An Urban Social Network: Reweaving Cerdà's Eixample Around Children, Seniors and Everyday Encounters

Most urban plans describe a city through its pipes, roads and transit lines. An Urban Social Network starts from a different premise: a bench is infrastructure, a playground is infrastructure, and a shaded plaza two blocks from home may matter more to an elderly resident than a new metro stop. The project takes Barcelona's Eixample, one of the most studied grids in urban history, and asks what it would look like if its design began with people at every stage of life.

Designed by Ivette Caveli, the proposal does not set out to overturn Ildefons Cerdà's nineteenth-century plan. Cerdà's grid of chamfered corners, broad streets and regular blocks was conceived to improve circulation, daylight, ventilation and equality in an expanding industrial city. Caveli reads that framework as both a physical structure and a social landscape, mapping population groups, transport, schools, parking, green areas, public services, cycling routes and community amenities to locate the gaps in the existing network. Children and senior citizens receive particular attention, since their independence depends so heavily on the quality and proximity of public space.

Disc Canopies Turn a Brick Square Into a Neighbourhood Room

The rendering sets the tone at eye level: rust-coloured disc canopies held aloft on blue columns, a brick-paved square beneath, café tables, parked bicycles and birds crossing a cloudy sky. Nothing here is monumental. The canopies offer shade and a sense of enclosure without walls, which is exactly what a public room for lingering requires. The colour pairing of rust and blue also gives the intervention a recognisable identity, a useful quality for a system meant to repeat across many blocks.

This is where the project's thesis becomes tangible. A seat in the shade, a place to leave a bike, a table outside a café: these are the small affordances that determine whether someone with limited mobility leaves the house at all. Caveli frames architecture as a mechanism for reducing isolation, and the scene argues the point quietly, through ordinary furniture and a generous ground plane rather than spectacle.

The Chamfered Corner as a Collective Centre

The isometric pulls back to reveal how the plaza occupies a chamfered Eixample block, with circular canopies clustered over the open ground, a dedicated play area, and surrounding rooftops planted with green. The chamfer, Cerdà's signature move for traffic and visibility, is reclaimed here as social space. It is a clever reading of the grid: the geometry that once eased the movement of carriages now gives room for children to play within sight of adults resting nearby.

The drawing also makes the proposal's four strategies legible at once. Planted roofs speak to biophilic design, the shared plaza and play zone to community generation, the open level ground to accessibility, and the intensified use of an existing block to redensification. Rather than adding greenery as decoration, the project layers it onto surfaces the city already owns, keeping Barcelona's urban character intact while changing how a block performs.

A Replicable Polygon for the Whole Grid

The two site plans carry the strategic weight of the project. Above, the intervention polygon locates the main collective centre within a field of city blocks; below, a replicable polygon shows how the same logic can be repeated across the grid. This is the distinction between a single plaza and a network. The main centre is supported by smaller niche public spaces scattered through surrounding residential blocks, producing several scales of social activity rather than one destination that everyone must travel to reach.

The replicable unit suits the Eixample particularly well, since Cerdà's grid was itself a repeatable module. Caveli exploits that regularity, proposing a kit that can be deployed wherever the mapping reveals a shortage. For seniors, the result is a public space a block or two away; for children, it is a set of safe, nearby destinations that make independent movement through the neighbourhood plausible.

Why This Project Matters

An Urban Social Network shows a mature restraint. Instead of proposing a new masterplan for a city that already has one of the world's most celebrated grids, it adds a thin, distributed layer of shade, greenery and gathering space that works with Cerdà's logic rather than against it. The decision to measure success by the daily lives of children and older residents gives the design a clear test: can someone with limited mobility reach a comfortable place to sit and meet others without a long journey?

The broader lesson is about redefining infrastructure. By treating benches, playgrounds, canopies and planted roofs as part of the system that connects people, Caveli makes a case that social connection deserves the same planning rigour as roads and utilities. The replicable polygon turns that argument into a method, one that other dense, gridded cities could adapt to their own gaps.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Ivette Caveli

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Project credits: An Urban Social Network by Ivette Caveli.