us to clearly explain the model of life and coexistence that we have in our heads, because each of the lines that we draw and then build will lead to that life being realized in that way.

In a world of cities standardized by globalized consumption, it is more than ever necessary to understand and defend what makes us unique and which is probably what will allow us to continue being humanly universal. Being universal implies recognizing that humans are all the same, but that we do not want to be identical, which is the same as being nothing.

I have worked intensely in Iraq, Afghanistan, a raid in Dagestan, an intense stay in West Africa and a dive through the Czech Republic, on projects of different natures. This means trying to understand the essence of places quickly, not over a lifetime like you do with your own city.

For almost 15 years my life has been closely linked to Iraq. I went for the first time in 2010, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and I developed projects focused on the urban rehabilitation and revitalization of a destroyed country where some of the oldest cities in the world are located. And those cities of enormous heritage value have been devastated by wars, poor planning and a poorly understood modernity that, starting in the seventies, built megalomaniac road infrastructures of iron and concrete on the fragile fabrics of the Arab cities of medieval origin, where It dominates the human scale and the construction of mud or brick.

Trying to intuit the past, respect it and integrate the present to enable a future city that is friendlier, more sustainable and appropriate to the culture and climate of the place was our ambitious but unavoidable objective. The evidence after 10 years is that the economic and political interests that govern our time are betting in this part of the world on a city model in which the new fortunes settle in newly built luxury ghettos (not always inhabited) and the city historical and historical inhabitants, with a tendency towards endemic poverty, are abandoned to their fate in the hope that they will disappear from our sight as soon as possible and these new emerging classes will live their fiction of vital consumption without ugly mirrors. I want to believe that there is something so strong in the surviving soul of the people of that country that at some point it will rise from the rubble and beauty will germinate through that stupid layer of cheap shine that they are building now.

In September 2012, with my old studio AV62, we won the competition for the new National Museum of Afghanistan, organized by the Ministry of Information and Culture of Afghanistan, the National Museum of Afghanistan and the US Embassy in Kabul. The first question we asked ourselves was what a national museum should be in a city like Kabul and what real, immediate and future needs of users it should take into account. The conceptualization of this project was based on three fundamental aspects: the responsibility of providing a response to an urban context with great potential for transformation; a unique collection like that of said museum, and in certain historical circumstances of great fragility. In short, an architecture capable of hosting our daily activities, from the most corporeal – shadow, freshness, bodily well-being, rest and encounter – to those that allow us to interpret the world and exorcise our fears through art, poetry or magic. . For us, this project could never be an international project, but despite being foreigners, our responsibility is to have the ability to read the context and propose something new that can take root. If this is not achieved, the project is always a failure that time reveals.

In 2019 I was hired by a Spanish construction company, PNHG, which is building a new city in Benin called Ouèdo: 12,000 social apartments, about 60,000 inhabitants. The growth of African cities is tragic. While the population displaced by poverty is crowded into informal neighborhoods among the technological garbage that the West gets rid of, certain investors get rich with dreams of luxury rendered which are simple capital displacement operations. Some governments build new cities that are nothing more than dormitory neighborhoods of poor quality blocks without equipment or services. Before they are finished, they will become ghettos of poverty and marginality. Our work consisted of drafting a plan that, through the insertion of private housing, would generate resources to provide the city with those services and equipment that the project completely lacks. An epic attempt to make a new residential monoculture plant city sustainable. I don’t think our proposal was perfect and I don’t think they will be able to implement it. What I know for sure is that, if something is not done, this new city will join the long list of failed cities that have degenerated into ghett
os of marginality.

So, you have to read the place, internalize it, interpret it. Only then can you take the risky leap of proposing something that does not kill the valuable existing, that eliminates only what can be eliminated and that proposes what can germinate and grow, offering something better to life. See everything, touch everything, eat everything! And this methodology is extendable to anyone who really wants to know and appreciate a city, because only when we know something in depth are we able to love it intensely, and only if we want it intensely will we be able to respect and care for what is valuable in each person, every place, of every life and of life. Understanding and respecting the essence of cities means understanding and respecting ourselves as changing individuals and as humans connected to each other and to our environments.

Victoria Garriga Ariño is an architect.

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