Why is bureaucracy catastrophic for a city? Primarily, it is because only large operators, with many resources and a lot of money to pay lawyers, architects, and engineers, can afford the economic risk of submitting a project to all the departmental and agency reviews required by rich cities like Barcelona. And this has formal consequences because the scale of projects increases significantly, and the diversity of designers decreases. Freelance professionals or small conventional firms cannot afford to survive making changes without charging for revisions. But beyond the professional dimension, this also has consequences for the form of the city, in what is seen and the urban landscapes it creates.
Cities with small plots have much more typological, formal, and compositional richness than cities with large plots. Think of Soviet cities or the large Viennese hofs, projects designed and executed by a single operator with homogeneous facades dozens of meters long: they create scenic fear.
There is an example in Barcelona's Eixample that allows us to imagine what the Cerdà Plan would have been like if each block had been promoted by only one team of architects. It is the CLIP block, which gets its name because it is located between the streets of Còrsega, Lepant, Indústria, and Padilla. It is a prototypical block, geometrically symmetrical and made up of 20 plots, 16 of which are very similar and four are trapezoidal in shape at the corners. According to the City Council's Heritage file, it is a post-war project (1949) for 24 residential buildings covered by the subsidized housing law, for owners Ramon Salada Padrós and José Torruella.
The 113 linear meters of street have the same facade, the same buildable depth, the same square window, and the same distribution: four apartments per landing, with a slight setback in the attics. The roofs are all at the same level, and all have exactly the same use: they are empty, because since they are communal, and the apartments are privately owned, no one has agreed to use them as neighborhood spaces. There are about 814 homes and about 1,450 registered residents. Few cities have such a high lived density; this block could house the population of many rural municipalities in Catalonia!
But, fortunately, the CLIP block is an exception and most blocks in the Eixample have between 20 and 25 plots that different owners built with different projects and teams. This is the diversity that we admire today, that we enjoy, and that generates unforeseen cadences, singularities and stands, galleries or facade details that make us look up, even from our phones.
For bureaucratic logic, working with a single idea provider and a single project processor is an economic saving. For a city, it is the poverty of ideas and the condemnation of homogeneity. And neighborhoods, their architectural quality, also have economic and patrimonial value. In the long run, bureaucratic logic turns out to be short-sighted. Take a walk around the CLIP block and compare it with other blocks full of modernist, noucentist or simply anonymous master builders with skill, to understand what I mean.