Urban Resilience Lab Barcelona

Blog

Welcome to our blog! Here, you’ll find descriptions and video tours of our site visits linked to the Resilience Map, along with the latest news and updates we’re excited to share with you.
 

Montjuïc “Botanical Neglect” Walk

During the Primavera R Festival on April 11th, we had the pleasure of experiencing the “Botanical Neglect” walk, led by Garbino Carballo. This site visit offered an opportunity to explore the ecological, biological, and social benefits of Montjuïc, while also examining how these are affected by surrounding urbanization and the various urban activities taking place there. The walk guided us through several parks and gardens on the hill, beginning with the Gardens of Walter Benjamin and Hortes de Sant Bertran, continuing through Forestier’s Stairs, Jardins de Mossèn Costa i Llobera, and Jardins de Miramar, and finally returning to Avinguda Paral·lel via the Jardins de la Primavera. Along the route, we learned about the complex historical, urban development, and social issues that have emerged from the many uses of these spaces, and about the many great benefits these parks and gardens provide to the city in terms of resilience. Take a look at our Recap Video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx62-_9uPCg

Read More »

Designing Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems in practice: a field visit at Parc de les Aigües de Barcelona

With the rising awareness of climate change impacts, and as the number and frequency of rainfall events increases, so does the need for innovative rainwater management solutions. Especially in the context of Barcelona, increasing precipitation constantly puts the sewerage systems under pressure. However, rather than simply replacing existing pipes with larger ones, benefits can be achieved by focusing on more integrated and sustainable rainwater management, retaining the rainwater through paths and gardens which reduce the speed of the run-off. We had the chance to spend a whole day with the chief architect who designed the Parc de les Aigüesin Barcelona, understanding and touching with our hands how to design and manage sustainable urban drainage systems solutions in practice. The renovation project we visited was developed by CREAM, and Angel Cerezo, founder partner of the firm, explained the whole design process taking us on a tour. The parc is an 11-hectare site located in Cornellá de Llobregat (Barcelona) and linked to the Llobregat River (one of the two rivers’ mouths defining Barcelona city Northers and Southern boundaries) and representing an ecological corridor and a vertebral axis of this part of the city. The project aimed at recovering this natural characteristic of the space and improving the habitat of flora and fauna while serving as a didactic, pedagogical and social tool, supporting the memory of the place and its heritage values. The lens through which the project was conceived integrated water engineering and landscape architecture, recovering the place’s intrinsic relationship with the natural environment, its ecosystems and water flows. This has been done through a complete redesign of the park access and parking space, the underground ponds, pipes and canals for a more sustainable and flooding-proof water balance of the rain run-off and ultimately the re-urbanization of the garden paths. The parc is an 11-hectare site located in Cornellá de Llobregat (Barcelona) and linked to the Llobregat River (one of the two rivers’ mouths defining Barcelona city Northers and Southern boundaries) and representing an ecological corridor and a vertebral axis of this part of the city. The project aimed at recovering this natural characteristic of the space and improving the habitat of flora and fauna while serving as a didactic, pedagogical and social tool, supporting the memory of the place and its heritage values. The lens through which the project was conceived integrated water engineering and landscape architecture, recovering the place’s intrinsic

Read More »

Political barriers to decarbonizing the building sector

Climate change is a wicked problem that calls for new ways of governing. Decarbonization – the process of overcoming society’s dependence on fossil fuels – is a complex process of societal change. Reflexive governance helps address the ambivalence of goals, uncertainty of knowledge, and distributed efforts involved. Accordingly, it emphasizes the importance of participation, experimentation, and collective learning. But decarbonization is also highly political. It requires that fossil fuel supporting norms, institutions, capacities, and coalitions be questioned. Yet, the literature on climate governance largely overlooks politics. My research reveals how politics shape decarbonization trajectories in the building sector through struggles over problem/solution definitions, formal and informal rules, and power. Understanding these political barriers is crucial for several reasons: It helps us move beyond simplistic, technocratic solutions to address the full complexity of societal transformation. It reveals hidden obstacles that may undermine even the most well-intentioned decarbonization policies. It provides insights into how we can design more effective governance strategies that account for political realities. International Scale: The World Green Building Council’s Net Zero Program At the international scale, the World Green Building Council’s Advancing Net Zero program was explored through discourse analysis of over 100 documents, 22 interviews, and two webinar transcripts. Our analysis identified six main storylines used to legitimate Net Zero Carbon Building standards. While the WorldGBC’s legitimation strategy allowed for the rapid diffusion of Net Zero Carbon Building standards, we also found tensions between efficiency claims and procedural integrity, between promises of distributed benefits and economic advantages for industry incumbents. Further research into discursive legitimation practices revealed that the incremental, techno-optimistic approach to decarbonization was legitimated by nesting these discourses within more systemic sustainability narratives. The perception of consensus was fostered by adopting a broad definition that could be adapted to various regional expectations, while actively suppressing public conflict over the Net Zero Carbon Building solution. This demonstrates how legitimacy imperatives and discursive practices can limit transformative change. It highlights the challenges of making diverse perspectives explicit and reflecting upon them publicly. At the same time, these findings underscore the need to reflect on legitimation discourses, practices, and mechanisms that reinforce the status quo or provide opportunities for change. These reflections are increasingly critical to avoid depoliticising decarbonization as public policymakers consider private standards as policy models or compliance options. Urban Scale: Building Emission Performance Standards At the urban scale, I studied building emission performance standards (BEPS)

Read More »

Reflective insights on the community resilience workshop: Barriers and Enablers to Effective Climate Governance in Cities

Community is a complex term in itself, often overused. The concept is layered with social, spatial and emotional dimensions. Adding to it, “resilience”, it is another challenge to define. Community and resilience are both rich terms employed in many fields. “We all agree more or less on a definition of community, at the end of the day it is just a word, but we can agree that community is not for example a fruit!”. It was a playful, frustrating moment when we discussed the definition of the words, on the second day of the workshop on community resilience by the URLab Barcelona. In reality and a more scholarly approach, community is a complex, multiscale term, often used with a positive connotation. From the article shared with us by Mulligan,2016. We could define a community as a social formation multilayered and dynamic, sharing similar characteristics (whether place-based or virtual, identities,…etc) creating a network and relationships, a sense of belonging shaped by contexts and common goals. But then, where does the resilience fit? And how can we address its temporal, geographic, and transformative dimensions without getting lost in abstraction? Group discussion. Photo: Marti Colomer Morera Organized by the URLab Barcelona, this event is the second of a series of international writing workshops connected to the topics “Barriers and Enablers to Effective Climate Governance in Cities”, which are raised by the issue of the Frontiers in Sustainable Cities journal. A first event happened at the end of October addressing the barriers and enablers to carbon neutrality. This February, the goal was to critically analyze the reasons for governance frameworks’ difficulties in supporting community resilience in the context of climate resilience. We spent three full days immersed in the dynamics between communities in all their forms and their relationship with climate resilience. The focus was on the barriers and enablers to effective climate governance in cities. I listened to different lectures from diverse professionals in the field and participated in the site visit of the Sant Antoni superblocks. Here in this reflective essay, I aim to summarize the key notes of the workshop. This event was a great closure for our module on community resilience. After spending the last weeks on site visits around Barcelona and even out of the city in Olot. We immersed ourselves in different community-led initiatives such as the cooperatives of Barcelona (La Bobilla, Sostre Civic, etc) centered around the

Read More »