N-550. A house is not a city, but a city can be a house

On October 4 at 8:30 p.m. he will be presented at the headquarters of the College of Architects of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela the publication “N-550. From the road to the street”, the first chapter of a research project on territorial transformation using the physical structure of the old national highway 550 that from North to South connects the most dynamic Galician areas parallel to the AP-9 highway. Press here to learn more.

I have to thank the promoters of this project, Xulio Turnes, Ramon Viéitez and Naomi Diaz, his invitation to participate in this first book that, using isolated homes, includes a reflection on the modification of our residential habits in relation to our capacity for mobility.

It is very meritorious that young people from different disciplines come together to show different visions about the transformation of the use we make of our territory, and it is even more meritorious if they do it in such a generous way, having as a great reward the knowledge that their journey brings, and the curiosity they provoke in us.

I hope that their role as “explorers” of our reality continues for a long time, and their discoveries help us think about a better future.

Below is the article that is part of this first book of the N-550 project, with it I wanted to vindicate community life and pay attention to the need for planning at a supra-municipal level, which does not exist in our country, implying that without planning any An architectural fact is an isolated object, just like the life of its inhabitants.

“A house is not a city, but a city can be a house” Toni Garcia

“The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of the memory; “The degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
“The Lens”. Milan Kundera, 1995

Slowness and patience are opposite degrees to those of the current construction of the territory in almost any place on the planet, not only due to population growth and the extension of urbanization, but also due to the possibility of mobility of its inhabitants and the increase in the frequency with which it occurs. When crossing the limit of our house, the space of the street changes towards that of the car the further we live from our place of work or the spaces we use to interact. The geography resulting from this transit dematerializes our body, our habits, and our way of living; It is not true that the car here offers us the freedom to access and reside in any place connected by the road network, what it offers us is the individualization of these acts, the loss of its collectivity and its consciousness. A new form of urbanity does not emerge here, but rather its fragmentation, a division that they see occupied by the dispersion of urban activity.

The city is a collective artifice, we bring part of our habits to it, it should be the extension of our house but when its inhabitants do not associate in space, the physical channels through which they travel disappear, there is no longer the possibility of creating the body that allows their spatial relationship. This loss of spatial continuity does not allow the different pieces that make up this fabric to interrelate, disappearing the complexity and gradual transience between the small residential scale and the large scales. In this fragmentary journey, the car more than any other means of transport encourages the creation of itinerary-territories, personalized territories through the individual use of networks. It is at this point where the city stops being a collective artifice and becomes a sum of fragments connected by distance and travel time, where the landscape between fragment and fragment does not count, where the activity and use given by its residents is unknown, moving from a condition of inhabitant to that of simple user of a space in which one does not participate, in which one only moves.

A house is a civilized space, it becomes a refuge when it is located in a hostile territory, it can be a home if relationships between people survive in it, and it becomes a residence if it is collectivized; but it loses these two attributes when it is individualized. This regression from the house to the refuge is what we find along the roads in the territories of the automobile. The house here becomes an isolated object, where the relationships and impact of the inhabitants on its surroundings are reduced to be encapsulated in the mobility of the networks.

A city can be a house if it maintains the possibility of being a place for everyone, an inhabited space in which people coexist with diversity; where singularity is enriched by collective experience, and size and density are not as important as the interaction of its inhabitants in space.

Using a physical network that runs through a territory with different degrees of humanization, such as National Highway 550 in Galicia, is an opportunity to reflect on the transformation caused by changes in residence, work and relationship habits, on the impact they produce on the construction of the territory, and the need for a model that articulates it allowing its balance. A balance between residents in spaces with lower and higher building density, which must be measured by their interaction, by diversity and sociability, by access to facilities that match their quality of life and the work opportunities generated in their surroundings, to turn it into a territory-house, in a common place and not in a set of fragments-refuge.

A question of density?

If we pay attention to what was expressed before, we will realize that the term rural is not used to contrast it with the urban, that we are talking about different degrees of density of settlements on the territory, of people who live connected by road networks in spaces of different compactness. and degree of construction, with different possibilities of access to its resources and endowments. This territory transcends the urban sphere, its limits are those of mobility, those of the flows marked by the place of work and residence, and also those of indifference, which causes the increase of superficiality in the relationships between people and which It is derived from the empty image of the space where they occur.

The linear reading provided by the observation of the territory along the N-550 is biased by focusing on the most urbanized space in Galicia and not considering its transversality, but it also allows us to define a variable transit through different territorial phenomena. Among the most notable are those urban ones in which the most important cities, Coruña and Vigo, grow by agglomeration of their central centers in a compact and continuous manner due to the concentration of employment and services, reaching densities greater than 3,000 inhabitants/km2, at the same time they lose population to neighboring municipalities.

These bordering municipalities, belonging to the metropolitan periphery or diffuse city, are the most dynamic spaces in current Galicia, with a social structure very similar to that of the compact nuclei, they receive population and grow discontinuously with densities between 400-800 inhabitants. km2, to be the place where activities that do not have space in the central city area are located. Between both areas, the N-550 progressively loses the traditional meaning of a street to become an extension of activities and services supported by the road, shared with residential pockets that configure the more “urban” image of suburban growth. This peripheral location of new, generally tertiary activities is related to the construction of new networks (highways, highways, and now the AVE) that further specialize the uses of the territory and the relationships of the inhabitants located along the N-550, and those who connect to it in a transversal way.

In the immediate area of this urban periphery, the N-550 passes through a space characterized by the reduction of the built volume and a lower density. In these second peripheries, still energized by urban activity, a specialization is observed based on the relationships with the metropolitan areas, in which traditional village centers and small towns mix with screes along the road and dispersed urban growth. These characteristics occupy the largest section along the N-550 around the city of Vigo, from Pontesampaio to Porriño, also becoming visible south of Santiago de Compostela, with densities greater than 200 inhabitants/km2. This is a recent phenomenon where the degree of occupation, abandonment and territorial specialization is not the same, in which its residents have their main activity in urban sectors, whether they are urbanites who see it as affordable to live in a more naturalized environment, neo-rural, or heirs of the old peasants who share other jobs with agricultural activity.

What this route shows us along the most active and densely populated stretches of the N-550 is a sequence of discontinuous limits and varying degrees of relationship with urban centers of different dimensions. Spaces in which agrarian structures still mix with other activities, and where their inhabitants have urban consumption habits but poorly interrelate with their surroundings. In this urbanity of diffuse limits, there is difficulty in finding places of relationship as we separate ourselves from the denser core, the social and functional segregation that explains them increases the distance between the inhabitants, and the lack of accessibility to both the centrality that can be recognition in urban centers, such as nearby public facilities and spaces, does not allow all its residents to acquire the same degree of citizenship.

The house is handled here as a basic piece of this territorial “alphabet soup.” Between its block accumulation and its dispersed position, spread over a garden plot and delimited by a wall, is the expression of the current urbanization. Between the compactness and diffuseness of these areas, our habits correspond more to those of our instinct than to those of the logic of reason, installed more in occupying a large space than in grouping ourselves as a collective. In this area, the term city does not serve us to define the entire space; we cannot understand it as a whole because it appears fragmented, without social and functional integration of its inhabitants in a quality space. Not everything can be considered our “home” here because we do not know a large part of it that we do not need to live.

Population density helps us measure the concentration of inhabitants, urban density the degree of concentration of activities and housing, but in the scope of this extensive and diffuse contemporary city they are not enough to characterize territorial habitability and measure accessibility to the city. information and exchange that urban concentrations should foster.

A question of spatial continuity?

We are accustomed to living with the continuity and spatial contiguity of the residential fabrics of the traditional city, those in which an average population density allows us to appreciate the existence of social diversity and profitability of facilities, public transport and local services. As we observe, this does not occur equally in the immediate territory of the cities that the N-550 crosses, maintaining in the rest of the sections a necessary physical separation between spaces previously differentiated by the use of the land, in which the uses still predominate. agricultural, and in which urban habits are increasingly shared.

In the most densely populated territory of the N-550, it is observed how the original rural formations, without modifying their old dense and smallholder structure, acquire a suburban condition. The superposition of new objects built on the rural structure leaves a territorial image managed by location criteria or access preferences without respect for the previous order, without a planned order, with a new order where the distance to the new objects built is not coincidental, but the space that exists between them.

These empty spaces that lost their agricultural use mark the lack of spatial continuity that characterizes the peripheries compared to the traditional compact city. This dispersion is visualized in a swelling of diverse objects without formal structuring, a reading landscape different from that which we identify as a city, with a way of travel and relationship based on the relationships of the objects with respect to the entire metropolitan system and its multiples. centralities. In this area, individualized transportation by car predominates, and its inhabitants usually make routes between empty fragments that make sense as a space prior to an activity that can change location depending on better positioning.

Away from this territory of the urban centers and their extensions, we circulate along the N-550 highway through a wide space with different degrees of rurality. The proximity of the road shows us a landscape of old villages with altered or abandoned farmhouses. and new constructions, some linked to agricultural and livestock farms, others, most of them, serving the territories transversal to the N-550. The location here of many of the gas stations, roadside restaurants, brothels, nightclubs, furniture or agricultural machinery exhibitors responds to a service economy. The position and distance of these built objects, isolated and apparently decontextualized, is not measured so much in relation to the urban system as in the space made up of the mesh of villages and the network of roads that connect them, making that section of the N-550 a showcase, the representative space of a community that now has access to mobility that acquires its first degree of relationship in these spaces in front of the road.

The N-550 here fragments into local areas, losing its regional character in favor of the AP9 highway, becoming a façade of objects built more or less close depending on the level of activity of the surrounding population.

Using the N-550 we are talking about the breaking down of spatial barriers within territorial diversity, which manifests itself more evidently in the forms of urbanization of urban peripheries, and more profoundly in the change in the habits of residents. residents in any of the territorial areas crossed by N-550.

Lengthening and separating, distancing objects between house and house characterizes part of this contemporary territory that measures social cohesion from the individualization and mixture of fragments. Belonging to communities of diverse interests is no longer based on proximity or local demographic density. The dynamics of service networks replaces the statics of built places to condition urban mentalities and behaviors where transport and telecommunications involve us in increasingly numerous and varied relationships.

One house + one house =6 cars?

In any section of the N-550 we can find that the surface area of the residents' cars in the house doubles that of the common spaces of the house, in many cases the time we spend in the car exceeds that dedicated to the coexistence in those spaces; and even if the number of inhabitants per home was reduced by half in Galicia in the last thirty years, increasing the amount of space per person inside the house, in many of the houses with more than two members everyone has a car and They individualize its use, leaving as an image the spatial emptying of the house in a society that is structured from the open spaces between fragments, and that assumes the mixture of landscapes as a background and extension of itself.

We talked at the beginning of this article about the regressive isolation of the house when instead of being part of a whole, a part within a whole, a whole within a part, the house becomes an isolated object, a refuge within a hostile territory. Even if this characterization is excessive, what I try to represent with this image is the increase in the isolation of an increasingly large group of people with respect to their environment, not so much because physically along the N-550 we can find isolated elements , houses or house-ships that store the services that their residents sell, but because of the existence of residents who do not interact locally. There are more and more people who work and seek their leisure outside their place of residence-bedroom, others own a “walled castle” full of devices that help them move regardless of their location, and the most depend on the use of the car. private to reach other areas of relationship.

All this offers many other readings: that of the spatial fragmentation that starts from the residence itself and extends into the territory; that of the dispersion of the members of the house that manifests itself in the social segregation of its environment; that of the monofunctionality of the house that divides the fabrics into residential, industrial and service pieces; that of a new space without institutional recognition, in need of a new global and supra-municipal reading that allows effective management of urban areas and rural spaces to ensure the solidarity-based and sustainable development of the territory.

In these situations, despite the closeness that exists between the built objects, despite the density and spatial continuity of the fabric of which they are part, the house is not part of a whole, it is not a “city” nor do its residents create external links, there is no continuity between the house and its surroundings. The house here is an exit platform to other areas, and the city disintegrated and extended in the territory is not everyone's home.

*Antonio García Fernández is an architect, Master in Urban Design from the Technische Universiteit Delft-Netherlands. Delegate of Spain in the XIV-Y network of the AECI-ICI for the improvement of housing and Ibero-American rural settlements (1998-2003). Professor of projects and urban planning at Cesuga UCD-Dublin since 2002, researcher at the ULAB of TUDelft since 2009, and author of several articles and books on the transformations of housing and territory in Galicia, among them “25 Houses of Galicia, architectures of diffuse urbanization, Other houses other habits”, and “Collective housing, protected housing. Social Housing in Galicia”.