Ildefonso Cerdá

Ildefonso Cerdá Suñer
Portrait of Ildefonso Cerdá by Ramón Martí Alsina in 1878. Ateneo Barcelonés.
Born	December 23, 1815 Centellas, Barcelona, Spain.
Died	August 21, 1876 (aged 60) Las Caldas del Besaya, Cantabria, Spain
Notable work	Cerdá Plan (Ensanche of Barcelona)
Signature

Ildefonso Cerdá Suñer, in Catalan Ildefons Cerdà i Sunyer (Centellas, December 23, 1815 – Las Caldas del Besaya, August 21, 1876), was a Spanish engineer, urban planner, jurist, economist and politician.

A multifaceted man, he wrote the Teoría general de la urbanización (General Theory of Urbanization), a pioneering work in the field, for which he is considered one of the founders of modern urban planning. His most important project was the urban reform of 19th-century Barcelona through the Cerdá Plan, with which he created the present-day Ensanche neighborhood.

Cerdá was not successful during his lifetime; meticulously focused on his work, he had family problems. Moreover, his expansion project was never looked upon favorably by the local establishment, and he ended up ruined, since the Spanish State and the Barcelona City Council did not pay him the fees they owed him. A century had to pass before his legacy was recognized.

Biography

Mas Cerdá de la Garga in Centellas, the place where Ildefonso Cerdá was born and raised.

He was born at the Mas Cerdá de la Garga, a property his family had owned since the 14th century, in Centellas, Osona, Barcelona. He was the fourth child—the third of the sons—of six siblings, in a family with documented roots in the Plana de Vich since 1440. Despite their rural origins, the Cerdás were worldly people with interests tied to the American trade, a fact that undoubtedly stimulated the open spirit, the intellectual curiosity and the faith in progress of the young Ildefonso.

Destined by his father for an ecclesiastical career, he studied Latin and philosophy at the seminary of Vich, a city where his family, of liberal tradition, took refuge during the War of the Aggrieved in 1827. After clashing with his father in order to change his professional direction, in 1832 he moved to Barcelona, where he began studies in architecture, mathematics, navigation and drawing at the Escuela de la Llotja. He did not obtain the title of architect and, in September 1835, he moved to Madrid to study at the School of Engineers of Roads, Canals and Ports, where he obtained his engineering degree in 1841, after great financial hardship due to the lack of family support.

On June 20, 1848, he married the painter Clotilde Bosch Calmell, daughter of the banker Josep Bosch Mustich, with whom he had four daughters: Pepita (1849), Sol (1850), Rosita (1851) and Clotilde (1862), the last of whom became a well-known harp player. The marriage did not work well, and Clotilde, the youngest daughter, was the fruit of his wife's adulterous relations, although Cerdá acknowledged her as his own. Finally, in 1862, the couple separated.

With the premature death of his father (1787–1844) and of his two brothers, Ramon (1808–1837) and Josep (1806–1848), he inherited a substantial estate that allowed him to resign, in 1849, from his official post in Public Works, to reorient his profession, to enter politics and to devote, as he himself described it, "my entire fortune, all my credit, all my time, all my comforts, all my affections, and even my personal standing in society, to the idea of urbanization".

In the last days of his life, ill and half-ruined, since the government owed him the fees for many of the works he had carried out, he moved to the spa of Las Caldas de Besaya, in Cantabria, where he died on August 21, 1876. On August 23, the newspaper La Imprenta published an obituary with the following words: "Señor Cerdá was a liberal and had talent, two circumstances that in Spain are detrimental and usually create many enemies..."

In May 1970, coinciding with the reprinting of his Teoría general de la urbanización, and following efforts by the Official College of Architects of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, his mortal remains were transferred to and buried in the New Cemetery of Montjuïc in Barcelona, and various tributes were held.

Political life

Interested in the study of urban planning, in Barcelona he came into contact with the doctrines of the utopian socialism of Étienne Cabet and with the utopian world of his Voyage en Icarie (1840), and he associated with Narciso Monturiol and Ramón Martí Alsina.

After finishing his studies, he enlisted in the National Militia, formed by defenders of liberal ideals, where he reached the rank of lieutenant of grenadiers. His progressive ideology led him to take an active part in public life: he became deputy for Barcelona in the Spanish Cortes in the elections of 1850—the legislature began on May 18, 1851—as part of a progressive slate together with Estanislao Figueras, Pascual Madoz and Jacinto Félix Doménech.

Portrait of Ildefonso Cerdá as first commander of sappers of the National Militia of Barcelona

During the Progressive Biennium he was appointed commander of the battalion of sappers of the National Militia. After this period, in 1854 he joined the Barcelona City Council as a regidor.

It was in the 1850s that he developed a greater social awareness and laid the foundations of his future urban planning project, upon seeing how the city, pressed and stifled by the walls that surrounded it, could grow neither physically nor hygienically. Sensitive to the living conditions in the city and to the problems of the working classes, he led the mobilization that entered the Casa de la Ciudad de Barcelona on July 3, 1855, to recover the flag that had been seized from the Workers' Associations, which were generating strong social instability. This action earned him enmities among the ruling classes, but it was the reason he accompanied a delegation of Barcelona workers to Madrid to present the problems of workers' associations to Manuel Alonso Martínez, Minister of Development in the government of Baldomero Espartero. The following year, 1856, he was removed from the Barcelona City Council by the Captain General Juan Zapatero y Navas and was imprisoned on two occasions. Between 1864 and 1866 he again served as regidor on the Barcelona City Council.

The Revolution of 1868 brought him back into public life, and he joined the Federal Democratic Republican Party. A member of the moderate wing of federalism, he was elected deputy by popular vote in the elections of 1871 for the electoral district of Centellas, in the judicial district of Vich, and at the constitutive session of the Corporation he was named vice president of the Provincial Deputation of Barcelona, from where he contributed to proclaiming the First Spanish Republic in 1873.

In May 1873 President Benito Arabio resigned, as a result of which Cerdá took over the presidency of the Deputation until January 1874, when the Captain General of Catalonia dissolved the Corporation as a consequence of the coup d'état of General Manuel Pavía. During this period there was a Carlist resurgence, and the "Junta of Salvation and Defense of Catalonia" organized a citizens' militia of men between 20 and 40 years of age. The government in Madrid did not give its approval but, despite this, four battalions of "Guides of the Deputation" were organized.

Cerdá was a member of the Board of Works of the Port of Barcelona and took part in the proclamation of the Catalan State, federalist and republican in character, of 1873.

Professional career

He began his professional life as a state engineer in the Public Works administration and, between 1839 and 1849, was posted to Murcia, Teruel, Tarragona, Valencia, Gerona and Barcelona, where he took part in the construction of the first Spanish railway, the Barcelona–Mataró line. This work led him to become interested in the applications of the steam engine in the new and revolutionary system of locomotion that the railway represented.

He carried out statistical studies and graphic syntheses with housing proposals for various social categories and with different degrees of complexity, from the detached house to the collective dwelling.

His principal urban planning project: the Ensanche of Barcelona, known as the Cerdá Plan (1859), showing the grid of chamfered squares and the planned diagonals.

Cerdá's legal proposals for the cities of Madrid and Barcelona gave rise to new legislation, but he found himself lacking precedents, both in state and in foreign legislation. In Cuatro palabras sobre el Ensanche (A Few Words on the Ensanche, 1861) he developed at length the compensation system and the technique of land readjustment as a means of achieving a fair distribution of the benefits and costs of urban planning among the owners, and of obtaining land in a proportionate manner and buildable in proportion to the plot contributed, a system later included in the bill of Posada Herrera and incorporated a century later into the Land Law of 1956.

On the economic side, Cerdá established the rules for infrastructure, for the division of property and for the allocation of the plots of land of the new Barcelona.

The plan devised by Cerdá remains fully in force in present-day Barcelona.

In the field of the social sciences he sought to solve the problems of the demographic concentration of cities and of industrial development in his work Teoría general de la urbanización. In this treatise he set out theories that he had in large part already applied earlier in the Proyecto de Reforma Interior y Ensanche de Barcelona (Project for the Interior Reform and Expansion of Barcelona). He also included an assessment of the living conditions of the popular classes, with an approach to the study of social inequalities in health, in which he compared the differences in life expectancy according to social class. Ildefonso Cerdá developed a genuine sociological study as an appendix to his Teoría general de la Urbanización, since he regarded the workers as his project for the expansion of Barcelona, and he bequeathed only figures to posterity, leaving behind the wishes of the working mass, which he must necessarily have gathered in his social inquiries. According to his figures, the number of workers that existed in Barcelona at that time can be counted: of the 54,000 workers, some 6,500 could be considered "distinguished", that is, able to dress and educate themselves well. The others were simple day laborers. Cerdá mentioned that the number of paid working days in Barcelona was 269 per year, and that the average daily wage of a worker was 8.55 reales. Only the most skilled, generally married men, exceeded these wage figures. Comparing income and expenses, only a worker employed in a textile factory, as a first- or second-class weaver, could meet the expenses of his marriage. But as soon as children arrived, a deficit loomed, and with it unease and worry. An illness or an unforeseen accident meant forced unemployment and the loss of the family's income.

The Cerdá Plan

Main article: Cerdá Plan

His most important and most internationally recognized work is his expansion plan for the City of Barcelona. Born amid controversy because it was imposed by the government of Spain against the will of the municipal council, it was approved in June 1859 and began to be developed a year later.

Cerdá's new language

The plan introduced the primary classification of the territory: the "ways" (vías) and the "inter-way" spaces (intervías). The former constitute the public space of mobility, of encounter, of support for the service networks (water, sanitation, gas...), the trees (more than 100,000 trees in the street), the lighting and the street furniture. The "inter-ways" (island, block, building block) are the spaces of private life, where multi-family buildings are gathered in two rows around an interior courtyard through which all the dwellings (without exception) receive natural sunlight, ventilation and the joy of living, as the hygienist movements demanded.

Cerdá advocated balance between urban values and rural advantages: "Ruralize that which is urban, urbanize that which is rural" is the message found at the beginning of his Teoría general de la urbanización.

Structure of the Cerdá Plan

Cross-section of an Ensanche street as it appeared in the project.

The plan proposed by Cerdà for the city stood out for its optimistic and unlimited projection of growth, the planned absence of a privileged center, and its mathematical, geometric character with a scientific vision. Obsessed with the hygienist aspects he had studied so thoroughly, its structure makes the most of the direction of the winds to facilitate the oxygenation and cleansing of the atmosphere.

In addition to hygienist aspects, Cerdá was concerned with mobility. He defined a street width that was absolutely unprecedented, partly to escape the inhuman density in which the city lived, but also with a motorized future in mind, with spaces of their own separate from those of social coexistence, which he reserved for the interior areas.

He incorporated the layout of the railway lines that had so influenced his vision of the future when he visited France, although he was aware that they would have to run underground, and he took care that each neighborhood had an area devoted to public buildings.

The most notable formal solution of the project was the incorporation of the block of houses; its crucial and absolutely singular form compared with other European cities is marked by its square structure of 113 meters with chamfers of 45°.

Geometry of the Ensanche

Diagram of how the intersections work, included in the Cerdá Plan.

Cerdá's grid provided for streets 20, 30 and 60 meters wide. The blocks had buildings on only two of their four sides, which gave a density of 800,000 people. With the original design, the Ensanche would have been fully occupied by around 1900, although both Cerdá himself and, later, certain speculative actions densified it substantially.

Diagram of sunlight in the blocks.

Cerdá proposed the "unlimited Ensanche", a regular and unvarying grid throughout the entire urban layout. Unlike other proposals that broke their repetitive rhythm to insert green spaces or services, Cerdá's proposal incorporates them internally, which allows him to establish continuous repetition in the plan with the ability to alter it when convenient.

The engineer's vision was one of growth and modernity; his genius led him to anticipate future urban traffic conflicts 30 years before the automobile was invented.

Cerdá lays out the plan along the backbone formed by the Gran Vía. He works with modules of 10 × 10 blocks (which Cerdá considers a district), which correspond to the main intersections (Plaza de las Glorias Catalanas; Plaza de Tetuán; Plaza de la Universidad), with a wider street every five (Calle de la Marina; the Vía Layetana, which would cut through the old city 50 years later; Calle de Urgell). With these proportions, as well as the one resulting from the block size, Cerdá manages to place one of the wide streets running down from the sea to the mountain on each side of the old city (Calle de Urgell and Paseo de San Juan) with 15 blocks in between.

Exceptions to the regularity

Projection of the module of 10 used by Cerdá for the layout of the main and diagonal ways; in red, old roads that have survived the Cerdá grid.

Special mention must be made of the design of the Paseo de Gracia and the Rambla de Cataluña where, in order to respect the old road to Gracia and the natural drainage slope of the waters—hence the name rambla—he laid out only two consecutive ways of special width when in reality, according to the 113 m grid, there should have been three streets. Moreover, the Paseo de Gracia, in order to respect the old route, is not exactly parallel to the rest of the streets, which is why the blocks between the two ways mentioned, although of orthogonal design with chamfers, have irregularities that give them a trapezoidal shape.

To all this must be added the presence of some ways of special character that do not follow the grid layout but cross it diagonally, such as the Avenida Diagonal itself, the Meridiana or the Paralelo, and others that were laid out respecting the existence of old communication routes to the neighboring towns.

Opposition to the Cerdá Plan and disparagement of its author

Even before its approval it faced municipal opposition. Barcelona's dominant group acted against the plan in the same way as it did against the growing popular protests. The anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical, egalitarian and rationalist character of the plan clashed with the vision of the bourgeoisie, which preferred Paris or Washington as the model for a new city, with an architecture of a more particularist character.

The figure of Cerdá also generated antipathy among architects, since they could not forgive the affront that awarding an urban planning responsibility to an engineer had meant. Cerdá suffered a campaign of personal discrediting full of legends and lies. It was of no use that he came from a Catalan family dating back to the 15th century, nor that he had proclaimed the Catalan federal republic from the balcony of the Generalidad, because the claim ended up being spread that "he was not Catalan".

He was also disparaged institutionally. The Ensanche competition stipulated that the winner's name would be given to a main street of the grid. Cerdá was denied this prize until, in the 1960s, Plaza Cerdá took his name. It is a square located outside the grid he himself designed, with an urban marginality that persisted until recently and remembered for constant flooding problems due to poor sewer design, curiously one of Ildefonso Cerdá's greatest concerns. In the same way, he was denied a monument that had already been designed in 1889 by Pere Falqués and which Mayor Francesc Rius did not wish to carry out.

Principal works

• 1859 – Teoría de la construcción de las ciudades, vol. 1. Barcelona, 1859. Published in 1991 by the Ministry of Public Administrations, the Barcelona City Council and the Madrid City Council. ISBN 84-7088-583-9.
• 1861 – Teoría de la construcción de las ciudades, vol. 2. Madrid, 1861. Published in 1991 by the Ministry of Public Administrations, the Barcelona City Council and the Madrid City Council. ISBN 84-7088-586-3.
• 1863 – Teoría del enlace del movimiento de las vías marítimas y terrestres.
• 1867 – Teoría general de la urbanización y aplicación de sus principios y doctrinas a la reforma y ensanche de Barcelona. Madrid: Imprenta Española, 1867. Reissued by the Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, 1968–1971.
• 1867 – Monografía estadística de la clase obrera Barcelona, en 1856: Espécimen de una estadística funcional de la vida urbana, con aplicación concreta en dicha clase. It was published as an appendix to the Teoría general de la urbanización.
• ? – Teoría general de la ruralización.

Personal archive

Cerdá's grave in Montjuïc Cemetery. The tombstone has the shape of the Ensanche grid.

Ildefonso Cerdá's personal and cartographic documentation, preserved in the Historical Archive of the City of Barcelona (AHCB), comes from the donation that the College of Engineers of Roads, Canals and Ports of Catalonia made to the Barcelona City Council on September 27, 1979.

The cartographic collection of the Cerdá Legacy, deposited in the Graphics section of the AHCB, is an irreplaceable source for gaining a deeper, systematic knowledge of some of the characteristics of the territory of the Plain of Barcelona. It consists of a set of 56 large-format original maps covering the territory to be urbanized, which provide detailed information on the space located between the walled precinct of Barcelona, the Mountain of Montjuic and the suburban settlements of the Plain.

The series of personal documentation is made up of a total of 32 texts, fourteen autobiographical and eighteen on urban planning. This documentation covers a chronological period extending from 1841 to 1876.

See also

• Urban planning of Barcelona
• Architecture of Barcelona
• Ensanche District
• Gran Vía de las Cortes Catalanas
• Urban planning
• Urban development rights
• Mortgage of urban development rights
• History of urban planning in Spain

Notes and references

Bibliography

• Babiano i Sánchez, Eloi: Antoni Rovira i Trias: Arquitecte de Barcelona. Barcelona: Viena Edicions / Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2007. ISBN 978-84-8330-435-8.
• Bassols, M.: "Ildefons Cerdà davant l'ordenació jurídica de l'urbanisme: Aportacions i anticipacions", in the proceedings of the 1st International Conference "Cerdà, urbs i territori", 1995.
• Bohigas, Oriol: Barcelona entre el pla Cerdà i el barraquisme. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1963.
• Cerdà, urbs i territori, catalog of the exhibition of the same name. Barcelona: Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca / Madrid: Electa, 1994. ISBN 84-8156-067-7.
• Fabre, Jaume, and Huertas Claveria, Josep Maria: Burgesa i revolucionària: La Barcelona del segle XX. Barcelona: Flor del Vent, 2000. ISBN 84-89644-48-9.
• Grau, Ramon and Montaner, Carme (editors): Estudis sobre la cartografia de Barcelona, del segle XVIII al XXI: Els mapes d'una ciutat en expansió. Barcelona: Historical Archive of the City of Barcelona and Cartographic and Geological Institute of Catalonia, 2014. ISBN 978-84-9850-603-7
• Soria, Arturo: "Actualidad de la Teoría de Cerdà", in the proceedings of the 1st International Conference "Cerdà, urbs i territori", 1995.
• Permanyer, Lluís: L’Eixample: 150 anys d’història. Barcelona: Viena Edicions / Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2008. ISBN 978-84-8330-508-9.

External links

• Ildefonso Cerdá Collection of the Historical Archive of the City of Barcelona. Online catalog
• Historical Archive of the City of Barcelona. Documentary collections: inventories in PDF format. Private collections
• Website of the Cerdá Year (2009–2010)
• Biography of Cerdá
• Information on Ildefons Cerda's Urban Plan
• Biography in Spanish
• Fifteen articles on Ildefons Cerdà, his work and his legacy to the City of Barcelona, Barcelona Metrópolis, fall 2009.
• Historical study of the Casas Cerdà, one of the first developments built under the Cerdà Plan. 2015. Elena Moral and Cynthia Emmi.