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10 The Barcelona Region’s land mosaic
Suppose you were faced with developing a regional plan that highlights natural
systems and their human uses for one of the world’s great cities. You have never
been to the city or its surroundings, though you once lived in the broader
geographic region. What would you do? Here is my story, and especially its
result.
Barcelona struck me as a vibrant livable place with a cutting-edge can-do
attitude. Best known are the amazing multicolored organic structures created
more than 80 years ago across the city by Antoni Gaudi. I was inspired by his
Parque Guell, especially the stunning evocative mosaics created with broken
pieces of brightly colored ceramics (Color Figure40). They are as magical today
as when he did them. Any land mosaic I propose for the Greater Barcelona
Region should be as inspiring, valuable, and long-lasting as those ceramic mosaic
masterpieces in tiny spaces.
In essence, a 150-page conceptual plan (including 28 maps) was prepared over
a15-month period for the city’s Mayor and Chief Architect (Forman 2004a). The
project objective was to evaluate and highlight the importance of the urban
region (rather than the city), the major natural systems therein, and the diverse
human uses of these natural systems. This challenge was addressed by the devel-
opment of a ‘‘land mosaic for natural systems and people” based on landscape
ecology and other principles. I extensively visited the region, talked with diverse
knowledgeable experts, and accumulated shelves of valuable information, maps,
and literature. The resulting report listed important assumptions, stated basic
principles, outlined a vision, portrayed simple spatial models, applied the mod-
els to the region, and identified options. Major themes were highlighted in
detail. And three plan options for the Greater Barcelona Region as a whole were
described, mapped, and compared.