Moll de la Fusta

Integrative Urbanization

Lina Abou Reslan, Michal Doukarsky, Federico Escalante, Hernando Gomez, Joris Moonen

Taking a primordial walk along the shore of Moll de la Fusta left us with two strong impressions; first, that this is not the seafront, rather a vague part of the city with a dominant car parking that overlooks a yacht parking surrounded by a mall complex. The second impression is that all developments in this zone have been a series of parallel developments of streets and promenades on different levels with a few plug-on bridges to link these layers. This development ‘along’ rather than ‘within’ the Moll de la Fusta is probably due to the influence of the infrastructure (Ronda Litoral) and the false conception that this is seafront.

We propose to approach this area from a more integrative perspective, suspending the belief that it a seafront, linking it to the city physically and functionally, inviting a richer diversity of events and programs that can attract diverse groups of people (tourists and residents) and simultaneously providing the local municipality an opportunity to enhance the project of propagating an ‘alternative lifestyle’ image of Barcelona already underway. Hence the general headline of this proposal is to URBANIZE Moll de la Fusta, in four steps:

• Building a large urban theme-park, unique to Barcelona, in order to infuse the area with events, attract visitors and give Barcelona a new landmark in its skyline.
• Creating a zone of boat housing, long-term (as an extension for Barceloneta) and touristic (closer to the theme park.)
• Extending the Ramblas walkway through a floating deck that leads to the sea outside this urbanized zone. This deck can have multiple layers of program below to service some functions and events that can take place on top.
• Building low housing and commercial units, and implementing a landscaping strategy to create shaded, pleasant human scale public spaces.

With an integrative urban planning approach, Moll de a Fusta becomes a multi-layered event-city; a space where events, people, water and land come together.