City Ideas (Ideas de Ciudad) is a laboratory for research, dissemination and debate on the spatial and social transformations of the contemporary city. The aim is to create a city laboratory, an open research platform geared towards exploring the future of cities as spaces for culture and the generation of new social, technological and innovation paradigms.

Olga Subirós presents the second online conference. Olga Subirós is an architect and a curator of projects that focus on the major transformations of the 21st century. She is currently the curator of the Air/Aria/Aire project for the upcoming 2021 Biennale of Architecture, a project that addresses the impact of air pollution on cities and the need to change to an urban model that places health at the centre of the decision-making process. She has curated Big Bang Data, alongside José Luis de Vicente, an exhibition about the exponential process of datafication of the world, which has been presented at the MIT Museum and the Singapore ArtScience Museum, among other spaces. She has also designed the Data-Square exhibition for the EPFL-Art Lab of Lausanne and the exhibition on the creative process of chef Ferran Adrià which was presented in Somerset House in London, the Boston Science Museum and the Telefónica Foundation in Madrid. She is also responsible for the montage of the Are You Ready for Television? exhibition at the MACBA and for more than a dozen exhibition projects at the CCCB. She is a teacher in the master’s degree in Design and Data at the Escuela Elisava-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and she is a frequent guest lecturer in the master’s degree in Advanced Ecological Buildings and Biocities at the IAAC. 

Olga Subirós presents an investigation into the quality of the air in the city of Barcelona that serves as a wake-up call, inviting us to reflect and to take immediate action. Subirós takes advantage of her curatorship of the Catalan pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture to not only research and disseminate information, but also to map what she has found in collaboration with the 300,000 km urban planning studio, transforming the data into visual maps.

“Cities can be part of the solution to the climate crisis and the public health crisis caused by air pollution because in European cities, pollution is mainly due to fossil fuel vehicles. It is necessary and urgent to change our city model to redesign a city that dethrones vehicles from its streets and where the health of its inhabitants is always its absolute priority”.