Hackató: Discovering Les Rondes

During the weekend of 19 to 21 October, five hundred students from six architecture schools will cover the 37 km of ring roads. The route will be complemented with stops at strategic points on the ring roads, where new ideas, questions and challenges concerning the infrastructure and its surrounding area will be discussed.

With 'Discovering Les Rondes', Barcelona joins the debate on the future of ring roads, which other cities, such as Paris and Amsterdam, are already working on. Although they are a reality in many European cities, these roadways are under scrutiny, due to their inability to solve the problem of congestion, their short-lived capacity for dissuading traffic from city centres and their concept, which is exclusively centred around private vehicles. Ring roads are also under scrutiny because of their environmental impact and the discontinuities they cause in urban continuity.

Although Barcelona's ring roads were built with the aim of establishing the periphery of the city, in recent years their surroundings have been transformed and consolidated. In fact, today, the Les Rondes area is the site of some of the major projects on the current metropolitan agenda. Any reflection on Les Rondes today is therefore not only made in the context of redefining the use of private vehicles and surpassing the established limits for air pollution, but also of a need to understand this infrastructure as a defining area of today's metropolitan city.

This activity begins just after the 'Building and Dwelling' debate (Friday 19 October, 7.45 pm - 9 pm) and will continue until Sunday afternoon

With the organisation and participation of: Barcelona Regional and the Confederation of Architectural Project Workshops (CTPA): ETSAB, ETSAV, EAR, UIC, IAAC, LA SALLE.

With the collaboration of Lacol (a cooperative of architects that works towards social transformation through architecture) and the support of Barcelona City Council and the Barcelona Metropolitan Area.

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