Urban Crisis & Creative Destruction: Barcelona Resilient City

Rafael de Balanzo, director of the Action Without Borders Project for the Social Habitat Work Program, offers a Q&A session after the screening of “Encaixonats,” a documentary about urban resilience in Barcelona.

Encaixonats (meaning “boxed” in Catalan) is a documentary from director Marta Saleta that highlights neighborhoods and cities succumbing to successive changes and urban crises caused by internal collapse and external shrinking processes. The neighborhood of Vallcarca in Barcelona has become an urban landmark, characterized as one of the first districts to implement policies of urban sustainability. After suffering from urban crises, social displacement, and conflict induced by a Rezoning Master Plan, Vallcarca masterminded change by implementing new urban sustainability policies.

The documentary follows a family displaced from their home of 50 years, as the city moves them to a new housing superblock. The remaining members from Salvem-Vallcarca community organization fight to find new strategies against displacement. These strategies include urban crises and reorganization process as well as tactical urbanism and transformative governance.

About Rafael de Balanzo Joue

Architect, landscape architect and urban designer De Balanzo, Ph.D., is currently Adjunct Lecturer at Hunter and Queens College, CUNY and Barcelona University. He was born and raised in Barcelona. After studying architecture and urbanism in Belgium, he returned to Barcelona to start his own office, Urban Resilience Thinking Institute, and has been awarded several architectural and landscape awards. De Balanzo is also Director of the Action Without Borders Project for the Social Habitat Work Program, International Union of Architects, UIA. He promotes “resilience thinking” through the Habitat Program participatory process for informal settlements and Shrinking Cities in Latin America, the U.S. and Europe.