The expansion of Barcelona in the mid-1800s was a necessary step to improve the quality of life of its citizens. Services and spaces lived in a disharmonious way and the city was characterized by density, congestion, terrible water supply, poor hygiene, non-existent sewage systems and epidemics. The rising mortality rates were higher than those in Paris and London at the time, and life expectancy fell to 36 years for the wealthy and 23 years for the working class. The people of Barcelona were suffocated by the walls that enclosed them, becoming a health hazard. With a density of 856 inhabitants per hectare, it became necessary for the government to manage and rework the distribution of the excess population. Houses stretched out into the street as they went up, and some streets were narrow from 4 to 10 feet wide. With the city prospering at a faster rate than the rest of Spain, there was no land left within the city walls. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In 1841, the Barcelona City Council held a design competition to expand the city beyond the confines of the medieval walls. After studying various urban plan proposals, in 1860 the central government approved the plan of the Catalan engineer and urban planner Ildefons Cerdà, known as the Cerdà Plan. His radical expansion proposal to develop the city into a grid neighborhood would unite the old city with seven outlying villages. This united area, now called L'Eixample (Catalan for The Expansion), was almost four times larger than the old city and took almost a century to complete. Ildefons Cerdà, born in 1815 in the rural area north of Barcelona, ​​Spain known as Catalunya, graduated in Civil Engineering from a school in Madrid. He specialized in a new type of engineering focused on roads, canals and ports. He wrote and published several theories on the structure and development of cities, as well as invented the concept and term urbanization. He created a science from the study of cities and towns. This science emphasized the need for the collection of data and statistics when planning and designing each function in the economic, social, political and environmental elements that make up cities. Cerdà had also immersed himself in the political arena, which later influenced the hand he was dealt regarding Barcelona's expansion. Although Cerdà's ideas were primarily the product of his mind, there were many external factors that shaped his thoughts and influenced him. One factor in particular that helped influence his planning was the train. In 1844 Cerdà witnessed the potential of trains as both a technology and a form of transportation, and linked this idea to the development of a city. In particular “he considered trains as bridges between old and new settlements”. (1) Although other planners noted the importance of trains, their influence on Cerdà's plans was not found in other plans made at this time. As will be discussed in more depth later, Cersà based the width of his proposed streets on the incorporation of trains into the transportation systems of cities and towns, as well as other means of transportation that had not yet been invented. He designed not only the basic foundations of a city, but also the finer details. These fundamental foundations included political, legal, economic and administrative. Only by understanding these fundamental principles did Cerdà believe that realistic or useful plans for city development could be created. The grid system exemplified byCerdà in his plan was described as providing “non-hierarchical access to all parts of the city, thus avoiding differences in the urban condition”. (1) Cerdà based his grid on strategic components such as wide streets, wide intersections, mobility and large, spacious blocks. He made sure to keep in mind the city's capacity for growth and the ability of this network to provide for that. This grid has determined the development of land values, real estate values, the availability of services, healthcare, housing and open spaces. Cerdà calculated the volume of atmospheric air that a person needs to breathe correctly, collected data on the professions that the population could carry out, and mapped the necessary services. A-1 (The map above shows the boundary of the Cerdà plan represented by the light green road grid represented by the blue lines and the schools represented by the green circles.) The Cerdà grid provides for a highly effective and efficient distribution of resources and services, which coexist together to create a better environment for the citizens of Barcelona. “He proposed an equitable distribution of “33 schools, 3 hospitals located on the edge of the city for hygienic conditions, 8 parks, 10 markets and 12 administrative buildings.” (2) In designing this grid, Cerdà educated himself on the distance and location of services in relation to residents. He carefully designed the plan so that there would be sufficiently large roads. The streets would be built 20 meters wide, with 5 meters dedicated on both sides for pedestrians. There are also main streets such as the Gran Via which would be 50 meters wide and the Passeig de Gracia which would be 60 meters wide. The districts were defined as 20 blocks of Manzana together, with access to shops, markets, services and schools. It has ensured that whether wealthy or working class, every resident has equal access to these services. He studied the maximum desired distance between each service and the other, limiting the distance to 30 minutes. He truly intended to create socioeconomic equality with his network. Another significant aspect of the Cerdà plan was the development of the Manzana Block. La manzana is a structure of urban blocks created by Cerdà. This idea evolved from public to private, or from more of a garden, to a backyard. Cerdà wanted a square block to consolidate his equitable distribution of services, maintain traffic flow, and eliminate the association between land size and socioeconomic status. As explained later, this unfortunately was not avoided as Cerdà hoped. These square-structured blocks were originally intended to be built on only 2 or 3 sides, 20 meters deep and at a scale of four stories, indicating a human-level structure. Each side would measure 113.3 meters and between the sides would be a recreational green space that would A-2 allow the maximum amount of sunlight and ventilation into each unit of the block. Since this plan was not profitable, most of the blocks were built on all four sides, becoming parking lots and further exceeding the originally planned height. Instead of green, ventilated, publicly accessible neighborhoods, the blocks began to resemble a more Soviet block brutalism, developed without regard to the plan to include public facilities in the blocks. The plane tree was chosen as the ideal species to plant in the city and was planted with a distance of 8 meters between each tree. The most unique aspect of the manzana was in fact the 45 degree bevel given to each corner of each block. Cerdà did this because he believed that there would be “a sort of small steam-powered cars that every driver could stop in front of his house. The beveled corner allowed the driver to see moreeasily what was happening on each side. Even though automobiles had not yet been invented, when Cerdà discovered the railroad, he quickly understood the type of technology the future had in store and adapted to it as best he could without knowing the specific details. A-3 Today, this project has significantly improved traffic flow in the city. Cerdà not only planned to accommodate the mobility of pedestrians, carriages, steam trams and future automobiles, but also took care of optimizing infrastructure works such as gas supply lines, sewers and waste disposal lines. His efforts went beyond simple transportation planning to include planning for the movement of goods, energy, services, and information. Being a civil engineer as well as an urban planner, it is not out of character for Cerdà to have developed empirical formulas to create and justify his plan for Barcelona, ​​along with all of his planning. Within this formula he tried to answer questions regarding urban planning. “…how could the construction of new roads, health infrastructure and municipal equipment be financed and…how could house prices be adjusted to different wages?” (2) These questions show his awareness of the social, economic and political factors that influence a city and he used these factors to shape his formula. Cerdà “found a way to calculate the length of blocks, the width of streets, the size of land occupied by a single resident, and even the number of people per family. His formula then allowed him to quantify his plans and more accurately design the layout of his cities. (1)A-4 The Cerdà plan is barely mentioned to this day in any urban planning book that is not written in Spanish or Catalan. Cerdà did not receive praise and recognition for his work internationally until around the 1980s and 1990s. Something that was surprising to discover is that with the explosion of modernism following the Cerdà plan, an urban competitiveness began among the people of Barcelona. Even though Cerdà had designed his grid so that there would be equality among everyone regardless of socioeconomic status, real estate owners and architects could not completely eliminate that competitiveness and class divisions. They each wanted to build the biggest, tallest, best house on the block. This is a great example of why there is so much diversity in the city's architecture. Families commissioned architects like Antoni Gaudi to design their homes and create a unique, organic structure to stand out from the rest. However, if it were not for these wealthy families who support and provide financial benefits to Cerdà and his plan, it could not have been as successful. There were many people, as well as architects, who turned their backs on his project. Since his approach was different from others, being based on an egalitarian grid, an economic proposal and a global circulation plan, it was understood that his design intention was not only functional but was a response to the conditions and needs of society. But because of this radical proposal, his plan was not well received by the central government, and it took decades for Catalans to applaud and accept Cerdà's work. Even so, there was much opposition to Cerdá and his plan, which helped facilitate the appearance of some parts of the plan. Cerdá, for example, designed a wider street every fifth, to facilitate mobility and to escape the density of the city. It was argued that if streets were 20 meters wide, the depth of buildings could be expanded so that they were proportional to the largest street..