Views of the city: Barcelona as an urban laboratory

Abstract

The teaching project Views of the City has been developed since 2004, and year after year it has generated a broad background enriched by contributions from a great number of experts, who have consolidated it as a singular academic experience in the Barcelona School of Architecture. Views of the City intends to develop new forms of understanding the city and its elements by incorporating interactions with social agents and expert professionals who have defined and are part of it. Its principal aim focuses on integrating the knowledge about Barcelona, moving the academic experience from the classroom to the real urban space. Barcelona appears as an urban laboratory analysed from three different perspectives: the morphological, related with urban form, architectural design and open spaces; the social, produced by the anthropological observation carried out by agents who belong to the social system of the city; and finally the cultural, analysed from pluralistic perspectives.