Barcelona and Medellín share common features, including a geography that defines the landscape, acts as a boundary and prevents expansion. Both are also the second-largest city in their respective countries and share a marked industrial character that has allowed them to expand rapidly and has attracted many emigrant workers. This exhibition demonstrates what international cooperation can mean today: in this case, the exchange of pilot experiences that provide useful knowledge for any city in the world.

Fourth-year School of Architecture students worked in the Ciutat Meridiana neighbourhood to create proposals for urban regeneration. They received direction from lecturers Iñaki Baquero, Álvaro Cuéllar, Iván Llach, Carmen Mendoza and Felip Pich-Aguilera, and technical support from workshop assistants Marta Benages, Eva Damià and Jaime Batlle.

The objective of the Project V and VI subjects was to allow students to learn how to take a broad, crosscutting approach to a project and explore its interactions with different disciplines and areas of knowledge. The resulting strategies successfully addressed the neighbourhood’s principal deficiencies through urban planning proposals that reinterpreted the architecture and its relationship to the public and private space. Lecturers and students came up with four urban strategies: projects relating to mobility, projects that create public spaces, projects that highlight cross-sections and building types, and projects relating to the balance between activities, the landscape and the scale of the city.

Students on the Master's Programme in International Cooperation: Sustainable Emergency Architecture at the School of Architecture presented the conclusions from the #meflipatorrebaró workshop (crazy about Torre Baró) held in December 2014 in the Torre Baró neighbourhood. During the workshop, students carried out an analysis of the area’s socio-spatial climate in order to provide real solutions that met locals’ actual needs in terms of housing, public space, services, mobility and the commercial fabric. The method proposed by the master's programme involved identifying current social and spatial values to guide regeneration and using place-making activities as the main driver of the process.

“Pilot Apartment” is curated by architects Josep Bohigas, David Bravo and Alex Giménez, UIC alumni Guillen Augé and Anna Vergés, and Museum of Antioquía curator Nydia Gutiérrez. It is divided into three sections: The Housing Problem, Housing as a Solution and Challenges.

The exhibition is open until Sunday, 25 October 2015, at the Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) and at the Museum of Antioquia from Wednesday, 24 June 2015, to Thursday, 8 October 2015. “Piso Piloto” was created with the collaboration of the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture, as well as cooperatives, architecture studios, platforms, collectives, artists and other players, including: ETSAB, ETSAV, La Salle, ETSAM, IACC, Elisava, Columbia University, Fundació UPC, CoAC, FAD, Fundació Arrels, PAH, Sostre Cívic, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, URBAM-EAFIT, Escuela de Habitat-UNAL.