IAAC’s Master in City & Technology (1 or 2-year program) is a unique program oriented towards redefining the analysis, planning, and design of twenty-first-century cities and beyond. The program offers expertise in the design of digitally enhanced, ecological and human-centered urban environments by intersecting the disciplines of urbanism and data science. Taking place in Barcelona, the capital of urbanism, the Master in City & Technology is training the professionals that city administrations, governments, industries, and communities need, to transform the urban environment in the era of big data.
Mapping, Data, and Knowledge Production in the Contemporary City
Decolonial Futures & Counter-Cartographies in Urbanism critically examines how cities are produced through unequal power relations embedded in planning practices, architectural discourse, and data-driven methodologies. The seminar frames urbanism as an epistemological practice, interrogating how maps, models, and datasets shape what is visible, governable, and imaginable while privileging certain perspectives and excluding others. Through decolonial theory, critical methodologies, and collective cartographic practices, students develop situated research positions and produce layered counter-maps that reveal the city as a dynamic, contested space shaped by multiple forms of knowledge and experience.
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Urban space is conventionally conceptualized as an anthropocentric construct. However, non-human species continuously appropriate architectural surfaces, infrastructural voids, and vegetated fragments. Birds occupy ledges and canopy layers, insects colonize engineered soils, bats navigate nocturnal corridors along tree lines, and plants root within pavement fissures. These presences are not incidental; they reflect how spatial design either … Read more
This project explores how power operates spatially through counter-cartography and autoethnography in Poblenou, Barcelona. Combining observation, mapping, and self-tracking, the research examines how infrastructure, urban objects, rules, and rhythms shape behavior, movement, and perception. Benches, pedestrian streets, and smoking practices reveal how freedom, restriction, and permission are unevenly distributed. Findings show that movement is widely … Read more
Introduction “Poblenou” or “Poble nou”, means “new town” in Catalan. When we first arrived to Poblenou in Fall of 2025, it was difficult to see how this space in the city was “new.” While it didn’t appear to be as old as El Born, Raval, or Gràcia, in our outsider perspective it certainly did not … Read more
Scrap Metal, Migration and Urban Recycling To better understand people, we must understand the spaces they occupy – the city they navigate, the neighborhood they experience. Robert Park notes that the city is a man’s most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his … Read more
Cities are often described in terms of movement. We often tend to move through them in familiar loops – leaving home to catch the metro, commuting to work, coming back in the evening, running errands, going to appointments. Over time, these repeated paths shape how we think about urban space and can seem to define … Read more
