Gloria Serra Coch. Masters in architecture and urbanism from the UPC and Columbia. Researching at EPFL on urban innovation factors (New York).
What can be learned from New York about urbanism?
New York is five cities, not one, but five. New York is not Manhattan and its metropolitan area. New York is Brooklyn, a working-class city that reinvents itself daily; Queens, world capital of linguistic diversity; the Bronx, artistic phoenix; Staten Island, suburban backwater; and Manhattan, the one of the dreams that are fought. Each of those cities is what they call a borough, with its own president, planning office, and budget. Five counties that were twinned in 1898, because there is strength in unity.
New York has more than 700 bridges and tunnels, spectacular works of engineering that connect these boroughs. New York has three airports. None in Manhattan, one in Queens, another in Brooklyn, and the third in New Jersey. New York does not care that Newark Airport is in another city, in another state, it has enough personality to know that sharing is gained. New York does not accept these contradictions, it integrates them into its DNA. Just as it has integrated the waves of immigrants who bring new energy and dreams. New York is brave, it is not afraid of losing its identity when it merges with others, it knows that making all those personalities its own is its strength.
How could this experience be transferred to Barcelona?
Barcelona is a city with a magnificent urban history, a heritage of linking cooperation, citizen initiative and visionary episodes, such as the Eixample or the Olympic Games. But to make the next qualitative leap, Barcelona needs to look up again, look around and reach out. The territory that surrounds us is rich in opportunities and, as in New York, there is strength in unity. We need to look for partners and, to find them, you have to be brave and generous. We must leave behind the idea of growth by absorption of adjacent urban centers and assume a real polycentrism, in which we give up the leading role without fear of losing our identity.
Why not think of a pact of cities and not one that expands? Barcelona does not want to be a town, it is a great city. A city that, without forgetting the human scale and the neighbourhood, needs metropolitan connections that link the territory, in a big way, without fear, imagining Collserola as our Central Park or El Vallès as Brooklyn. It is not about remodeling the house giving a coat of paint, it is about opening new doors and windows. Barcelona is ambitious and capable, but you have to believe in it.
