#Barcelona – Urban Issues

1 city, 26 maps, a whole lot of Barcelona!

March 12, 2018October 22, 2019Posted in Urban IssuesTagged #architecture, #art, #Barcelona, #history, #maps, #urban design, #urban development, #urban planningLeave a comment

Barcelona is an amazing city in many ways!

It has an interesting history of urban development as well. Museu D’Historia De Barcelona released an interactive map combining 26 maps of the city throughout its history. It overlaps loads of information about urban development starting from 150 AD to 2010.

In 1859, the medieval-era walls that had surrounded Barcelona since the 13th and 14th centuries had already started to come down. In this year, the city approved an expansion plan proposed by Spanish urban planner Ildefons Cerdà, which was hailed as “one of the most revered international examples of modern planning and urban design” by Judith Urbano, an architecture professor at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya. It laid the foundations of modern Barcelona. (CityLab)

Check the website here!

Visualisation of Airbnb Through the Years

November 17, 2017November 17, 2017Posted in Urban IssuesTagged #airbnb, #Barcelona, #Berlin, #cities, #city, #commodification, #design, #housing, #London, #media, #New York, Amsterdam, database, everyday life, holidaylets, tourismLeave a comment

Kor Dwarshuis visualised Airbnb boom in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin and New York since the foundation of Airbnb to 2017.

The maps show the striking increase in the numbers as well as the distribution and clustering of the Airbnb flats in these cities.

The maps also pose a question of the commodification of the couch as well as the scale of the unregulated holiday lets in these major cities.

It is also quite fun to explore 🙂 Click here to see more.

Look Down: Floors of Barcelona, Paris and Venice!

March 3, 2016April 6, 2017Posted in Urban IssuesTagged #architecture, #art, #Barcelona, #erras, #Paris, #photography, #urban space, Artworks, veniceLeave a comment

If you walk around Barcelona, don’t forget to look down from time to time: you may be standing on a marvel of design.

Artist Sebastian Erras took photos of marvellous floors at Barcelona, Paris and Venice. This facinating project shows us importance of details in our everyday life and importance of the unity of arts and crafts!

Check some examples here:

Barcelona Floor:

For more Barselona Floors please check boredpanda

Parisian Floors:

For more Parisian Floors please check boredpanda

Venetian Floors:

For more VenetianFloors please check boredpanda

Bonus: Floor of my grandmother’s house 🙂

Urban Smellscapes: What is the smell of your city?

June 9, 2015March 16, 2018Posted in Urban IssuesTagged #Barcelona, #London, #smellscape, #social media, #soundscape, #urban space, nose, Urban SmellscapeLeave a comment

Think about your nose. Now think about big data. You probably didn’t realize it, but your nose is a big data machine. Humans are able to potentially discriminate more than one trillion different odors.

On one hand, we have our big data nose; on the other hand, we have city officials and urban planners who deal only with the management of less than ten bad odors out of a trillion. Why this negative and oversimplified perspective? Smell is simply hard to measure. (Urban Smellscape)

Daniele Quercia, Luca Maria Aiello, Rossano Schifanella, and Kate McLean have developed a way of capturing te urban smellscape from social media data. The researchers had smell walks in seven cities in UK, Europe, and USA to collect smell data. They also asked citizens to walk around the cities to identify distinct odors and to note them. Then the researcher related this data with data collected through social media. For details check Urban Smellscape.