Espacios abiertos metropolitanoscriterios , objetivos y estrategias para el proyecto territorial. El caso de la región urbana de barcelona

Resumen

This Ph. D. deals with metropolitan open spaces, among which we consider agricultural land and forests, riverbanks, beaches, parks, gardens and urban parterres and all those elements that, even small, have a certain degree of naturalness as opposed to paved and built-up spaces. The main idea is that these spaces, which have traditionally been used as land stock for urban growth, should be considered as structural elements in territorial and urban planning, at the same level of importance as urban systems and infrastructure. Their environmental, productive and cultural functions, as well as the shape and structure they have, make them fundamental spaces with structuring capacity in any metropolitan scenario. We must admit that they have not been taken into account nor given the appropriate value through their territorial project yet. YO AL FINAL AÑADIRÍA "YET". The lack of a systemic approach to these spaces, necessary for the way the biophysical matrix works, causes their preservation and protection not to be adequately addressed and not valued to a proper extent. The current situation is fragmentation, reduction and degradation. It affects territorial efficiency, understood as the forms of economic use of the biophysical matrix that manage to meet human needs while maintaining the adequate ecological state of its landscape. It is true that some territorial planning, based on the patch-matrix-corridor model of landscape ecology, has directed its objectives to the restitution of physical continuities, through Ecological Network projects where they are approached from a more structural point of view. On the other hand, ecology has traditionally separated its analysis into two areas. Firstly urban ecology, which has focused on urban metabolism defining the way matter and energy circulate through the city-ecosystem. Secondly landscape ecology, which has dealt with open spaces, based on the premise that the proper functioning of the territorial matrix depends on its structure, characterized by heterogeneity both in uses and forms, and permeability, understood as the ability to maintain ecological flows. Recent studies that combine structure with energy balance data -such as how energy and information are distributed in the landscape- have proved the relationship between form and metabolism. However, given the complexity of an urban region such as Barcelona, where open spaces, urban systems and infrastructure work together, it becomes necessary to integrate the two approaches into what we could call regional ecology. This model has two main objectives: to close metabolic flows at regional level (water, food, waste, energy, agriculture, livestock and forest) and to intervene in urban systems and infrastructure at the regional and urban level, since the fragmentation of metropolitan spaces will depend on the spatial configuration of both. In order to do this, it is necessary to integrate structure and metabolism into a single analysis. Regarding metropolitan open spaces project, based on the model of metropolitan ecology as a general criteria and from the diagnosis that is established in the study of its processes and dynamics, a series of objectives and project strategies are proposed as well as an action system for its implementation that integrates and ranks the objectives into two axes. The first gathers objectives - structuring, connecting, recovering and restoring - that physically affect the territory and are developed through physical planning instruments. The second focuses on the regulation of processes and activities causing the degradation of the territorial matrix through management instruments.