On May 12th at 7:00 p.m, Roca Barcelona Gallery presents ARCADE, the first academic project by the architecture studio Arquid, designed as a space for reflection and debate on architectural practice from an interdisciplinary and trans-scalar perspective. This series of lecture cycles unfolds by seasons and themes, addressing current challenges through dynamics inspired by play.
After successfully hosting the first three sessions at Roca Madrid Gallery, this fourth episode of the series titled “Habitar la ebullición” proposes a reflection on tourism as one of the forces most intensely reshaping our cities.
In today’s local context, this issue is especially relevant. For decades, tourism has been an economic driver and a promise of growth, structuring territories, economies, and ways of life. Spain is different is not only a legacy slogan, but a contemporary condition: we are, simultaneously, hosts and visitors. We inhabit cities crossed by constant flows, while also participating in that same logic elsewhere.
Beyond its economic dimension, tourism acts as an agent of urban transformation: it puts pressure on access to housing, reconfigures everyday spaces, and progressively shifts the lived city toward a represented city. It turns the city into image, destination, and product.
A Souvenir City: accessible as an experience, but increasingly less habitable as a condition. Where cultural exchange dissolves into transaction and hospitality becomes a business model. A city designed for visitation and sustained by those who can no longer afford to fully inhabit it.
From an architectural perspective, the question is not only how to respond to these dynamics, but how to intervene in them. What role do we play in the production of these cities? Can we imagine forms of tourism that do not entail the dissolution of the local? Is it possible to sustain conditions of permanence, belonging, and everyday life in environments increasingly oriented toward visitation?
The conversation seeks to open these questions from a critical but also operational perspective. To understand tourism beyond the simplification of the opportunity/problem dichotomy, and to address the concrete ways in which it produces the city as a field with the potential to rethink the relationship between mobility, identity, and space.
Among the invited speakers will be:
In addition, for this session we will be supported by Bernadí and Figueras Seating and Grosso Napoletano. We look forward to seeing you at Carrer Joan Güell 211!
Reserve your spot and come discover ARCADE 04.