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12 / 09 / 2004
Joan Muñoz (Urban geographer): "We should all be able to live in the city, but it's too expensive"
The Forum's "141 Questions" (127): "Are making housing developments what makes a city?" Joan Muñoz, urban geographer and professor of geography of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, tried to give some key points for understanding the current problem of large cities, the phenomena of the US style developments that have become more and more habitual here, the management of time, the urban mobility, and the need of the establishment for a new social contract with the civil society, the public administrations, and the private sector in town planning issues."
The geographer, Joan Muñoz, who has participated in the sessions of the parallel dialogues "City and Citizenship for the 21st Century" and "Collective Public Space: new perspectives" that ended today at the Forum's Convention Center, stated that "having housing developments helps to have a city." From this Muñoz has made a few generic remarks about some of the perspectives.
According to Muñoz "everyone should be able to live in a city, but it's too expensive. Those who do not want to leave the city should be able to stay." The increase of the prices of houses in the city centers is parallel, as the professor of the Autonomous University of Barcelona said, to the creation of the numerous developments that have been built around Barcelona. "In the 311 municipalities of the metropolitan region of Barcelona, 80% of the buildings built in the last fifteen years are houses with gardens. I think that this is a negative tendency."
The participating public disagreed with some of the speaker's statements, stating the contradictions that are often produced in cities; for example, in neighborhoods with a large amount of inhabitants that do not have enough community services, large commercial and recreational malls have been built. A visitor gave the example of the commercial surface linked to a basketball sports club planned for Badalona. Muñoz, who acknowledged that he is not aware of the details of the project, refrained from evaluating it and stated that citizens need to be conscience that "the city is a space of conflict and it will be even more so in the future." The urban geographer defended that, in any case, there is a need for projects "that put cities like, in this case, Badalona, on the map."
Asked about how to avoid the formation of closed immigrant communities that can become ghettos, Muñoz affirmed that, "the public authorities need to make a city planning policy that is closely linked to the social policies". "What I mean is, it is the town planning departments within these authorities that must know what they are doing and make agreements with those who conduct the social policies".
With regard to the policies of urban regeneration in the oldest districts of the cities, and especially of Barcelona, in response to a question from the audience that raised the issue of the ethics of the construction companies, the quality of the new work and the assistance towards rehabilitation, Muñoz affirmed that “a new social contract is required and the authorities need to establish clearer directives" in order to defend the rights of citizens. Muñoz also talked about the case of the district of Ciutat Vella in Barcelona, one of the urban areas of the city that has most strongly experienced the process of urban renewal as a result of municipal policies. On the subject of the Born, he said: "it has been rehabilitated and has become a district of fashion and design stores, but in the 1980s City Council documents literally spoke of the need to "sanitize it", because the district had many social problems and was a place where there was a lot of crime”.
In answer to a comment from the audience, the geographer also talked about the architectural barriers that prevent the easy movements of people with reduced mobility. According to Muñoz, although the situation is improving, the lack of a design of squares and streets adapted to the needs of the disabled has happened because until now "these people have not been taken into consideration. The city has not been designed for them", and he mentioned some interesting initiatives "although some seem like science fiction", such as for example mobile phone alarm signals when a wheelchair approaches an obstacle in its path, or the initiative to include the Braille language on the street pavements, to help the blind. Muñoz also said that, quite often, even "for those of us who do not have a physical disability, it is difficult to walk along the street with so many post boxes and telephone booths. Rather than street furniture we would have to call them street obstacles".
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