Designing an Open City. Approaches to 30 Public Spaces in Barcelona

An open city should represent an active and safe place in several senses, both from the point of view of the perception of its users, as well as the environmental and physical configuration of urban common spaces. Faced with this challenge, a theoretical and practical reflection is presented here, applied to the study of 30 parks and public spaces in the city of Barcelona, whose main objective is to rethink and adapt the specific spaces studied or to propose similar studies on other cases, in order to promote common spaces that are more functional and integrated with their surroundings, that is, more open, accessible, inclusive, healthy and safe. The method used consists of an initial phase of selecting a representative sample of case studies, posterior processing of city-scale and urban-scale analyses based on “desktop methodologies” and “in situ methodologies” of visual inspection, and finally conducting a comparative, qualitative and quantitative analysis of the results. The reflections and methodologies applied use innovative components based in the use of open access data and new analytical technologies to develop frameworks, mapping, and assessment matrices, which allow exemplifying aspects of the approach, methods, and tools to achieve more open, green, and safe cities from a holistic and interdisciplinary perspective.