Coming across closed businesses with the sign “Local for transfer” or “Local for sale” is an increasingly common reality when walking through the commercial axes of our cities. The 2008 crisis and, subsequently, the Covid-19 pandemic have altered the urban landscape of many streets, now populated by endless lowered blinds. This situation not only harms the image of the neighbourhoods, but also negatively influences citizen coexistence, because in many cases these closed premises are in a situation of serious neglect.
Precisely, this problem of empty basements in urban centers has been the central axis of the Final Master’s Project (TFM) “The urban commitment of the ground floor. The reactivation and transformation of disused low-rises in Catalan intermediate cities” prepared by Marc Modolell, alumnus of the 2021-2022 edition of the MBArch of the Escola Técnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB) of the UPC. This work, presented at the Association of Developers and Builders of Catalonia (APCE), has as its main objective an analysis and a proposal for solutions to the current situation of unoccupied ground floor premises in consolidated urban buildings.
In this sense, the thesis highlights the need to reconvert these unoccupied or underused ground floors to give them a viable long-term outlet, such as housing, through a change of use. On this subject, the director of ETSAB, Félix Solaguren-Beascoa, argues that “if we want life, we need life in these spaces. For this reason, we must look at the horizontal and the ground floor, and flee from conflicts about their use”.
This proposal to change the use of the premises or ground floors of the buildings coincides with the lack of existing housing supply in the main cities of Catalonia and could become one more option to increase the residential stock and thereby improve access to the housing for many people. And it is estimated that the demand for home ownership in Catalonia will double the offer in 2025. These data are taken from the monograph “Estimation of the solvent demand for new housing in Catalonia and its provinces” of the business chair “Habitatge i Futur ” from the Pompeu Fabra University and the Association of Promoters of Catalonia (APCE).
The author of the thesis awarded a scholarship by APCE, Marc Modolell, focuses on three medium-sized Catalan cities, Mataró, Terrassa and Vilanova i la Geltrú, as they are representative of the global context in this matter, and thus have a diverse and heterogeneous sample comparable in analysis results with other assimilable tissues. Modolell is of the opinion that “the regulations have protected the commercial use of ground-floor premises to have services close to the public. But at a time of crisis, it should focus on diversifying the ground floor, making regulations more flexible and opening the door to new ways of living such as co-working spaces, warehouses, shared bicycle parking and residential use”.
This proposal, however, collides head-on with the current regulations. And it is that urban planning in Catalonia has always classified the ground floor of buildings as commercial use, whether the buildings are for residential or tertiary use. A fact that has caused that, currently in our cities, there are many closed premises, while the need to increase the number of homes in some places increases more and more, either due to lack of land on which to build or urban actions. The work qualifies that although some of the premises that are currently closed were occupied before the pandemic and the economic crisis that it caused -, others had been closed since the 2008 crisis. In addition, the thesis points out that, with the changes in the habits of consumption that has been taking place since before Covid-19, it is difficult for its use to recover 100%.
In this sense, from the APCE, its president, Xavier Vilajoana, is of the opinion that it is necessary to have an agile, flexible urban planning that adapts as quickly as possible to the changes in the needs of citizens and cities. Vilajoana also highlights that the sector has been proposing for some time in new urban developments the introduction of “dual use” – housing and commercial or tertiary use – or compatible use, in order to provide flexibility to planning and to be able to adapt the premises to the use possible at any time. On this aspect, the thesis shows that the compatibility between the workplace and home with the consolidation of teleworking as a result of confinement is an increasingly recurrent reality. And he adds coliving as a new housing figure that could fit into the uses of these unoccupied ground floors, thanks to its multiplicity of uses.
For all these reasons, from the PACE they maintain that the regulation should allow the use of housing in closed premises in the urban area when the minimum conditions of habitability can be achieved. Except for habitability, every effort should be made to overcome the other legal issues by changing what is necessary, such as island or zone density depletion. In this sense, Xavier Vilajoana encourages administrations to carry out a practical exercise to implement the measure, both in the case of existing buildings and in a derived approach, and check the results.
In addition to making aspects of urban planning more flexible, Vilajoana reiterates the need for administrations to make developable land available “in order to be able to build the homes that Catalan society will need in the next 15 years.”
