On the one hand are the roundabouts, the train tracks, the sea, the mountains or that monumental error that was the Glòries ring road, which has cost so much time and money to correct and which has been a drag on the city. These would be the visible barriers, the real and festering scars that cities heal based on investments.
And, on the other hand, there are the hidden barriers that hinder the sum of efforts, the automatisms and misgivings that, in short, despite not being tangible, prevent projects on a city scale from taking off. These wounds are difficult to heal. They require leadership that is unaffordable to discouragement.
In Barcelona some projects with this city scale are underway. One of them, the Ciutadella del Coneixement, has already overcome the most difficult stages, those prior to the start of the works. For the less initiated: the Ciutadella del Coneixement is a project to promote the park and its surroundings as a pole of scientific and cultural excellence. Its epicenter is the site of the old Mercat del Peix, where a research complex in biomedicine, biodiversity and planetary well-being will be built.
Most of the people who talk about the project exclusively mention the scientific part and ignore the cultural one. Reference to the museums on the other side of Ciutadella (next to Paseo Picasso) as part of the global project is rare, although this combination of science and culture was defended from the beginning by promoters of the project such as Andreu Mas-Colell, Jordi Camí and Mateu Hernandez. The Palau dels Tres Dragons (the Museum of Zoology), the Museu Martorell, the Umbracle or the Hivernacle appeared on the first maps of the project.
But, regardless of whether or not these museums are included in the photograph, the option of considering that this Ciutadella del Coneixement must incorporate, as one of its main strengths, the great public library that has already begun to be built is still more minority. on land attached to the França station, so close to the park.
The most obvious reason for this oversight is that this equipment paid for by the State on City Council land and managed by the Generalitat has been under the radar for too long. After the fiasco of its location in the Born, many Barcelonans have disconnected from the project.
Another reason, also obvious, is that when the word library is mentioned, a 19th-century facility incapable of evoking the idea of modernity comes to mind, which does suggest, on the other hand, the research center that is going to be built at the other end of the park. .
In short, another reason for the invisibility of the library is that, right now, it belongs to everyone and belongs to no one. We repeat: the Ministry of Culture pays for municipal land and will have to manage it, when it is ready in a few years (it is better not to set deadlines that will not withstand the test of the newspaper library) whoever then governs the Generalitat.
The independence sphere never felt as its own a library that until four days ago carried the adjective of provincial. In fact, it is an outstanding debt that the State has towards the province of Barcelona, the only one without this type of equipment. But the current Minister of Culture, Natàlia Garriga, has assumed the involvement of the Government in the project without further problems.
What is missing now, and in this all the administrations have a responsibility, is the creation of a commission that begins to work now on the design of the library for the next decade, as well as a direction in charge of guiding the deliberations. Once again, the risk of invisible barriers that prevent significant steps forward lurks.
Due to its dimensions and its strategic location, this library, in addition to housing –of course– books, is destined to be a first-rate Barcelona cultural center. For this reason, those assets that define the creative proposal of the city should be able to get involved from now on. Not only the publishing world, with its successful idea of locating literary archives there and a permanent exhibition on bookish Barcelona, but also the most advanced proposals in the museum, musical or artistic areas.
Without forgetting that in the years in which the library will be under construction, there will be spectacular advances in artificial intelligence, robotics or supercomputing, fields in which Barcelona is better positioned than most of the cities with which it competes.
In this last field, all you have to do is let your imagination run wild and think about what a technology such as that of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), capable of processing a colossal amount of texts, can contribute to a library that is born with the purpose of carrying human knowledge to limits now unknown. With the idea of being an advanced laboratory for everything that has to do with reading.
Moving blindly, building the building without necessarily having a revolutionary concept of what a public library should be in, say, 2030, can be a missed opportunity. This requires consensus, political generosity and a lot of ambition. It is urgent, from the outset, to create a multidisciplinary commission that begins to imagine what the library of a future should be like, which will bring changes that we cannot even imagine now.
