Cornucopiae finem

Amalthea’s horn, the goat that, according to the Greek mythology legend, nursed Zeus and from which fruits and flowers continuously flowed, has run dry.

After almost 3,000 years since Hercules won it in battle from the god Achelous, humanity wakes up, astonished, from the lustful dream of depredation.

“We are living the end of abundance,” said Emmanuel Macron last August as he left the council of ministers of the neighboring country. Beyond the rejection his words might provoke, coming from a politician who likely does not deprive himself of anything, the phrase summarizes the recognition of the end of a system. A capitalist system based on the exploitation of natural resources and the creation of pockets of poverty, with more and more losers than winners, until in the end there are no winners left. The conclusions of the 2009 Davos Forum were that only 1% of the global population held 44% of the world’s wealth. In 2019, this 1% already dominated 99%. A true reedition of the Elysium.

The recipes trying to alleviate this disaster clash with a reality and an inertia based on growth that is hard to stop. At the same time as we receive the largest aid from the European Union, in the form of Next Generation funds, we watch impassively projects like the renovation of the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, where, in addition to covering the pitch, six levels of basement are being built 30 meters deep to store the grass in trays. Imagine the resources used to excavate and construct that, under a stadium already built. Imagine the justifications for it.

“Finite resources” was precisely the title of the workshop that the Vallès School of Architecture (ETSAV) held this September at the Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) as a course start. Luxury speakers like architects Mar Santamaría and Blanca Pujals gave inspiring talks, offering tools to look at and diagnose urban situations and point out the growing artificialization of our world. Pujals explained that in the classic structure of our planet’s configuration –exosphere, stratosphere, troposphere– a layer of exclusively human origin is detected, and is currently measurable: the technosphere. Unlike the other spheres, it does not work in balance with the rest but instead exploits them. The indiscriminate and senseless use of natural resources has altered the balance of our planet, slowing ocean currents or melting the ice stored in the poles and other regions.

The ETSAV workshop took Ciutat Vella as its scenario, home to the CCCB and the origin of the city of Barcelona, working with the most basic resources of our surroundings: air, water, vegetation, and fauna, but also with others that we do not usually identify as sources of supply, such as garbage and everything that we no longer need.

The recipes trying to alleviate the disaster clash with a reality and an inertia based on growth that is hard to stop

The students’ proposals denounced, in an imaginative way, things we already know, such as the absurd consumption of bottled water. Standing in the middle of the Ramblas and dressed as waiters, they offered glasses of water from the neighborhood fountains as a true luxury product. Under the slogan “fresher than snow, it comes straight from the Pyrenees,” they showed passersby the fabulous water conduction and treatment system humanity has designed and that we unconsciously disdain, consuming plastic and fossil fuels for its transport.

Another group denounced the waste generated by our frantic consumer activity. They asked people walking down the street to give them their recent purchase receipts, with which they papered an entire façade of Ciutat Vella. The mere observation of the size of the papering, which is also a faithful record of all the purchases made, caused real shame. How many of those things are unnecessary? How long will it take to fill our trash bins?

Some students set about measuring the city, armed with simple windmills as wind sensors, relating wind speed to changes in urban geometry. They discovered simple methods for designing pleasant and cool spaces in summer, combined with vegetation. A real lesson teaching us that often sophisticated tools are not needed to generate knowledge and have judgment.

Perhaps the most shocking proposal was the one suggesting using as a true food resource something we would all identify as a plague, not just in Ciutat Vella, but in practically any city: cockroaches. It is well known that insects are an important source of protein, considered by the WHO as a serious alternative for feeding a growing global population. They are consumed in various ways in cultures like the Asian one, and we have them in abundance.

It’s just a cultural issue. A change of perspective that new generations of architecture students propose we adopt. A new way of behaving and looking that might allow us to see the cornucopia half full.