The movement from fragmentation to recomposition

The great unease felt with regard to the morphological and functional organisation of the city produced by the institutionalisation of the modern project derived not only from the city’s evident state of degradation, but also from the realisation that a large part of local society, a society divided by deep inequalities reflected in the social division of space, could not identify with the idea of the city as a representation of social relations. The series of rules and procedures constituting the operative apparatus of town planning, which aim to resolve abstract questions of land use and density, had some definite spatial implications, one of which was the tearing apart of the lawscape through the gap created between the public and the private, the individual and the social. People were inevitably destined to suffer the consequences of such plans and urban development projects that typically ignored specific contexts and local demands. These instruments had produced residential conglomerations, i.e. ‘shapeless and opaque spaces without explicit reference to the conventions of social living, without symbolic depth’ (Huet, Reference Huet1984, p. 11). Such conglomerations were soon to become symbols of dehumanisation, their dimensions had grown along the masses of planning and building regulations, and here standardised mass production had been marketed ‘as social equalisation raised to an aesthetic principle’ (Oswalt, Reference Oswalt and Gemma2006, p. 129). The divorce that had arisen between the city and its inhabitants, who identified with it less and less, ultimately led to the de-legitimisation of urban policy and the regulatory instruments implemented from World War II on (Jacobs, Reference Jacobs1961; Lee, Reference Lee1973; Frampton, Reference Frampton1980; Rykwert, Reference Rykwert2000).

Given the inadequacy of modern town-planning methods and the failure of major urban development programmes, intervening in existing cities required the formulation of new cognitive strategies that would resuscitate the lawscape from its decline. These strategies were characterised above all by a commitment to understanding the present (as opposed to evading it by constructing new myths) and by an acknowledgement of social responsibility, on behalf of both institutions and professionals, in attributing meaning to the city and setting out prospects for its development.

In the field of urban planning, the shift from Modernism brought about a plurality of positions and tendencies that took into account the fragmentation of the urban fabric, the juxtaposition of its different parts, and the ‘palimpsestic’ nature of historical form (Rowe and Koetter, Reference Rowe and Koetter1978; Harvey, Reference Harvey1990). On the one hand, there emerged a ‘dissolving’ vision of the architectural artefact and of space, embraced by the theorists of ‘populist’ post-modernism. This was understood as a set of styles and signs, transformed into a market-orientated instrument of communication as promoted by the mass media and the related ‘cultures of taste’, and not as a form in space. On the other hand, in accordance with the figure of the bricoleur outlined by the authors of Collage City, the fragmentary character of the city shifted from being a distinctive element to being a condition, allowing only for partial projects on parts of the city rather than plans for the overall layout (Rowe and Koetter, Reference Rowe and Koetter1978). Profound changes in transport and communications technology presented an unprecedented opportunity to diversify the city’s spatial configuration by creating non-concentrated urban forms, akin to traditional ones but dispersed and decentralised. Having eliminated the constrictions of space and time, these changes made it possible to develop complex spatial and temporal geographies of urban practices – as underlined by academic literature which emphasises the decoupling of physical spatial patterns from the time–space of the relational dynamics of the traditional urban places – as well as highly differentiated social uses of space (Jencks, Reference Jencks1978; Graham and Healey, Reference Graham and Healey1999; Massey, Reference Massey, Doreen, John and Steve1999; Graham and Marvin, Reference Graham and Marvin2001).

This novel interpretation of the city as a discontinuous structure, characterised more by the collision rather than the cohesion between physical construction and a heterogeneous concept of urban space, gave rise to two opposing tendencies: the first one elevates to the point of paroxysm the ‘fragment’, with the result of the fetishisation of a torn and angular urban space; the second, by contrast, turns towards the recovery of traditional morphologies, evocative of the pre-industrial city. This latter was to be achieved by recreating spaces intended to reproduce the city’s integrity and symbolic richness, understood once again as the expression of a social order, within which a system of autonomous communities could take place. This model, unlike the vision of the city that had inspired it, has found various applications that effectively parodied it, meeting the aspirations of well-off social elites in various forms of peri-urban residential enclaves, gated communities, holiday villages and the other types of quartiers fermés that directly responded to the growing need for security provoked by the decline in the protection system of the Social State (Bauman, Reference Bauman2005).

The dialectical clash between the different positions that have engaged with the issue of urban reconstruction has characterised the debate regarding the urban project, especially the debate promoted in Berlin by the IBA. At the same time, we see the beginning of a great deal of experimentation with methods and strategies that have engaged with the issue of the ‘critical reconstruction’ of the city, i.e. through a dialectical confrontation with the sense of its historical truth. These have tackled the problem of the meaning of space and the organisation of the urban area, and have therefore tried to define criteria and guidelines for modifying the pre-existing fabric based on an understanding of its background and history, from which to derive principles for ordering its identity but also its function in respect of the processes that produce and reproduce social life. In other words, the form of pre-industrial lawscaping is being recast in such a way that now normativity facilitates social spatial movement; the fragment becomes inscribed in the urban texture as a distinct locus of community formation.

In Barcelona and Berlin, this movement, from a discontinuous and alienating to a centralised yet multiple lawscaping exercise, has been sustained by a clear political intention to generate a discursive public realm, mobilising wide-ranging attention around discussion about an image and a representation of the city (Healey, Reference Healey2002), to reconfigure key dimensions of the institutional infrastructure of the urban area and reorganise the city. This reorganisation was pursued beginning with its most strategic parts, mitigating social inequalities as expressed in urban space and acting on the mechanisms that produce them, or trying to reduce the impact of neoliberal policies and restrain the powerful speculative pressures which, in the case of Berlin, characterised the phase immediately following the fall of the Wall.

Two convergent itineraries

Despite their differing contexts and historical backgrounds, in both Berlin and Barcelona this new lawscaping entailed engagement with the city’s historical heritage; in other words, with the materials and compositional aspects of the urban space of the traditional European city, and simultaneously with the systems that governed the planning and organisation of the expansion of the city during its transition to a modern metropolis. In the case of Barcelona, this meant reinterpreting the rules and constituents of the consolidated city in order to reaffirm the primacy of public space, especially in the sense of contact space, as an essential component of the city. In the case of Berlin, a city exceptionally full of incomplete or interrupted projects, it involved a prioritisation of duration and permanence, from which to derive the method of ‘critical reconstruction’.

In the decade leading up to the fall of the Wall, efforts had been made to reconstruct whole districts of Berlin that had been destroyed, and to reconnect pieces of the urban fabric. Priority was given to creating residential units in central areas, mainly in the regime of social housing, engaging with the issue of the city block and in particular with reforms of its traditional late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After the fall of the Wall and the opening of an expansive public debate on how best to reconstruct the reunified city, the aim was to reconstruct the old city centre and upgrade the ‘socialist city’ by reconstituting its identity based on historical continuity and the common memory of Berlin.

In Barcelona, where consideration of the great IBA experiment had proved beneficial, redevelopment was to occur on the basis of the urban development plan of Cerdà, which had been and was again to be the matrix for the shape of the new city. Thus, the intricate relation between a space of movement and a space of repose initially captured and encouraged in the nineteenth-century area of Ensanche, was one of the things that was chosen to be reproduced in the new lawscaping of the city. This was not unthinking historical reproduction but a resuming and updating of the effectiveness and coherence of the urban form that encourages an abundant development of the kind of street life that characterises the historical parts of Barcelona. Furthermore, to again propose a close relation between the two kinds of space which structured the Ensanche has signified the rejection of the logic of abstract space–time and the ‘pre-eminence of linear repetition over other rhythms of the city’ (Butler, Reference Butler2008, p. 472) implicit in the Modernist paradigm of urban mobility, supporting the reappropriation of physical space and promoting different rhythms of movement through space.

In both these renovatio urbis experiments, there was a reshaping of public institutions–citizen relations, through a decentralisation of local government structures and a real involvement in social participation, and a determination to clarify the different spheres of responsibility: first and foremost that of the public institutions, and more specifically the legality of decisions and actions; and then of the practices of town planners and architects. This allocation of responsibility that was guaranteed through various political and juridical mechanisms that ensured transparency, accountability and clear allocation of decisional responsibility came in the wake of demands made by the great urban social movements that had erupted onto the political scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Barcelona, the demands were expressed by neighbourhood-based voluntary associations and were concerned with the physical and social degradation of peripheral districts consisting mainly of large poligonos de viviendas, namely mass-housing developments located in marginal areas and lacking basic services and collective facilities. In Berlin, particularly the western part, the social struggle had thrown up strong opposition to the policy of urban redevelopment being extended to the existing fabric of the city. Acute criticism was reserved for redevelopment projects involving the replacement of large parts of the historic central zones to achieve the long-standing goal of supposedly ideal housing densities, and the Groβwohnsiedlungen, that is the large residential developments built during the 1960s. With their provision of open space, ‘dynamic’ composition and better services, these were intended to play an important, even exemplary, role in contrast to housing conditions in East Berlin. Instead, they had been transformed into dormitory districts, places of social segregation isolated from the consolidated urban area. The inhabitants’ struggles against this policy gave rise to the cautious restoration projects which, with the direct participation of the tenants, characterised the programme of one of the two sections of the IBA.

Common to both situations was the opposition to urban redevelopment policies for the construction of major road infrastructure which, as well as separating parts of the city and condemning them to decay, had resulted in large transfers of population from the central areas. These reactions form part of the broader criticism of the programme of modern city planning and the restrictive effects of functionalism, especially evident in the urban areas developed during the years of reconstruction and the period of great expansion that followed. Standardised architecture and urban planning based on zoning caused an atopical fragmentation of urban space and opened the way to a city increasingly characterised by the ‘ghettoisation of differences’ (Sennett, Reference Sennett1990).

A new approach to the material construction of the city

These criticisms and local reactions led to a recognition of the close connection between architecture and the city as a historical phenomenon, and of the value attributed by a large part of the population to the characteristic features of the ‘traditional’ city. The latter was understood as structured by a network of symbolic hierarchies and regulated by a system of conventions and rhythms which, through their particular sense of time and place, provide the coordinates for inhabitants and city-users to frame and order their experience of the city (Allen, Reference Allen, Doreen, John and Steve1999). Through this, the urban morphology consolidates its ‘function of ensuring permanence, unity and continuity in space and time’, while architecture, subject to continual changes and adaptations, confirms its ‘heterogeneous, discontinuous and fragmentary’ nature (Huet, Reference Huet1984, p. 9). Still, the importance of contact space, that is space where both movement and repose are interlaced, has survived the succession of urban transformations and has ensured the permanence of that ‘very direct iconic relationship between signifier (road network, squares, gardens and built scenery) and signified (continuity, spatial identity)’ (Portas, Reference Portas and Paolo1998, p. 57).

A reawakening of affection for the ‘inherited urban form’ had already been noted in the mid-1960s by Alexander Mitscherlich and Wolf Jobst Siedler. The authors note the rediscovered need for familiarity and customary forms of living, especially in the face of the threat of their dissolution, the breakdown of social life and the impoverishment of urban life. Responsibility for this degradation was ascribed to postwar urban transformations, together with the mass-produced quality and anonymity of the housing they had produced.

Both Mitscherlich’s psychological critique of the inhospitality of the modern city and the gradual disappearance of the ‘civilisation of living’ (Mitscherlich, Reference Mitscherlich and Carlo1968) and Siedler’s ‘anathema’ against the destruction of the historic city (Siedler and Niggemeyer, Reference siedler and niggemeyer1964) emphasised a capacity for renewal within the bounds of tradition. Although citizens, as partakers of a tradition that had become part of their tacit understanding, formed their identity in the urban experience, the systematic cancellation of that tradition by planners in the new satellite districts, in city centres and in large-scale urban developments, where the profit motive had been uppermost, had resulted in their disorientation.

The most recent thinking on the new phase of urban expansion and dispersal, characterised by the irrepressible spread of individualistic behaviour and an enormous growth in mobility through new communication techniques and media, challenges the ‘tradition of local rootedness’ defended by Mitscherlich. The gradual decontextualisation and standardisation of space brought about by the spread of (material and virtual) technical networks means that terms like ‘tradition’, ‘locality’ and ‘rootedness’ sound simply reactionary. As a result, the structuring of living space in an increasingly diffuse and amorphous urban environment has become a possible but no longer necessary horizon of the new era, partly because of a ‘failure to educate and raise the awareness of the users, who have been unable to benefit, where familiarity with the ancient forms of living and aesthetic understanding of space are concerned, from the conditioning deriving from a vision of the world, nor from direct physical involvement’ (Choay, Reference Choay1992, p. 91).

But despite the technological threat, despite the intense pressure exerted on central urban areas by suburbs that have besieged the city, causing congestion and adversely affecting living conditions and functionality, despite even the urban sprawl and the emergence of an ‘archipelago of places’, the traditional city – rooted in its exceptional stability as an urban location, generator of external economies, characterised by maximum diversity and a mixité of functions and social groups in a minimum area – has shown that it can resist and still exert a strong attraction. This can be summarily attributed to its unique quality that derives from the effects of density – in terms of habitat, social and economic relations, institutions and services – and from the city’s public shared space – in other words, from its form and organisation. In the value and semantic richness of this space, we see realised the idea of a city that has survived its metamorphosis (Hénaff, Reference Hénaff2008), strengthening the main aspects of its cultural base, i.e. ‘the local historical, cultural, aesthetic and ecological values which give the city its distinctiveness’ and affect the quality of urban life (Knight, Reference Knight1995. p. 226). And it was precisely this space that was negated by the city model advocated by the Modern Movement. The exponents of this movement viewed the city as a social and spatial mechanism for constructing a new society made up of free, equal individuals. In fact it embodied the illusions of a scientism that knew nothing of the social and corporeal experience of the city, preferring the idea of a universal individual regardless of context. This vision of the city was translated into the common form with which we are all familiar, and which was further developed in the informal and changeable spaces of the dispersed settlement. Its final expression was the ‘generic city’, a conglomeration without history or roots (Koolhaas, Reference Koolhaas, Rem and Bruce1994).

In the reconstruction and redevelopment of both Barcelona and Berlin, even before the local was reaffirmed politically and culturally and became a significant factor on the European scene, public institutions took upon themselves the responsibility of recognising in this space – in its value as a place of social experience and at the same time as generating a unique milieu, into which every person, as Patsy Healey has argued, ‘senses an ambience, an intensity of movement, which conveys a density of activity, a rushing by of people and good, absorbed in many kinds of relations’ (Healey, Reference Healey2002, p. 1779) – not only a fundamental aspect of the identity of the European city, but also its irreplaceable function in creating social cohesion and common life.

A method for intervention in the consolidated city

The Italian school of urban analysis, from Saverio Muratori’s investigations of the relationships between forms of settlement and types of construction to Aldo Rossi’s L’architettura della città (Rossi, Reference Rossi1966), has been widely recognised as making the theoretical contribution that focused renewed attention on the history and tradition of the city and made it abundantly clear that the modern project had run its course. The merit of Rossi’s contribution was to have focused attention on the city as an object and place of architectural activity, and so to have provoked reflection on the very dimension that Modernism had banished from its programme: the existing city with its complex layering, compositional elements and permanent features (monuments, road system, ordinary built fabric, layout). The above criticism together with Rossi’s idea of the ‘city in the city’ as a unique feature of Western urban culture, formed the matrix for the strategies adopted in both Berlin and Barcelona. In the case of Berlin, it served as a stimulus that resulted in the IBA, characterised by the desire to offer solutions to the problems of modernity. In the case of Barcelona, it motivated widespread targeted interventions on open space, which have born a functioning public space together with an operable vision for urban civility, and the reconstruction of significant parts of the city. In both cases, it involved a suspension of judgement on the city as a global entity and concentrated analysis on different parts of the urban structure, identifying its vital nuclei to discover constant and permanent principles in the construction of the urban form, over and above historical changes and changes in their nature and role.

In Berlin, driven by political interest in renewing the central zones and the impetus of the social struggle, numerous initiatives opened up the debate on a new urban culture. This programme also played a political function in mitigating social inequalities and imbalances in living conditions between the various urban areas, and in protecting the inhabitants of historical districts threatened with displacement as a result of urban redevelopment. In the central part of the city around the Wall, the aim was to rebuild the traditional urban fabric based on blocks of houses, starting by reconstructing the original layout – i.e. the ‘permanent genetic structure’ of the city (Kleinhues, 1985) – and preserving existing features. This combined the recovery of traditional elements and the memory of the historic structure with the plurality of styles and languages offered by contemporary architecture.

From this morphological analysis and the initial experimental interventions, it was possible to identify the principles and rules – consisting in a return to the historical street layout and the alignment of buildings along these axes – which should govern the construction of an urban space as differentiated yet coherent. This included several objectives: safeguarding the settled population, consisting mainly of foreign immigrants; renewing the function of open spaces; and restructuring the building stock. All these were achieved by putting a ceiling on rents, improving services and collective facilities, rehabilitating streets and squares, planting greenery in the internal courtyards of blocks of houses, and applying prudent restoration methods. This last usually involved the occupants in a manner of self-managed ‘light’ restoration practices. Through such sensitive methods, the IBA worked to recreate an awareness of the city as a cultural entity and played an important role, later recognised as its chief success, in reawakening a desire for civilised urban living and translating it into material manifestations of architectural culture.

In Barcelona, the return of democracy was accompanied by an exceptional creative drive and forward-looking attitude on the part of society and institutions. The main motivators of this widespread desire for transformation were the academics who had previously supported social protest movements. This social group, working with the socialist/progressive forces heading the administration and with neighbourhood associations which had been given institutional legitimacy through a policy of administrative decentralisation, assumed responsibility for the process of renewing the city. This process started with the construction and rehabilitation of public space, restoring its collective meaning and recognisability both as a key element in improving the quality of life and as the setting for a new ‘socialisation to democracy’ (Donolo, Reference Donolo1992, p. 39) – democracy understood, using Karl Polanyi’s expression, as an ideal form of life, not just a system of government. This was with the declared intention of inverting the logic and processes that had led to a reduction in the visibility and comprehensibility of urban space as public space, and at the same time of giving public interventions an exemplary value in relation to those of private enterprise (Busquets, Reference Busquets1989).

This process of reassigning meaning to urban space by means of the open-space project began at a time of serious economic and social crisis for the city, with the introduction of a proactive municipal welfare policy in response to the pressing demands emerging from the barrios (neighbourhoods) and using the existing urban planning instrument. This legal device, which allowed for immediate intervention in the areas designated for public use, was also adopted as a framework of reference for the medium-term structuring of the urban and metropolitan area. The remarkable work done in describing and interpreting the morphology of urban space and its relationship with social processes was thus used to experiment with and develop an incremental strategy of redevelopment and modification of the existing city, which would give public space a pre-eminent role in shaping the layout of the urban area. This led to the decision to go ahead with more general projects to redevelop peripheral areas and the most degraded working-class districts, as well as promoting a new ‘monumentalisation’ of open spaces, different from the junta, intended to have special representative and symbolic value connected with the building of a more egalitarian city.

The Olympic Games operated as a strong catalyst for regenerating the city, enhancing an already existing large-scale plan not directly connected with the event. This was an integrated system of policies, special plans and area projects, working in several interacting spheres on different scales: the consolidation and connection to the urban area of the peripheral districts, consideration of the metropolitan dimension and the reordering of unconsolidated areas surrounding the individual restructuring projects.

The area hosting residential functions connected with the Games was destined to become a new urban district, located within a more extensive project to regenerate the vast industrial area that had become run down and was largely derelict. This project entailed a reintroduction of the ‘block’ pattern of building, updated and reinterpreted to take into account new styles of living. The block was therefore taken as the optimum unit for redevelopment purposes, suited as it was to accommodate activities of different dimensions but also complex types of activity, including various uses and a diversity of architectural forms. This was a confirmation of the value and effectiveness of the Cerdà layout, in other words of the factors that have historically encouraged social and functional versatility together with modern traffic flows and a balance between public spaces and a high density of functions. Above all, the street was confirmed as a highly relevant technical artefact.

The critical reconstruction of the city and its development

The strategy of critical reconstruction of the city was launched in both Berlin and Barcelona. Substantial public financial resources were made available to the local administrations in connection with their respective exceptional events, namely the IBA and the Olympic Games. This enabled them, in a very short period of time, to push for extensive urban transformations designed to satisfy the needs expressed by a wide-ranging social demand and to put into practice the recomposition of the city, while paying attention to its history and traditions. The implementation of this strategy, which in each case deliberately set out to be exemplary in terms both of concrete results and external acknowledgement, concerned central parts of the urban area and was directed at the reconstruction of the ordinary urban fabric, consisting mainly of housing, with a view to reinstating the city centre as a residential area.

Once the first phase of transformation that was directly connected with the two major events had been completed, these areas in which the events took place found themselves regarded as strategically important parts of the city and as such, albeit with differing intensity and to varying extent, the object of considerable speculative pressure. With only limited public resources and being heavily committed to investing in extending and modernising the urban infrastructure system in order to relaunch the city on a supranational scale, the two administrations resorted to various forms of incentives and regulatory measures whose essential aim was to reintroduce a relationship determined between urban morphology and building typology, to order public space, while having definite effects on densities, and to guarantee the formation of a mixed and multifunctional urban fabric. These measures were incorporated into area plans and regulations and set prescriptive conditions for the residential surface area that had to be created in any transformation financed by private investors or public–private co-operation agreements.

The two administrations tried to root their operations firmly in existing social processes and practices by seeking to extensively involve citizens and associations from the beginning, i.e. at the programme definition stages; the planning proposals and architectural solutions were therefore legitimised by the systematic involvement of local government and by the inhabitants themselves.

The most important achievement was the reconstruction of the spatial organisation of the public sphere, in other words the reinstatement of the dialogue of meanings between res publica and res privata. The break-up of this relationship in the modern city had led to the loss of the concurrence of form, use and meaning in places belonging to the city community as a whole that underpinned their designation as ‘public’ places; similarly, it had led to the impoverishment of the morphology of urban space and to a loss of cohesion. As Hans Paul Bahrdt had forecast, areas of life that do not have a clear identity as either public or private are destined to lose their meaning. By contrast, the clearer this identity is and the closer the relationship of interaction between the public and the private spheres, the more the life of a community takes on an urban character, which is the prerequisite for the acquisition of identity as a city (Bahrdt, Reference Bahrdt and Ida1966). With this we reach the clearer material manifestation of the concept of the lawscape (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Reference Philippopoulos-mihalopoulos and Philippopoulos-mihalopoulos2007). In both Berlin and Barcelona, the material morpohology of the lawscape is evinced in the way the two parallel forms of organisation co-exist without overlapping. Thus, the public and the private have entered the mutual visibility of each side, making one the necessary precondition of the other.

The need to reinstate structural relations between public and private spaces is one of the reasons underlying the revived proposal for the operative plots subdivision that regulates the built and for a close relationship between this and building. Intimately connected with this is the need to cater for a socially diverse body of users by creating a differentiated but connected settlement structure in regulations governing land use and housing type, and at the same time to restore flexibility to the urban fabric. Through continuous maintenance, restructuring and rebuilding operations, this settlement structure was intended to develop in time, as always happens with settlements that gradually take shape over time.

Another issue is the relationship between plan and project, which led to a redefinition of the former. The plan now became a regulating device intended to ensure overall consistency between the city subjected to transformation and the existing city. Public institutions were thereby required to reacquire their function as guarantors of the conventions that regulate the relationship between the various spaces. This allows maximum freedom to private initiative but within the spatial and regulatory limits of the planning scheme. This was thought to be the solution to the tension between social interests and the individual artistic practice of the architect (Huet, Reference Huet1984; Bohigas, Reference Bohigas1999).

International acknowledgement of the success of these experiments and the impressive powers of attraction exerted by the huge investment in the collective symbolic capital of the cities, as David Harvey rightly terms it, sanctioned this strategy, and its renewal after the first period (Harvey, Reference Harvey, David and Neil2005). In other words, the strategy proved successful in the international context, determined on the one hand by globalisation, that inevitably leads to the subordination of the cities’ development trajectories to supranational dynamics and thus to the imposition of competitive logic between urban areas, and on the other hand by the unprecedented pressure exerted by multinational capital (Le Galès, Reference Le galès2002).

In Berlin, these conditions became violently evident when, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the eastern part of the city was suddenly subjected to a form of capitalism that was much more radical in comparison to the Western capitalism that had characterised the development of West Berlin (Oswalt, 2000). In the delicate phase of the East’s transition to the juridical and political systems of the West, in the absence of any planning instruments and with town planning and architecture in a state of crisis in both theoretical and practical terms (a situation that became very clear from the debate that followed the fall of the Wall and from the numerous public competitions that were organised), the reconstruction of the historic city centre and the regeneration of the eastern part took place under a system of rules that were being laid down as the situation evolved, with the experience of the IBA and in the name of re-establishment of Berlin’s identity as a European city. This involved focusing above all on the unifying, identifying value of the city’s historical substance in order to redefine the image of a city divided into two competing parts for over forty years, parts that had developed in different directions also in terms of urban structure. In other words, this required a return of history.

In Barcelona, the strategy of critical reconstruction took different forms both in the formation of the newly central areas and, especially, in the transformation of the important urban sector that had previously been occupied by the manufacturing industry (district 22@). In this latter case, the strategy involved an attempt to guide and control a gradual process of alteration of the previous order while maintaining the area’s production-orientated vocation. In this context, the most important issue was that of density, along with that of intensity and new urban functions, and with a policy of reducing land consumption and increasing the sustainability of the settlement area, all this within a debate involving the metropolitan area understood as a system of urban nuclei that tend to cluster together, linked to the new system of infrastructure and integrated into the great central hub of Barcelona in its position on the supranational grid of central cities.

In the new phase characterised by the exponential growth of communications networks, by the flexibility of relocation, by urban sprawl and by fierce competition between cities, both Berlin and Barcelona therefore sought to tackle the issues posed by the historically consolidated European urban experience, in particular those associated with its inseparability from the specific values of urban civilisation and from their particular genealogy (Mongin, Reference Mongin2005). Indeed the greatest effort after the first phase consisted of drawing attention to an identity whose roots lay in the history of the city and local culture. This identity is now a prime point of reference and an important factor – particularly in the case of Barcelona – in the global competition between cities (Le Galès, Reference Le galès2002).

Of course, this has given rise to new problems that have already had discernible effects in both Barcelona and Berlin and appear to be real threats in terms both of the physical organisation of the urban space and of its social order (Castells, Reference Castells1996; Borja and Castells, Reference Borja and Castells1997). In the first case, with the gradual increase of space devoted to ‘flows and networks’ and the greater influence of technology on decisions as to where to locate economic activities, contrasting phenomena have appeared at the same time. One phenomenon involves the concentration of certain activities – industries and advanced services – and especially investments by large-scale international developers in central urban areas. This generates economies of agglomeration and makes it possible for two irreplaceable resources of urban space – information and accessibility – to merge ‘in a single operation based on variable supply’ (Bohigas, Reference Bohigas and Paolo1998, p. 20), while at the same time generating huge speculative income. The other phenomenon features the decentralisation of specialist functions (management of service industries, hotel and commercial activities, exhibition facilities and congress centres) associated with the creation and appropriation of the values of the ‘space devoted to flows’ to the interchange points of the space connection networks (the points at which transport infrastructures converge) in both urban and metropolitan areas. In both cases, and especially in the latter, the phenomena involve new forms of aggregation (but also the reappearance of trivialised rationalist forms) where the individual artefacts, heterogeneous and substantially autistic, co-exist in perfect autonomy. The dissociation of functions and urban spaces thus reappears at a morphological level as well as in practical social terms, with the formation of oversized, decontextualised structures, where the mediatisation of architecture asserts itself and where ‘chance and indifferentiation seem to favour interchangeability rather than identity’ (Gregotti, Reference Gregotti1999, p. 5).

In the second case, the new functional, economic and technological organisation of space and the increase in the value of real estate led directly to gentrification, social polarisation and segregation. These processes fuel each other and can only be partially mitigated by integration policies and public housing policies. The fracture that current exclusion dynamics risk causing in society mainly concerns the urban area, where the spread of centrality, the renewal of infrastructure, improvements to accessibility and environmental rehabilitation all helped to confer the value of centrality on the entire compact and continuous urban fabric and brought about substantial changes to the hierarchies of urban space, as happened especially in Barcelona. Compared with the first phase of urban transformation, in which the problem of equity seemed to refer mainly to the redistribution of services, means and opportunities in the urban area, the problem now has to do chiefly with the reduction of exclusion and social polarisation. For these phenomena to be tackled adequately it will require a renewed vision of the city as a space fostering integration and social mix rather than the vision of the city as a ‘product’ to be positioned on the global market via the use of specific promotional policies.

Though developed in different ways in the two cities, the critical reconstruction of the city and the reconfiguration of urban space, which began in the 1980s, showed that it is the responsibility of public institutions to ensure the reproduction of the space they have inherited, a place of collective experience that is (and is destined to remain) a symbol of liberation, a shared space of the experience of individual and collective daily life. This is nothing more than a realisation that lawscape, namely the reciprocal determination of space and normativity, is not a luxury but a necessity. Lawscapes can break open, be torn apart and become derelict when public institutions distance themselves from assuming the responsibility that comes from spatial configuration. Critically reconstructing the lawscape in the case of these two cities meant a return to the pre-modern space but reinterpreted by means of contemporary technology, globalised demands and local communities. The ‘resemiologised return to tradition’, as it were, has made it possible not only to undertake a reappraisal of the identity of the European city – which has been the focus of attention of numerous researchers on the urban phenomenon for a number of years – but also to re-examine the sense of a space which, within its defined dimensions, allows unlimited practices in which subjects relate to each other and where social connections are consolidated.

This is the space of a lawscape simultaneously old and new: a space that has been constructed over time to give shape to the life unfolding within it – and nowadays this increasingly refers to the lives of the wide variety of people who inhabit and use it, whether permanently or temporarily; a space that is different from normalised space yet relies on the assumption of public responsibility; finally, a space which is primarily associated with ‘a style, a culture, a complex of relational models’ (Farinelli, Reference Farinelli2008, p. 163), and which is therefore physical and material, and as such enables comparison with the building expertise that has evolved in the course of a long history (Choay, Reference Choay1992, Reference Choay1999; Rykwert, Reference Rykwert1963, 2000; Gregotti, Reference Gregotti1999). As Jean-Luc Nancy asserts, ‘building expertise and lifestyle have straddled their meanings’ (Nancy, Reference Nancy1999, p. 16). It is to be hoped that the physical and social significance of this space will be maintained, and is radical difference reaffirmed within a conceptual horizon in which individuals and society continue to identify with an era in which decontextualised space, normalised by networks and carried out in fragments, have replaced the experience of history.