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| Hypercatalunya. Multi-cities, geo-urbanities, hyper-territories |
| Manuel Gausa, Vicente Guallart and Willy Müller |
Day after day we see how those functional elements, more or less aggressive, more or less attractive or attractors, that formerly seemed to be localized in that artificial organism we used to call "city," today rapidly invade this other environment, theoretically more "rural" or "natural," that we once called "territory." The city –or at least many of its traditional manifestations– today tends to "explode," scattering over a distance, and this explosion appears to impact –with greater or lesser force and density– our surroundings, thus affirming this increasingly ambivalent, heterogeneous and dynamic state of progressively entropic growths.
The traditional tools of urban discipline would seem to yield, thus, to this more polyhedral and open state of contemporary space, which requires not models ("old" or "new"), but criteria: criteria capable of detecting strategic and potential situations in the system and of inducing qualitative reactions in them. Combining strategic levels of action, orienting and identifying this new multiple dimension of current systems of territorial relation which would struggle between different dimensions, states and scales, between that which is urban and territorial, between that which is physical and virtual, between that which is natural and artificial, and which could be associated with what some of us have defined as "multi-cities" or "geo-urbanities" in our approach to the ambiguous limits of these realities, positioned beyond traditional metropolitan areas and eternal urban/rural dichotomies.
The new "networked" nature of the structures of current development permits fostering of a more irregular and elastic state of the city and the territory: the old expansive forms of "metropolitan" accumulation thus yield to more polyhedral and discontinuous complexes that combine old and new "centres," attractor nuclei and intermediate nuclei, networks of connection and spaces of relation in a new type of structures of exchange, more complex and flexible, among "associated identities" rather than among "subordinate entities." Structures capable of working concertedly or in coordination, in order to compensate a necessary and increasingly differential distribution of growth and added value and its associated environmental "actions" and "corrections," fostering new –not necessarily homogeneous or isotropic– urban models of deliberate definition, and therefore, new qualitative (more "irregular" and "selective") strategies of territorial planning.
To speak of a multi-city would thus be an allusion to a setting in which mobility, interconnection and interscalarity would have as much weight as would have, in turn, landscape and "interplaces," intersections and nodes, growths and discontinuities.
In speaking of a hyperterritory, we would mean this multi-layered dimension of a new setting of simultaneities in which we have to identify different strategic levels of reading, recognition and venturing, whose greatest capacity would lie in its potential degree of combination. But also of "linkage," among data and phenomena, situations and demands, latencies and emergences: key questions... and latent questions.
Based on these sorts of considerations we might pose a number of questions regarding the "multiple," strategic and territorial dimension of the current Catalonia-Barcelona binomial. What sort of possible common structure or "contract" should this future "metapolitan" setting of plural exchange be oriented towards, that would interconnect growths and landscapes, axes and foci of development, channels of growth and environmental corridors, in a single "geo-strategic" logic of interaction? With what criteria of intervention, preservation and articulation should the current multi-Barcelona concert itself with the new development of Girona and Tarragona and its relation with the north and south coasts? What role would be played in this polyfocal structure (GI-BAR-TAR) by the current intermediate urban nuclei (Vilanova, Vilafranca, Igualada, Manresa, Vic, Granollers, Mataró, etc.), and how could we define an effective articulation of development in this possible "meshed matrix", nature and landscape? What possible articulating role would be played in this discontinuous conurbation by the A7/B30 highway as a large central corridor? What sort of "linkage" would be required for the large logistical potential of the Lleida-Tŕrrega-Cervera "axis" and its entire area of internal influence? What new functional state would have to be assumed by the mountainous spaces, as nature reserve and active territory at the same time? How do we approach a functional definition of infrastructures and their possible combination with natural energy systems and productive flow? Beyond the old models of urban extension and industrial areas, how should cities grow in accordance with a new environmental sensibility and a notion of habitat as a relational landscape? In what manner should the old existing fabrics be re-informed to ensure the necessary urban "reimplosions?" With what criteria should both parameters –growth and restructuring– be brought together to ensure qualitative action in a territory potentially capable of accommodating production, leisure and knowledge, based on the correct strengthening of its infrastructures? From what new creative, technological and territorial ambition must we face the challenges of the information society and its translation into new settings of exchange?
Given all of the above, it is not a question of positing, once again, the classic polemic between "diffuse" and "compact" models, but rather of promoting a possible "interlinked" –connecting– model with which to concert strategic agreements capable of superseding the traditional definitions of "city" and "territory" in new geo-urban surroundings (and systems), but capable as well of superseding the old concepts of hierarchical development, zoned growth, and mono-functional regulation that the old models of urban planning and classification made us accustomed to, and of replacing the old linear and one-dimensional models with new multi-layered, programmatically n-dimensional definitions.
We refer, then, to a new flexible logic with which to conceive authentic "territories of crossing," posited based on this "multi" and "multifaceted" state characteristic of virtual, diverse and diversified "places of places," rather than on any desire for a hypothetical, essential, cohesive and single "ideal place."
It is these criteria which would involve not only a logical amortization of existing territorial values and assets but also, above all, a determined and constant will to re-inform –from the surveying and innovation of our environment, as well as from advanced management of the territory itself– able to express our cultural, spatial and technological paradigms. Cities and countries have been cut loose, today, into a new sort of network and networked drift, and their greater or lesser capacity for progress depends on their identification as polarizers and distributors of qualitative information (and, thus, of creative as well as productive information). Otherwise, their development stalls, enters into dynamics of inertia and routine and tends towards self-decadence, that is, to a lesser or greater degree, towards subsidiary dependence. |
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