Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing

The first edition of the Model. Barcelona Architecture Festival, is being held from 5 to 15 May. The festival takes over from Architecture Week, held over the last five years in the city. Model offers a plural and multidisciplinary space for meeting and reflection, open to everybody and addressing the main challenges for the 21st century through architecture and urban planning. This will be the first major event for when Barcelona becomes the UIA-UNESCO World Capital of Architecture for 2026.

For nearly two weeks the city will be hosting activities to generate collective ideas and proposals to envisage the cities of the years to come, particularly sustainable cities, with new ways of engaging with the planet and the environment. The festival also brings experimental architecture, ephemeral installations in public spaces and iconic spots in the city, open-air conferences, exhibitions, screenings, architectural visits, guided routes and more.

Copenhagen will be the guest city for the festival as the Danish city is the World Capital of Architecture for 2023. This will be a chance to share projects, experiences and learning in the institutional and academic realm, between schools and professional sectors and between companies from the world of architecture and urban planning.

A festival for “Re-growing”

The slogan for the first edition is “Re-growing”, to reflect and understand how the cities and their people can continue to grow in line with new values and principles such as:

• Repositioning (different scales): how architectural thinking can influence the environment and immediate built space.
• Reusing (different uses): developing a material awareness committed to optimising the use of material resources according to the principles of sustainability and circularity.
• Rethinking (different times): the importance of temporality and architecture.
• Rediversifying (between us all): diversity as a cornerstone for the production of innovative ideas.

In addition, this first edition will address five central themes with organisations to come up with new ideas and types of architecture.

1. Between generations: how mutual care architecture needs to be envisaged and what vision of the city needs to be promoted.
2. Between species: thinking about urban planning through new paradigms which reconcile human well-being with that of other species in the city.
3. Between cultures: new models which help us understand and transform the city, taking into account cultural complexity.
4. Between classes: what can architecture do to create more equal and accessible spaces.
5. Between materials: how can architecture help tackle the climate emergency.

The intention is for the general public to take part in the festival. To this end, any entity or legal or natural persons wishing to take part by organising an activity have until 25 March to send in their proposals via the website model.barcelona.

Promoted in collaboration with the Architects’ Association of Catalonia (COAC), the artistic management of the festival corresponds to the architects Eva Franch i Gilabert and Beth Galí, along with the researcher José Luis de Vicente.