Past, present, and future in the city

My partner Enric Batlle and I have been working in this area for over 40 years. Landscape design has always been there: together with urban space, planning and construction. It has kind of come from all sides. Enric is the son of a gardener, and has always been imbued with a sensibility for nature. And my father was a builder, so the rationality of construction and building production has always been a part of my makeup. Neither of us work in this profession because of those family roots, but, ultimately, they have played a large part. We both started working together in the studio of Elías Torres and José Antonio Martínez la Peña, where the idea of the construction of public space and nature was of central importance, and that has also been an influence right from the start.

Ever since the 80s, Barcelona has been a model city for many things: we have always attracted the world’s attention. The fact that we were Spain’s most cosmopolitan city in the 60s and 70s and that, with the recovery of democracy, we became a leader in public space construction has meant that what has come to be known as the Barcelona model (which is not one model, but many), has served as a model for the rest of the world. In the 80s in New York there was talk about the Barcelona model, and also in Le Monde. We have always been a focal point, and what has been done here has served as an example for other countries to follow. We have also looked to other countries.

Yes. We have often honed in on the idea that the city needs more green spaces. We differentiate the home from green space. The home and the park, the home and the garden. That’s something we have to break away from. The situation is more ambiguous than that. What we propose is the idea of fusing city and nature, not to make parks, but rather that the whole of the city has the function of a park. That the streets don’t have drains that take the rainwater to the sewers, for example, but rather that this water drains into the water table or accumulates and is then directed to the water table. The streets should function like gardens, the trees in the city not like city trees, but rather like a garden, in order to improve quality of life.

The whole city needs to be natural. Rewilding the city is one of the parameters of our book. The city needs to fuse both aspects again. The city needs to be a biophilic place, so that there can be insects, butterflies and bees, and we need to understand that this can happen alongside urban life.

What urban life has sought is an anthropocentric comfort that runs contrary to life in nature. The moment trees are chosen for the city that don’t produce pollen (to avoid allergens) or trees that don’t produce fruits (to avoid staining the streets), we are trying to read the city from a human viewpoint. But from the perspective of nature, trees have to produce fruit, the fruit has to fall to the floor and stain the floor. And that’s fine. Among other things because the floor doesn’t have to be something that can be stained, but instead could be earth that absorbs the flesh of the fruit. And it would encourage animals into the city, and not just dogs on leads: insects, bees and, therefore, pollination. A life cycle.

It’s not that we have to perceive the city in the future as part of the natural environment, but rather that we have to start doing that right now. We have to install operational systems from nature in the city itself. We work in public space with elements that correspond to public space. If you work in a place that has earth, you work with the earth, you work with vegetation.

With urban furniture it’s the same thing. We want urban furniture to have the same natural value as the intervention we are carrying out in nature. I would ask the people working in urban furniture production to start working out how to make urban furniture using purely natural elements and, therefore, move away from artificial elements. So we can have the same discourse in the landscape as in the elements that adorn it.