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09 / 09 / 2004
Joan Busquets (Architect): "The main reason for transforming cities has been the car"
The Catalan architect Joan Busquets has spoken of new cities, forms of mobility and the need to reduce the number of cars in cities
The Catalan architect Joan Busquets explained, "the main transformation of our cities has been the result of personal mobility, which in other words means, the car". Busquets reminded audiences that, "private mobility is on the increase".
Busquets referred to a time 50 years ago when "the car was a symbol of liberty. Man thought he could go anywhere and for that reason a concerted effort was undertaken to build highways in and around our cities".
In the opinion of Busquets it is important "to find systems of mobility that are different, as it is not the city that moves but the flow of traffic and people that change rapidly". Busquets went on to express the need to find new forms of transport and not to have to change cities.
"A variety of forms of transport or "inter-connecting transport" is essential in ensuring viable urban planning", said Busquets. In this sense, the architect spoke of the "rediscovery of the tram throughout Europe, which has resulted in the recovery of public space and a new dynamic in design". Among these new forms of viewing urban design, in terms of mobility, Busquets spoke of initiatives such as the idea put into practice in the center of London where drivers have to pay five pounds to be able to drive in the city center.
Busquets said that the trend on an urban level "is based on a varied combination of forms of transport so that the city can be as sustainable as possible, assuring connectivity between different forms of transports so that changeover from one to another is efficient".
In the case of Barcelona, "20 years ago traffic passed through an urban environment", said Busquets. He went on to explain that once cities became interested in opening up towards highways, projects including ring roads were undertaken". Busquets defended the idea that "the collective space is the space that has the most rights on an urban level" and gave the example of ring roads and major highways leading to and from the city being covered over and hidden underground.
For Busquets, the tram in Barcelona "serves areas of the city that the metro does not reach and where there is not as high a percentage of users". Busquets pointed out, "there is an increasingly amount of people moving around, more sectors and more people living outside the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona and if public transport does not take this into consideration there will be a heavy increase in individual mobility around cities like Terrassa or Mataró".
Busquets also mentioned the transformation of the historical parts of many Spanish cities that "were never intended to accommodate cars".
According to the explanation given by the professor of the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura (Superior School of Architecture) in Barcelona, the future of our cities is affected by specific conditions. In the first place, Busquets envisages "the taming of the car: head-on confrontation does not make sense but other alternative forms of transport do". In addition, Busquets insisted on the fact that "people will have increasingly more and more access to mobility and personal comfort is based on the ability to choose transport ".
Busquets has insisted on the idea of "modulating cars, we have to overcome the culture of the automobile and replace it with the culture of human beings".
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