El projecte urbà com a recerca

Abstract

Centring on forms of intervention in the contemporary city, the article offers an initial outline of the principal commonplaces of 20th-century urbanism (the automobile and mass housing production), and architects and urban planners' attitudes to the city. Using his own projects and research experiences, the author outlines five arguments to illustrate how the urban project is a form of research in the field of urbanism. This is the case of integrating a range of accessibilities (presented in the complex project to underground the railway in the city of Delft), of using new logics to reinterpret the city of the past (old town of Toledo), of new models for building today's city (Nesselande, Rotterdam), of the question of density and mixed uses (Qianhai, Shenzhen) and of experimental projects (the train in the Pyrenees). Together, these examples illustrate architecture's stimulating responses to the challenges raised by the contemporary city.