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Ildefons Cerdà i Sunyer (Centelles, Osona, 23 December 1815 - Caldas de Besaya, Cantabria, 21 August 1876) was a Catalan engineer, urban planner, jurist, economist and politician, a multifaceted man who wrote the Teoría general de la urbanization, a pioneering work in the specialty, which makes him considered one of the founders of modern urbanism. His most important project was the urban reform of 19th-century Barcelona, known as the Pla Cerdà, and which created the current Eixample district. However, Cerdà was not a triumphant; meticulously focused on his work, he had family problems, his expansion project was never well received by the local authorities and ended up being ruined by the fees that the Spanish State and the Barcelona City Council owed him. It took a century before his legacy began to be recognized.
He was born in the Cerdà de la Garga farmhouse, a property that his family had owned since the 14th century, in Centelles (Osona).
Despite their rural background, the Cerdàs were people of the world who had linked their interests to American trade, a fact that undoubtedly stimulated the open spirit and concerns of the young Ildefons along with his faith in progress.
Intended by his father for an ecclesiastical career, he studied Latin and philosophy at the seminary in Vic, a city where his family, of liberal tradition, took refuge during the War of the Malcontents in 1827. After clashing with his father over his professional orientation, in 1832 he moved to Barcelona, where he began studying architecture, mathematics, nautical science and drawing at the Llotja school. He did not obtain the degree of architect and in September 1835 he moved to Madrid to study at the School of Engineers of Roads, Canals and Ports, where he obtained the degree of engineer in 1841, after many financial hardships due to the lack of family support.
On June 20, 1848, he married the painter Magdalena Clotilde Bosch i Carbonell, daughter of the banker Josep Bosch i Mustich, with whom he had four daughters.
The marital relationship did not work out well and Clotilde, the youngest daughter, may have been the result of his wife's adulterous relationships and Cerdà excluded her from his will. In 1862 the marriage separated as a result of Clotilde's birth and in 1864 his wife left for Madrid.
In the last days of his life, ill and half-ruined because the government owed him fees for many of the works he had done, he moved to the spa resort of Caldas de Besaya, in Cantabria, where he died on August 21, 1876. On August 23, the newspaper La Imprenta published an obituary with the following words: "Mr. Cerdà was liberal and had talent, two circumstances that in the Spanish state harm and often create many enemies..."
In 1971, coinciding with the reprinting of his General Theory of Urbanization, his remains were transferred and buried in the New Cemetery of Barcelona.
PROFESSIONAL CAREER
He began his professional life as a state engineer at the Public Works Prefecture and, between 1839 and 1849, was assigned to carry out work in Murcia, Teruel, Tarragona, Valencia, Girona and Barcelona, where he participated in the works of the first Barcelona-Mataró railway. This work made him interested in the applications of the steam engine to the new and revolutionary system of locomotion that the railway represented.
He did not have an architect's degree, but he dedicated himself, with his characteristic rigor, to carrying out enormous analytical efforts of a statistical nature, and graphic syntheses, with housing proposals for various social categories and with different degrees of complexity, from the isolated house to the collective one.
As a jurist, Cerdà, in his proposals for the cities of Madrid and Barcelona, promoted new legislation, but found himself lacking precedents, both in terms of state and foreign legislation. In Cuatro palabras sobre el Ensanche (1861) he extensively developed the compensation system and the reparcelling technique as a means of achieving a fair distribution of the benefits and costs of urban planning among the owners and obtaining regular and buildable land in proportion to the plot contributed, a system later included in the Posada Herrera Bill and incorporated a century later in the Land Law of 1956.
As an economist, Cerdà established the rules for infrastructure, the division of property and the allocation of plots of land in the new Barcelona.
In the field of social sciences, he tried to solve the problems of the demographic concentration of cities and industrial development in his work Teoría general de la urbanization. In this treatise, he proposed the theories that he had largely already applied previously to the Interior Reform and Eixample Project of Barcelona. It includes an assessment of the living conditions of the working classes, with an approach to the study of social inequalities in health, where he measures the differences in life expectancy according to social class. Idelfons Cerdà developed a genuine sociological study as an appendix to his Teoría general de la Urbanización, since he considered the plannable workers as his expansion project of Barcelona, and only left us figures, leaving behind the heartbeat of the working masses, which he necessarily had to collect in his social research.