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.
Barcelona Built a Road to the Port. Someone Else Paid for It. In 1992, the city tore down a wall. The old industrial waterfront that had cut Barcelona off from the Mediterranean for over a century was demolished to make way for the Olympic Village. For the first time in living memory, residents could walk … Read more
Vulnerability-adjusted carbon sequestration for more [actionable land]. Current climate mitigation treats carbon sequestration as a static stock: it counts the biomass a landscape holds and rewards storing more. Yet under fire and drought, the densest biomass is lost first, turning a carbon sink into a source. This thesis develops vulnerability-adjusted carbon sequestration. Working across a … Read more
Mobility when Tourism outgrows the City Barcelona is the 10th most visited city in the world. In 2024, it received approximately 15.6 million tourists – nearly nine times its resident population of 1.7 million. The issue is not tourism itself. Barcelona’s economy depends on it, and the city’s cultural richness is inseparable from its global … Read more
What is an apothecary? The word comes from Greek. Apothēkē — it means storehouse. An apothecary is a place where you grow plants, prepare them, and share them as medicine. This tradition goes back thousands of years until the 19th century, when industrial pharmacy replaced it and the knowledge was lost. Today, we’re bringing it … Read more
Agriculture is not simply another economic sector. It is the foundation of food security, livelihoods and social stability. Yet in many conflict zones, agricultural landscapes are systematically damaged through bombardment, infrastructure collapse, restricted access to farmland, and disruption of water systems. While urban destruction is often visible and extensively documented, the destruction of food-producing landscapes … Read more
Re-envisioning Container City One of Barcelona’s most strategically located waterfront areas, the container port south of Montjuïc, remains largely disconnected from the inner city. As the city explores the possibility of relocating portions of its container operations in this speculative project and transforming this industrial landscape into a mixed-use district, mobility becomes a more pertinent … Read more
Microclimatic Corridor is a proposal for the transformation of Carrer de Rocafort into a climate shelter for non-human urban life. Responding to rising temperatures, biodiversity decline, and the urban heat island effect in Barcelona, the project extends the ecological and microclimatic performance of Jardins de Montserrat into the surrounding street network Climate change as a … Read more
What would happen if our landscapes got inspired in Culture, tradition and seasonality reflecting the core and inner Catalan escence? How could our landscapes being changed? but most important how could we do this? Introduction We began with a simple reframing: instead of adding nature on top of the streetscape, we asked how Catalan culture … Read more
Design for More Than Humans Seminar | IAAC Understanding Local Habitats, Native and Exotic Species What is a Local Habitat? “A place where plants or animals normally live, characterized primarily by its physical features such as topography, plant or animal , soil characteristics, climate, water quality etc and secondarily by the species of plants and … Read more
Across cities, certain spaces resist categorization. They are the unmaintained verges between a planter and a curb, the smooth underside of a bench, the patch of ground that no plan ever claimed. These residual spaces are not accidents — they are the structural byproduct of deliberate spatial organization. Wherever land is planned and programmed with … Read more
Children’s journey to school, in Bosa Apogeo, Colombia INTRO Bogotá’s growth over the last two decades has been dramatic. The metropolitan area now holds close to 11.8 million inhabitants — a 51% increase in just 15 years. That growth has not been evenly distributed across the city. The city currently ranks 7th in the world … Read more
Trinitat Nova, Trinitat Vella and La Trinitat are three neighbourhoods in Barcelona separated by 600 metres and divided by decades of infrastructure built for the city rather than for the people who live in it.** Ronda de Dalt — a six-lane open-cut highway — severs ecological continuity, buries the 10th-century Rec Comtal waterway beneath concrete, … Read more
A Bee Survival Game Context – Bee-Careful starts in Lisbon, Portugal. Where social (vulnerable young community), environmental (ecological unbalance and fragmentation), and mobility (elderly retired community) problematics are adressed through one common medium; greenery. Greenery forms the binder in which the previous elderly community of Lisbon convverges with a new and young community across a … Read more
Case Study of Ecological Restoration, Human Presence and Design of Co-Existence Introduction Fish Tail Park is located in the center of Nanchang City, a historic city in southeastern China with approximately 6.6 million residents, has experienced rapid urban growth and high-tech industrial expansion along the Gan River. Is a large-scale ecological restoration project designed by … Read more
This project investigates Parc del Centre del Poblenou through the lens of Designing for More than Humans. The park, although permeable and vegetated, is spatially structured around human circulation and programmed activity. As a result, human occupation is continuous and dominant, while non-human life remains fragmented and residual. Through rule-based speculation, the project tests how … Read more
