Resumen de Comerç, ciutat, paisatges arran de terra
- català
El capítol primer està traduit a l'anglès a les pàgines 57-88
- English
The thesis focuses on the right angle where facades and sidewalks intersect, a thick folded hinge with a primarily collective use mostly occupied by retail, characterized by an invasive and transforming nature. The activities have as main stage the arrival of the architecture on streets - the ground-floors-, where boundaries between public, private and collective change their thickness, degree of transparency or perforation, become discontinuous, disappear at times, or grow and get separated from the ground level. lt is in this level where the urban public component is mainly developed, because it is where the interaction between residents and visitors with the built environment help to magnify the conditions of urbanity (1) of the city. Certain tracks on the urban landscape are the result of the collective action of retail: interventions that drill or sculpt the architecture, that superpose new structures or that overflow and extend themselves over the nearest piece of city. These actions are sauteed in time and produce overlapping scenarios that can be explained in detail to highlighting the importance of the contribution of these retail parasitacions -spontaneous and beyond the norms in many occasions- to the complexity and intensity of the public use of the sidewalks.
The thesis approaches to urban retail from tour perspectives that established the theoretical basis for understanding the ground floor cityscape. The text is accompanied by a set of maps and images that explore both appropriate ways to understand and represent the threshold between the public space of streets and squares and the collective space of commerce. The first chapter reviews the scientific literature on which the research is supported, while unfolding the sensitive imagery around the topic. These texts and images accompany the formulation of the first hypothesis: what happens on the lower floors largely determines the character of the city. The second chapter describes types of buildings dedicated to commerce from the point of their morphology and their urban setting rules. lt looks at how they have evolved and how they have been transformed into structures that have reversed the logic of the original model, or how hybridized to respond to the needs that commerce requested the city. The assumption on which it rests is the ct that retail and its implicit forms have an invasive and transformative character, and experiencing these changes inflicted in their environment they characterize the use of the urban grounscape. The third part focuses on three fragments in the center of Barcelona and explains them from the pres en ce of sorne forms of retail described in the pre\1ous chapter: explaining their morphology or origin, reviewing municipal regulations that regulate them, mapping their use. Much to the way in which it manifests itself, retail always involves as mall-scale urban dimension, an oscillating roughness on the street level, a few ripples in the encounter of facades and sidewalks, that are always in constant motion. The fourth chapter el oses the thesis establishing relations with the three previous with a thought on the contemporary commercial landscapes -those that characterize urban centers, those that are decentralized and tied to the transport frastructure, those that remain without a physical support- and determines that to each of these scenarios correspond different rhythms and times, which are those of the retail forms that characterize their geography.
(1) Sola-Morales (201 O) defines Urbanity as the sum of"permeability, sensuality and respect" that is "not only in economic and social activity, but is also in the matter of architecture." ''La urbanitat de la arquitectura" (The urbanity of architecture ), Inaugural Lecture academic year 2009-201 O at ETSAB, Barcelona: Visions n.8).
