With the leadership of the Barcelona Design Centre, project partner, students of UIC Barcelona School of Architecture’s Master’s Degree in Architecture & Design Business Management will have to work on improving urban mobility in Calonge i Sant Antoni, Spain, in the form of proposals and business models. The project will last more than a month and will analyse, in short, the details of the mobility model over the next ten to fifteen years. Those cooperating in the project include the directors of the Master’s Degree in Entrepreneurial Financing: Venture Capital and Private Equity, Master's Degree in Management and Operations, and Executive Master's Degree in Advanced Analytics and Data Science; and industry leaders such as Saba Group and the Mobility Institute RACC.

First deputy mayor of the City Council of Calonge i Sant Antoni, Arturo Prades, and head of the Activities and Sustainability Unit, Ivan València, explained the characteristics and challenges facing Calonge i Sant Antoni during the introduction.

The introduction was followed by a round table discussion with experts who spoke about current and future mobility. The round table discussion was moderated by Maria Isabel Gabarró, director and lecturer of the Master’s Degree in Architecture and Design and Business; and Daniel Oh, assistant professor at the University of Korea; Sylvia Rausch, marketing director at Saba Group; Sonia Monclús, director of the Barcelona Design Centre (BCD) Design Cluster; Ricard Casalins, head of Mobility Projects at the Mobility Institute RACC; and Ivan València, head of the Activities and Sustainability Unit of the City Council of Calonge.

Sonia Monclús opened the discussion with her comment “first of all, we have to take a step back and think about what everything will be like in twenty years, because everything we invest in, has to last. Think about the technologies that could become available in the next ten to twenty years.” Ricard Casalins stressed the importance of considering trends: “We’ve gone from a world of ownership to a world of usership. Mobility services will also be affected by this trend. We think about how Calonge i Sant Antoni will face this trend that will come.”

Students will be working on a project that consists of four consulting and correction phases, which kicked off with a work day in Calonge i Sant Antoni, on Saturday, 14 January. Final project presentations will take place at UIC Barcelona on 17 February, as a part of the Master’s Degree in Architecture and Design Business Management.