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An investigation into how [landscape] architecture can start to connect different urban fabrics of a city.

Urban fabrics are defined by the users through such concepts as nodes* (focal points), paths* (channels of travel), and edges* (perceived boundaries). By altering these elements [landscape] architecture can start to blur the lines between two distinct urban communities. These changes in the perceived environment can affect the "imageability*of a city, a term coined by Kevin Lynch that describes the qualities of a space that give the observer a strong and vivid image.

Barcelona is one of the most densely populated cities in Europe where there is little green or public space outside of the large parks surrounding the city (such as Park Guell, Montjuic, and the Parc de Ciutadella). Although the urban planning of Cerda aimed to include green space throughout the city, realestate potential for that space had diminished those opportunities. The shortcomings of the city where overcome in the 1980s thanks for the regeneration of city neighborhoods, a strategy for urban reform now known as the Barcelona Model. 

Nevertheless, the creation of the Olympic village for the 1992 Summer Olympics as well as the controversial Diagonal Mar urbanistic project in 1997 has polarized and gentrified the city. The compacted city of Barcelona has changed to a dispersed city in its southeastern region. This new district lacks public interaction, consists of large-scaled high-rises, and requires vehicles as a mode of transportation.

By understanding the specific connections that have been made with the architecture, landscape, social, and cultural structures of the city, the two different urban fabrics can be intertwined to diminish the existing polarity. Through architecture one can  change the perception of the two regions by addressing the addressing their edges and reconfiguring their nodes and paths. 

*sources:

-The Image of the City by Kevin A. Lynch