Tarragona: fragmented development of a city

The proposed subject is the result of the study realized by the Thesis Laboratory, coordinated by the Professor M. Ieva, in the dICAR department of the Polytechnic of Bari. The study analyzes the urban structure of Tarragona, a city in Spain, and tries to explain the complex evolution of the urban fabric extra moenia and how its linked to the existent walled city. The first part, built from the XVII century next to the walls, is built above the Roman Tarraco whose doesnt survive evident traces in the actual structure, even though appears as a regular planning system that doesnt seem to coincide with the former. This edification corresponds with a phase of an accentuated urbanization and, according to the historical documents, it also responds to a request of new urban residential fabric due to population increase. An important element for the definition of the new boundaries has been, on one side, the superficial hydrography, composed of the Francolì river, and on the other side the coast. The new urban fabric is built next to the coast and gradually reaches the natural limit of the river. The global urban development follows different orientations, often depending on the previous lying and on the territorial itineraries considered matrices of the new urban layouts. A first connection is realized between the upper and the lower part, which is actualized in the construction of the area between the current Rambla Vella and Rambla Nova. The orientation of the coast, instead, conditions the structure of the new district that connects the port to the built in the meantime consolidated. The present Rambla Nova is a structuring axis of the expanding district designed by Josep Maria Pujol i de Barberà, articulated on a structure defined by a central pole, the Plaça de la Imperia Tàrraco, which generates a series of radial paths and of relative controradial layouts, according to a model of behaviour that had found wide use in many European expansion plans. The most recent developments in the urban fabric, which concurr to define a strongly torn periphery and lacking qualified hierarchies, seem to be affected by the strong industrial development that, since the last century, has produced a broad commercial and tertiary specialization with choices on the port system and on the infrastructural one that mark, even today, often negatively, the organization of the Catalan city, generating a strong incoherence of the whole urban system.