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THE METROPOLITAN AREA OF BARCELONA

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Night light in
Europe, Catalonia and Metropolitan Area of Barcelona

 
Physical geography Catalunya, AMB


Road traffic in
Europe, Catalonia and the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona

 

 From the middle of this century, the city has been overflowing its boundaries and has been invading outlying zones, swallowing up neighbouring villages and towns in the process, towns whose growth was itself motivated by the city in the first place. Cities, conurbations, metropolitan areas, megalopolises, urban corridors, diffuse nebulae are all successive phases in a large-scale urbanisation process, the extent and scope of which have not been fully accepted either politically or culturally, and whose final outcome is as yet unknown. In Catalonia, between 1950 and 1980 - a period of unprecedented economic boom but scant democratic control - compact growth accounted for at most a mere 20% of total new land occupation (10,000 Hectares), whereas dispersed growth made up 80% of the total (some 40,000 Hectares).

The new urban zones nowadays are diffuse and discontinuous; and the traditional urban activities now tend to relate and link to each other more by virtue of systems of communication and transport of people, goods, energy and information than by traditional factors of geographical proximity. The new communication and transport systems tend to be organised around a network logic which is based on a time variable, as opposed to the distance variable of the old system and its more territorial logic.

One important problem arising from these dissociated logics, is the increasing difficulty of implementing urban planning decisions in keeping with the administrative regional divisions, which are themselves, of course, a legacy of the past. Today's urban planning must set out from the basis of multiple superimposed regional and sectorial perspectives, as opposed to juxtaposed regional divisions. There are two main reasons for this: the growing complexity of urban land occupation patterns means that certain apparently isolated problems affect other sectors simultaneously on the local, metropolitan and international scale, and also what are ordering factors implemented on one level may well turn out to be disordering factors on other levels in different sectors.

Drawing up a metropolitan masterplan for the end of the 20th century demands a change in the traditional approaches to urban planning; it is vital to find the key elements which may serve to draw the multiplicity of individual free agents to a new global order, rather than merely seek to impose predetermined, rigid schemes on them; schemes which could serve only to either paralyse them, as typically occurred in planning during the sixties and seventies, or drag them into a resigned acceptance of the spontaneous developments in the short term in the ingenuous belief that the pre-existing global order would once again prevail in the long term, as tended to happen with the plans produced in the eighties.

In discussion of urban planning nowadays it is necessary to draw upon certain seemingly contra-intuitive ideas, such as the generation of chaos by deterministic laws, the spontaneous apparition of islands of order amidst the chaos, the universal nature of behavioural features of apparently different complex systems.

This change of approach requires, in turn, a cultural change. The world is more complex than we could ever have imagined, but the rules by which we govern it could be made far simpler than we expect. 

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Physical Geography		 The Physical Geography of the Metropolitan Area

The present Barcelona metropolitan area corresponds to the zone delimited by the Pla director de l'area metropolitana de Barcelona "AMB - 65" (Barcelona Metropolitan Directive Plan) which was approved in 1968. It is made up of seven comarques (territorial divisions roughly analogous to "counties") and 163 municipalities.

It occupies 10% of the territory of Catalonia. All in all, it makes up an extension of 3.235·9 km2 with a population density of 1.663 per km2. Indeed, 70% of the total population of Catalonia lives in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area.

Geographically, the area is located at the eastern extreme of Catalonia. It has 110 km of coastline, stretching from the Tordera Basin to the Foix River, while inland, it is bounded by the Precoastal mountain range.

Morphologically, the area is part of the Mediterranean system. It can be divided into four basic relief types: the interior Precoastal mountain range, the Precoastal depression, the Coastal or Marine mountain range and the coast. The four rivers which drain the area are, to the north east, the Tordera; the Besòs just north of the large conurbation of Barcelona and the Llobregat, which flows into the sea to the south of the city. The latter two have always formed and indeed still form today exit and entrance channels to the city of Barcelona. The fourth river is the Foix.

Climatically, the zone falls into two categories, one on either side of the Llobregat River. Land to the north is called "Catalunya plujosa" (rainy Catalonia), the southern zone is often referred to as "Catalunya seca" (dry Catalonia). Average temperatures are in the region of 140 to 170, with maximums exceeding 300 , and absolute minimums below zero in January and February.

Rainfall does not normally exceed 600 mm per year. The heaviest rainfall occurs in Autumn, while the summers are very dry. It rains on between 50 and 70 days per year, and snows very rarely, except for the Montseny area.

The physical diversity of the region gives rise to a great variety of landscapes and vegetation. There exist three distinct vegetation growth cycles; the Northern Alpine, the Euro-Siberian and the Mediterranean cycle. They correspond to three main zones of the territory: high mountain areas, medium-high mountain areas and the Mediterranean zone, each of which is characterised by distinctive flora and vegetation structure.