Lessons from Barcelona: Building a City That Grows Like a Tree

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By Valley, Jointing.Media, in Wuhan, 2025-07-19

The urban grid of Barcelona, Spain, conceived in 1859, stands as a global model for sustainable planning. From above, its orderly octagonal blocks form a vast chessboard. This pioneering layout is considered a landmark of modern European urban planning and remains in use today due to its unique advantages.

From the Cerdà Grid to Superblocks: Inheritance and Evolution

From Smart City Pioneer to Citizen‑Tech‑Powered Urban Governance

The Planning Philosophy Reflecting the Mediterranean Cult of Public Life

〉〉Read the original article

Editor’s Note:

What exactly are we talking about when we discuss cities in today’s world—a world of hyper-connectivity yet also heightened anxiety? Are we referring to the skyward-climbing “forests” of skyscrapers, shimmering with the cold light of glass and steel? Or are we talking about the rapidly expanding grey blots on the map, encroaching upon and devouring mountains, rivers, and wetlands?

The data offers a cold, stark alarm: the annual “creeping” expansion of global cities into ecologically fragile zones is swallowing hundreds of thousands of hectares of natural space. This is equivalent to over 140,000 football fields being erased from the Earth, leaving behind fragmented, isolated ruins of habitats. This encroachment, carried out in the name of “development,” exposes a deeply ingrained mindset—one that views the city as a machine capable of infinite replication and reckless implantation anywhere.

Looking inward, a profound “disconnect between knowledge and action” seems to pervade our urban narratives.

Looking back along the river of history, ancient Chinese urban wisdom demonstrated remarkable foresight and resilience. The 108 meticulously planned wards of Sui and Tang Dynasty Chang’an, with their logic of modular management for efficiency, indeed share a similar spirit with Barcelona’s Cerdà grid. Yet the more precious legacy lies in the resilient principles of moderation and functional balance embedded in texts like the Kaogong Ji (Artificers’ Record), which advocated “the court in front, the market behind, each occupying one fu (unit).” Even more significant was the quiet revolution of Northern Song Dynasty Bianliang (modern Kaifeng)—where ward walls crumbled, street markets flourished, and an open network was born, taking the imperial way as its backbone and dense alleyways as its capillaries.

However, pulling the lens back to the present reveals a different, disheartening scene. The past three decades of China’s frenzied real estate development have left a complex legacy, including numerous “vanity projects.” These were often hastily launched under imperfect decision-making mechanisms, driven by the pursuit of short-term political achievement. Since 2015, we have seen a concentrated emergence of faux-antique “ancient towns,” fantasy “characteristic towns,” and empty new districts and industrial parks. From the 540-million-yuan Yao-Han Yangshou City in Gongcheng, Guangxi, which rapidly became a ghost town, to the billion-yuan project in Xinye County, Henan, that was “rebuilt five times in three years,” these sites—alongside the single-function “ghost cities” sprawling in the wilderness—paint a picture of collective disregard for the laws of urban growth. They represent a mindset that reduces the city to a “project” for quick completion, land to “capital” for cashing out, and cultural heritage to a “landscape” for mass production. This model, in essence, shares the same simplistic, reckless, and unsustainable “logic of expansion” with the global urban “creep” that shows disregard for ecology.

What kind of cities do we truly need?

The lesson from Barcelona may lie in its attempt to rediscover an urban philosophy of “growing like a tree”: roots digging deep into the soil of community and collective memory, branches and leaves adjusting towards the sun through democratic participation and technological empowerment. A truly smart city is not a “super-machine” built from stacked technology, but a living organism capable of breathing, adapting, and healing.

The story of the city will ultimately be the story of how we coexist with ourselves, with nature, and with time. It is time to change the way we tell it.

Translated by DeepSeek

Edited by Jas