Barcelona: Modern Architecture Guide

2004 The Forum of Cultures and the connection Diagonal

South/Sant Adrià/Besós. Urban management, marketing and iconic architecture The first Universal Forum of Cultures was organised in 2004 and revolved around three main themes: sustainable development, world peace and cultural diversity. This new major event was a trigger for Barcelona to drive forward with an operation to clean up, reorganise and boost an area of the city that was complex, loss-making, partially obsolete and unresolved: that encompassing the mouth of the River Besòs, the point where Avinguda Diagonal reaches the sea, the Ronda de Litoral (coastal ring road) as it passes through and the seafront, plus the relationship with the town of Sant Adrià and the treatment of the existing wastewater treatment plant.

The Forum site arose, in this sense, as an opportunity to find solutions to a broad range of accumulated problems and needs present in a sector still in a “latent state”; there was an attempt then, to emulate the good results obtained with the urban planning project for the Olympic Games of 1992.

The first operation involved the introduction of a wide esplanade that, together with other parks nearby, provided a boundary for the site while covering over the wastewater treatment plant. Secondly, that enormous public area needed to harmonise the meeting of the public space with the seafront, the coastal ring road and Passeig del Taulat as well as help define the perimeter of the new marina, “Port Fórum”, and all its associated facilities. A new and representative landmark appeared in the construction of a giant photovoltaic solar plant hovering above the ground, which was also designed to act as an immense pergola situated right by the new bathing areas and the open-air auditoria, created via a system of artificial sand dunes.

The ambitious urban development operation sparked by the Forum would provide solutions to a large part of the urban puzzle and the numerous commitments that the city still had pending at the previously mentioned crossroads. However, owing largely to the urgency of the official requirements, some cultural facilities and important support structures (business centre, conventions centre, etc.), were resolved with iconic and autonomous objects isolated from city spaces. Had these been given a treatment more focused on integration, they could have (once the Forum event concluded) offered themselves as new innovated and innovating scenarios for the city. The Forum of Cultures was to form part, in any event, of a decided urban marketing plan designed to sell the Barcelona brand.

The event was to be a great showcase that would let the world view a city that wanted to appear as a leading centre of avant-garde design, but also a window display of a city devoted to mass tourism, leisure consumption and the hypothetical potential of the tertiary sector.

In any case, the great Forum operation was also a missed opportunity to integrate the neighbourhoods surrounding the site into a new, imaginative urban fabric, and it wasted the chance to resolve important spatial, social and landscape problems and propose more open and participative debates with the city’s inhabitants in general and with research and creation in particular.

A large number of the criticisms raised then focused on denouncing the speculative use of the land and the death of the balance between public and private investment, or the abandoning of horizontal urban planning for another based on vertical constructions. Advantage was not taken to commit to encouraging more empathetic, sustainable and interactive urban development, capable of promoting a potentially more innovative and stimulating “new urban model” for the 21st century.