FUTURE FLOWS
Our goal is to work towards the creation of a new vocabulary to describe the future of Sants’ mobility.
Conceptualizing Sants as a pocket of automation in the city of Barcelona led to an interesting and unexplored area of urban mobility. Our research focused on how self-driving vehicles and automated mobility systems can create an impact on Barcelona and lead towards the emergence of dynamic uses and correlations between the public spaces.
By focusing on the district of Sants we explored the implications of automated mobility systems, in order to create a more consistent image of the future of automated mobility by including in the image the pedestrian and the public spaces.
Through our analysis of the district, we were able to deduce that Sants could efficiently cover the mobility needs of all its inhabitants with a mere 500 self-driving cars. Implementing such a system in a city involves a huge spectrum of implications on the public space and the pedestrians.
By radically reducing the amount of space being used by cars, we are able to open the discussion for dynamic activations of public spaces based on their density and the location of the cars in the area. By creating mobility simulations of the area’s busiest intersection and by re-envisioning it, as a pedestrian oriented intersection it became apparent that it was possible to project this vision into the future and begin to talk about design solutions for this reclaimed space.
Since our research is based on a systemic approach to the introduction of automation and the examination of its practical implication, it was of an out-most importance to explore how this activation would create and redefine the correlation between Sants’ public spaces and the way in which the people experience them by moving through them. By basing our desing on a responsive, automated and modular material we created a catalogue of different public space activations that introduce dynamic solutions for the use of public space.
Future Flows is a project of IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia at Master in City and Technology in 2016/2017 by:
Students: Alex Mademochoritis, Pratyaksh Sharma, Asier Eguilaz
Faculty: Federico Parolotto, Sebastiano Scacchetti, Francesca Arcuri, Julius Streifeneder, Kathrin DiPaola