COMMU[C]ITY: Stacking Barcelona's Everyday Life into Green Modular Towers for 2050

Barcelona already taught the world how a grid can hold a city together. COMMU[C]ITY asks what that grid should carry by 2050, when climate pressure, densification, new mobility and resource scarcity have changed the terms of urban life. Its answer is not to erase the blocks but to intensify them: a denser, greener network of mixed-use towers, pedestrian space, ecological corridors, water systems and shared infrastructure, all working as one urban system rather than a set of separate buildings.

Designed by Florentina Anastasia, the proposal was recognised as an Editor's Choice entry in the Hyperblock competition. The site is a 3 x 3 block hyperblock within Barcelona's existing fabric. The existing blocks set the framework; new interventions intensify the interior and progressively hand large areas of ground and building surface back to nature. The governing ambition is simple and demanding: put living, working, recreation, public services, landscape and mobility within a much smaller everyday radius.

The Cerdà Tower Rises Out of the Perimeter Block

The aerial view makes the urban strategy legible at once. Clusters of green-banded towers rise from the hyperblock while the low-rise perimeter fabric stays in place below. These are the Cerdà Towers, named for the engineer whose plan shaped the city. They act as a deliberate counterargument to conventional land-use zoning. Residential, office, retail, hotel, public facility and green-space modules sit together inside one flexible structural system, so each tower behaves less like a building and more like a vertical district.

The stepped perspective shows why the module study matters. Anastasia tests single-height, double-height, extended and corner configurations, and the variation is visible in the silhouette: terraces push out and pull back, and planting interrupts the stack instead of crowning it. A shared structural language absorbs different programmes without collapsing into a repetitive pile of identical floors. Flexibility here is built into the system itself, not added later through fit-out.

Ground Returned to Water and Wildlife

At street level, the payoff of building upward becomes clear. The park scene, with its pond, waterbirds, a cyclist and a parent carrying a child, shows the ground the towers free up. The project's ecological corridors and water systems are rendered as ordinary daily landscape, not as technical diagrams, and the towers recede behind the tree canopy. That framing is honest about the trade-off at the heart of the scheme: concentrate built mass vertically so the horizontal plane can serve people, pedestrians and habitat.

Courtyards and Terraces as the Neighbourhood's Shared Rooms

COMMU[C]ITY treats density as a social project as much as an environmental one, and these two scenes carry that argument. The courtyard, with its fruit trees and tomato planter, is framed by balconies draped in vines and occupied by families and a wheelchair user. The space reads as a productive commons that everyone can reach, not a decorative void between buildings. Inclusion appears here as a spatial condition rather than a slogan.

The garden terrace lifts that commons into the tower. Because landscaped terraces are spread throughout the building instead of confined to roof or ground, residents meet neighbours mid-height: sitting on a planter ledge, skipping rope, walking dogs under pendant lamps. It is a convincing image of what vertical mixed use could feel like when shared space is threaded through the section rather than reserved for the lobby.

The Glasshouse as Civic Infrastructure

The final interior turns greenery into work. Under a white steel roof grid, people garden beside tall living walls and hanging plants. The glasshouse joins the scheme's ideas together: environmental performance, shared facilities and community activity in one room. It suggests that the green modules in the Cerdà Tower are not passive planting but occupied, maintained and collectively used space, which is where the proposal's sustainability claims have to prove themselves.

Why This Project Matters

Many visions of the future city start by clearing the board. COMMU[C]ITY starts with Barcelona's existing structure and asks how far it can be intensified before it loses its social character. By folding zoning categories into a modular vertical system, it relocates the mixed-use street into the section of a building and measures sustainability in shorter daily journeys, not only in technology.

The open questions are the useful ones: how modules are owned, swapped and governed over decades, and whether shared terraces stay shared. Still, the proposal earns its Editor's Choice recognition by tying density, ecology and community into one legible framework. It gives the hyperblock debate a concrete architectural type to argue with, and that is exactly what a competition entry should do.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Florentina Anastasia

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Project credits: COMMU[C]ITY by Florentina Anastasia Hyperblock (uni.xyz).