Master in City & Technology 2018/19 – Term 2
Seminar Name: Urbiotica
Total Hours: 20 hours
Senior Faculty:  Willy Müller
Faculty: Jordi Vivaldi

URBIOTICA
Re-informing Free Trade Zones: from stocking knowledge to replacing data
Since the recent emergence of the Third Industrial Revolution, the Urban Sciences are facing one of its major challenges: How to respond to the shift from an industrial society to an informational society? In this sense, every time seems more apparent that our generation is assisting to a radical transformation regarding the informational treatment: It is already no longer about accumulating ratios of knowledge in the long run, but about processing lots of small amounts of binary data packages in periods of no more than 3 seconds. One of the main consequences of this phenomena is that the accumulative logic that until know was operating in order to produce knowledge became obsolete. Instead, a new substitutive logic is arising, which is no longer working with “stocks” of information but with “circulations” of information.

This course is presented from the conviction that, indeed, there is a paradigm shift ongoing, and that therefore, most of the tools used to face the city in the industrial and post-industrial era are going to remain obsolete soon. The seminar is focusing on the Free Trade zone of Barcelona. This urban infrastructure has a big history behind and, overall, designed from the accumulative logic inherent to the industrial civilization. Its massive scale, privileged position and emblematic value achieved during many decades, suggest avoiding any “tabula rasa” strategy in order to apply mechanisms of re-information and recycling. In this regard, it’s crucial to detect which are the habitability needs of the cities of the XXI century. But, more specifically, it’s capital to understand which are the transformative strategies that these needs require in order to adapt the big urban equipment of the old industrial society to the demands on the new informational urban paradigm.

Session 01.
// INTRODUCTION TO THE 10 NEW URBAN PARADIGMS + GLOBAL FREE TRADE ZONES BENCHMARKING
Session 02.
// BARCELONA FREE TRADE ZONES ANALYSIS
Session 03.
// DESIGN SESSION_1
Session 04.
// DESIGN SESSION_2
Session 05.
// DESIGN SESSION_3
Session 06.
// DESIGN SESSION_4
Session 07.
// FINAL PRESENTATION