Ildefons Cerdá, urban planner
In a very interesting article titled “Sticking to the Plan,” also in the April issue of Metropolis, Eric Demby writes about the city plan for Barcelona, conceived in 1859 by civil engineer Ildefons Cerdá:
Although largely unheralded beyond Barcelona’s city limits, Cerdá [...] is one of the fathers of modern urban planning. In addition to redefining the Latin root urb to mean a group of buildings rather than a community of persons, Cerdá was foremost the original scientist of the city.
At the time, Demby writes, Barcelona’s Ciutat Vella (Old City) was overcrowded and Cerdá’s plan increased the city’s area fivefold by dividing “nine square kilometers of countryside into equal blocks separated by broad streets.” A very regular pattern, as Cerdá believed that this would cause the most variety. Demby quotes Cerdá as follows, probably from his Five Bases of the General Theory of Urbanization:
Until now, when attempting to found, reform, or expand a town, nobody ever troubled with anything other than artistic or monumental consideration, glossing over the number, class, condition, character, and means of the families that were to inhabit it.
A few years later, in 1861, he wrote about the “intimate and indissoluble link [...] between the building of a city and the general and particular well-being of the individual, the family and the State.”
Furthermore, Demby writes, “Cerdá envisioned his overall plan as a process without end.” Today, nearly 150 years later, the plan is still followed, and Cerdá’s thesis about regular patterns yielding variety has proven true, as is evident by buildings such as for instance those by Antoni Gaudí.
It would be interesting to read more about this, particularly about the relevance of a simple and regular plan, and about how his plan was maintained under this century and a half. Also, it would be interesting to read what a New Urbanist would think of Barcelona.
Some links to check up, but there are several interesting pages found when searching for Ildefons Cerdá and Barcelona:
- l’Eixample, Barcelona, an article at the Barcelona Field Studies Centre.
- Alex Marshall: Eurosprawl, a 1995 article from Metropolis Magazine.
- Maarten Hajer: The new urban landscapes, seems to be about public spaces.
1 Photo credits Andrew Martin, found at stock.xchg.