DESIGNING TERRITORIAL METABOLISM

92 ON TERRITORIAL METABOLISM
fabric. After more than twenty years of transformation, we can recognize here
some linked interventions both in the Raval area (from CCCB and Macba to Rambla
del Raval-Filmothèque) and in the Gothic Quarter (Mercat de Santa Caterina and
surroundings). In these paradigmatic sites, the new public facilities became social
catalysts for a radical improvement of the formerly neglected districts.
NEW METABOLISM AS A SPATIAL PARADIGM AT THE TURN OF THE
CENTURY
At the turn of the century, two different urban projects clearly shifted the focus
of the urban transformation to a new rhetoric: the Forum 2004 project and the 22@
District. Both urban transformations originated from overcoming infrastructural
barriers, especially railway infrastructure, as part of the transformation undertaken
during the Olympic period (1992), which revealed the possibility of discussing the
urban relationship between the central core of Barcelona’s Eixample district and its
eastern districts (Rowe, 2006; Masboungi, 2012).
This part of the city was characterized by varying elements: the accumulation
of industrial settlements in the Poblenou quarter, the “Catalan Manchester”; the
presence of the functional 1960s massive housing districts (La Mina and southeast
of Besòs); and, finally, an unusual accumulation of huge pieces of infrastructure—a
garbage incineration plant, a wastewater treatment plant, and a power
plant—that are necessary to sustain the city metabolism and were placed traditionally
in peripheral sites at the limits of the city’s administrative domain.
The “Reconquest of the East” would allow the urbanity of the central city and
its benefits for the quality of life to be expanded across more than two hundred
of Cerda’s blocks, which were historically disconnected from the surrounding city,
thus stimulating new operations of a distinctive character. The strategy, already
envisioned in the 1990s by the rearrangement of the Glories’ traffic junction and
the opening of the Diagonal to the sea, was based on the Forum 2004 event and
the 22@ renewal as two long-term city projects to extend the central city towards
Poblenou’s eastern quarters.
While the early 1990s urban projects focused on the urban structuring capacity,
both the Forum project (1996–2004) and the 22@ Innovation district (since
1999) introduced new perspectives for reconsidering the role of urban metabolism
and its civic expression, both as large-scale interventions and as urban fabric
reinvention.
URBAN METABOLISM AS CIVIC EXPRESSION: THE FORUM PROJECT
Imagined by Major Pasqual Maragall after the Olympics in 1996 as a major
cultural event to be hosted in one of the envisioned “areas of new centrality,” the operation
of the Forum rearranged the end of the Diagonal Avenue, widening the scope
of the city to the full extent of its administrative limits. At this geographic position,
the social problems posed by the existing mass housing quarters came into contact
with the accumulation of metabolic infrastructure related to mobility, the coastal
ring road; water systems, a wastewater treatment plan; a power station and a waste
incineration plant.
The operation settled in a huge, socially neutral space oriented towards city
mass events and a number of iconic buildings (exhibition and conference centers,
hotels, etc.). From that moment on, the Forum area became a central reference point
at the end of the Diagonal Avenue, adding new programs on a metropolitan scale:
the new marina, the eastern UPC campus, tertiary buildings, an initially planned