*facsimile: the exact copy with using fax machine since we are reproducing the Barcelona in our narrative. And fax is an analog way of transmitting information and image its an another criticism metaphor of our digitalized education…
IRREGULARITIES WITHIN THE REGULARITY OF AN URBAN GRID
In the middle of the 19th century Barcelona was in Turmoil: an industrial city with a busy port that has grown increasingly dense. Barcelona was on its way to become a European capital, yet its population still lived in a tiny area confined by its medieval walls.
Density had grown due to the jobs created by the industrial revolution, life expectancy had dropped due to the unsanitary conditions.
Into this came Creda with his utopian-sounding ideas of rich and poor accessing the same services, smooth-flowing traffic and so on. Not only he coined the term of urbanization, he achieved to materialize to at least some extent some of his ideas.
An extension of Barcelona was built, implementing the grid form to avoid privileged zones for social classes and to achieve „optimal hygienic density“. The original block dimensions were 112m X 113m. Due to economic pressure and housing shortage over the time many of the regularity features that Cerda implemented have been diluted and manipulated. The economic pressure persuaded public officials to loosen the regulations which led to the enclosed public becoming private or the courtyards becoming parking lots and so on. The tendency of maximizing the economic benefit minimized public space, increased width and influenced the brightness of the housing units- which led to irregularities within the idea of a regularity of the grid-structure.
