URBAN API

‘Barcelona posa’t guapa´ was a campaign designed to undertake the improvement of the urban landscape in the city. The endeavour was a success in the improvements made, however since then Barcelona has suffered an unsustainable growth of tourism. This tourism overload has caused a huge discomfort for the locals on the now heavily populated streets.The locals claim a direct correlation between their cost of living rising with the continued tourism growth.

In addition to the traditional types of accommodation, new disruptive technology-based platforms have come onto the market. Playing on the verge of the legality; hiding often behind the already eroded ‘sharing economy’ definition; these platforms have evolved rapidly hosting 25,10% of the total accommodations today, in many cases escalating out of control the number of tourists visiting the city.

In this scenario, the city council proposed the PEUAT; a static and rigid plan to regulate touristic accommodation in the city, that is believed not to be facing the challenges of the technological age we are living in.

Opposite of the analogic proposal from the council, Urban APi is a project that seeks dynamism and liquidity to control the accommodation items from short-term rental platforms, by providing a new technological system based on citizens’ tolerance.
As parts of the project, an APi would work as the missing (and required) link between the council, the citizens and the short-term rental platforms; whereas a voting system would define a balanced load-capacity tolerance.

This project was developed for the Urban Management class directed by Luis Falcon as part of the Iaac MaCT program 2016-17. The research was possible thanks the data provided by inAtlas.
Faculty – Luis Falcón Martínez de Marañón – CEO inAtlas
Students: Asier Eguilaz, Federica Ciccone, Iacopo Neri and Laura Marcovich.