Barcelona: haec omnia – divisa – tibi dabo…

Cohesion and division in the (geo)urban evolution of an ambivalently compact city

Abstract

From the top of Tibidabo, Barcelona has presented itself, for many years, as a unitary Whole (haec omnia tibi dabo ... All this I will give you, Matthew 4: 9): a compact mass, sensibly regular, extended between the two lateral rivers and the sea ​​(the limits that, in the past, had delimited its geography). Even with the recent leap in scale, Barcelona has preserved its apparent structural clarity, despite the diffuse processes that have characterized these last decades.

However, under that apparent "unity / uniformity", civil and civic, Barcelona has always been a divided city, both physically and socially. The most surprising thing about this division is its systemic character over time, as "sociocultural division" and "physical division" coincide - in each period - in certain boundary spaces that are clearly recognizable in the urban structure itself and in its own development (from the Roman and medieval city to the industrial and post-industrial city or the contemporary informational city).

In this text several sufficiently explicit examples are reviewed in which the paradoxical unit-division equation has marked the history (moderately contradictory and dual) of an open and closed city, domestic and cosmopolitan, liberal and conservative, ambitious and fearful, entrepreneurial and self -referential; a city in which, in its best moments, the two sides of the coin – the well-known seny (common sense) and rauxa (emotional rage)  – would have given way to a third way, the empenta (the drive, rational and creative) capable of overcoming abilities and inertias, conventions, and divisions.