•Monogràfics

Construction work has now begun on the new Diagonal Besòs Campus. In this university area, the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)-Barcelona Tech has started to build a new industrial engineering campus, which will become the site of excellent international training and emerging research in water and energy, carried out in a shared setting with companies and research centers.

In July 2009, the first stone was laid for the “Spiraling Tower” building, which will house offices and facilities. The event marked the beginning of the development of this new university area. In December, work began on the university buildings themselves, with the construction of retaining walls that will enable the basement floors to be built. The new campus will play a leading role in putting forward new ways of understanding and teaching engineering and promoting research in emerging areas, and it will bring value to this research in a singular and highly favorable environment.

The recently begun construction of the retaining walls also involves work to protect the service tunnels and earthmoving, which is required for the structure of future buildings and to excavate between the retaining walls. This work will cost approximately 12 million euros.

The retaining walls will be built with buttresses in the shape of a T. Anchors cannot be used due to the exterior conditions: a rainwater tank in Carrer Eduard Maristany, a sewer that runs transversally to the east, new buildings along Carrer Sant Raimon de Penyafort, the Ronda Litoral ringroad and a service tunnel to the south.

perimeter retaining walls will be built that are 43 meters deep and 80 centimeters in cross-section. There will be a 3.5-meter separation between the axes of the buttresses. The service tunnel will be protected with alternate sections of retaining walls that are 4 and 10 meters deep, 2 meters wide and 60 centimeters thick, with a top slab.



The Besòs Consortium definitely approved an urban development project for this area on 25 November 2008. The project establishes three large green zones: the Spiraling Tower, the university building area, and the wood that covers over a hectare at the top of the Rambla de la Mina. In addition, a walkway will be built over the Ronda Litoral ringroad, to connect the university area with the marina in Sant Adrià de Besòs.

This urban development project, which was drawn up by Barcelona Regional, has a budget of 20.7 million euros. This figure includes the work that was carried out in advance for the Universal Forum of Cultures, which cost 5 million euros and involved the development of Carrers Eduard Maristany and Sant Raimon de Penyafort. The urban development of this area includes the construction of a large central boulevard from which various roads will branch out to provide access to the buildings.The dimensions of this new development are large: around 71,000 m2 of gross floor area for university use, 17,000 m2 for research centers and over 60,000 m2 for facilities to boost university-business relations, such as the Nexus building. The site is located in an expanding area right at the entrance to the city of Barcelona on the boundary between the cities of Sant Adrià de Besòs and Barcelona. Its catchment area comprises the regions of Vallès Occidental and the Maresme.

The Campus will be built on land belonging to the Diagonal Besòs Interuniversity Campus Consortium, which is composed of the various public entities that originally owned the land. The Consortium was formed to develop this new interuniversity area and to establish science and technology clusters there. Two of the main driving forces in the area will be the UPC-Barcelona Tech’s College of Industrial Engineering of Barcelona (EUETIB) and School of Industrial Engineering of Barcelona (ETSEIB).



Light and flexibility are two notable features of the new campus’s architectural design, which was created by the architects José Antonio Martínez Lapeña and Elías Torres. These architects designed Barcelona’s Olympic village and the esplanade and photovoltaic panels in the Forum of Barcelona, among other projects. Their aim was to incorporate the campus buildings into an area of the city in which the architecture must be a reference point.

One of the most emblematic buildings in the area will be the Spiraling Tower, which was designed by Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi architect and designer. This building was promoted by the Zona Franca Consortium and will be used for facilities and services. It will house various public entities that operate in the area. In addition, some parts of the building will be allocated to university–business initiatives, continuous learning and shared facilities such as exhibition halls, conference rooms and other campus services.

An outstanding feature of the Diagonal Besòs Campus is that its buildings will be interconnected to increase the flexibility of the spaces and, above all, to facilitate multidisciplinary research. Thus, the buildings will have modular spaces for teaching, group work and research.

The new campus will benefit from its proximity to leading companies located in the 22@ district, which is a 200-hectare area that already houses more than a thousand companies.

The Diagonal Besòs Campus can be reached via Line 4 of the Barcelona metro (Maresme-Fòrum station), bus lines 7, 36, 41, 43 and 141, the Trambesòs tram line (Can Llima stop) and the C1 line of Renfe’s local trains (Sant Adrià de Besòs station, which is two Trambesòs stops from the Campus). Two bike lanes (Carrers Taulat and Raimon de Penyafort) cross the Campus. The number of public transport links is set to increase as new bus lines are planned and Line 9 of the metro will start to run.
Those travelling by car can access the Diagonal Besòs Campus from the Ronda Litoral ringroad (exit 25).

The Diagonal Besòs Campus will be surrounded by organizations and institutions that are in some way involved in research or in extracting value from its results. It will train engineers whose education will be highly valued. The training will provide technological and generic skills and other skills such as leadership, team work, decision-making, communication, international vocation, entrepreneurship, social responsibility and the ability to learn throughout life. The layout of the new campus is designed to promote excellence in teaching.

In this context, the new European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the creation of the Diagonal Besòs Campus provide a unique opportunity for the UPC-Barcelona Tech to establish a new teaching model that is closely linked to the architectural design of the Campus, the layout of the areas and the organizational model.The teaching model used by the UPC-Barcelona Tech in the new university area will be centered on project-based learning and on consolidating the model proposed by the EHEA, on which the University has been working for many years.

To ensure that students achieve the educational objectives, active teaching methods that promote group work and/or cooperation on projects will be implemented from the first academic year onwards. In the first few years of their degrees, students will work on projects in the basic subject areas they are taught, such as mathematics, physics and chemistry, and these projects will be relatively straightforward. As students advance in their degrees up to the final thesis, the projects will become more complex and pose new challenges. Throughout this process, students will acquire knowledge and skills in a leading research environment where intense business activity takes place.

Project-based learning is a commonly used educational model in English-speaking countries and in many European universities, such as the University of Aalborg (Denmark), in which engineers have been trained in this way for over 30 years. This will be the model of reference for teaching in the Diagonal Besòs Campus, and to be able to implement it, new teaching spaces in which students can come together and work as a group will be needed. Therefore, in addition to classrooms in which teaching staff can give lectures, the Campus will have multifunctional spaces in which students can work in groups for several hours and temporary offices where groups can work for several months with all the equipment that they need for the project. A wireless network and ICT equipment will ensure that activities can be undertaken across the Campus.

As a result of the proposed teaching model, the Campus will require the participation of businesses and research centers located in the surrounding area. The aim is to establish collaboration agreements so that professionals and researchers can participate in specific seminars that will be part of the training courses. The agreements will also enable students to undertake part of their learning in a company, institution or research centre, by means of a placement scheme. During placements, which are a compulsory part of the university degree, students will learn while they undertake a project that has been drawn up by the university school and the company. Like the rest of the subjects that students take, work placement will enable them to acquire and enhance personal skills.

In addition, the Diagonal Besòs Campus, which is located close to the future Energy Park, provides the opportunity to integrate into a new educational model the conglomerate of small and medium-sized companies that will be housed there. The aim is to create the synergies that are needed for research centers in the surrounding area to participate directly in degree courses, and particularly in master’s degree courses. The main building of the UPC-Barcelona Tech School of Professional & Executive Development, the Tech Talent Center, is located close to the Campus, on Carrer Badajoz. Thus, significant lifelong learning activities can be carried out precisely at the place where companies and the University meet. The UPC-Barcelona Tech School is part of the UPC-Barcelona Tech Group and teaches over 8,000 people each year. It has over 300 courses, a third of which are related to industrial technology.

The future Diagonal Besòs Campus will boost the popularity of engineering courses in Catalonia. The Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan government) considers engineering a strategic subject. Consequently, in October last year, the Enginycat program was established to promote engineering careers and to redress the shortage of professionals that is expected to come about in 2015.

In this academic year, there has been an 11.2% increase in demand for engineering courses at Catalan universities. The most substantial increase was seen in the building construction field, where demand was up by 18.3%. This was followed by a 12.3% increase in demand for telecommunications and computer science courses and an 11.4% increase in demand for civil engineering courses. Research on the Campus is set to foster innovation and the creation of businesses. It will focus on industrial technology and will be undertaken in a network, with the collaboration of the public and private sectors. Water, energy and mobility will be some of the main topics investigated by the research groups and centers. The Campus will promote the formation of research groups that are large enough to undertake activities ranging from study and the publication of papers to the definition of ideas, the creation of prototypes and applications for patents. The Campus will be conceived as a center for innovation that, together with the research that is undertaken on site, will facilitate the transfer of research results to society. To meet their research, development and innovation needs, companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, may require technical and human resources that are not available. Thus, the Campus is considered a meeting point between those who have needs and those who have the capacity to meet them.

The Campus will also be involved in fostering the foundation of companies. The various programs that will be created for this purpose will be designed to facilitate and promote the process of setting up a business, as well as to exploit patents and new knowledge.

The Energy Park. This is the most consolidated initiative to date. Initially, this park will house the following institutions:

• Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC). The IREC is promoted by the Generalitat de Catalunya. The aim is for it to become a center of excellence in energy efficiency. It is a key institute in the Energy Park and its priority is research on energy efficiency technology.

• Energy Efficiency Business Cluster (AEI). This cluster was formed as the result of an initiative of the Catalan Energy Institute and a group of companies that were interested in creating value in the energy efficiency sector through technological innovation. The Cluster will undertake joint projects with companies, university groups and R&D centers.

• Fusion for Energy” European Agency. This is a European joint enterprise undertaken for the ITER project and the development of fusion energy. The Agency will collaborate with industry and research centers around Europe to provide the components needed to construct the ITER reactor in Caradache (France). The Agency has a budget of 4 billion euros for the first 10 years.

• Research center in collaboration with MIT. This center will undertake a joint project of international excellence in the area of energy research. Its technology lines will be thermoelectric solar energy (production of electricity) and marine wind energy.

• B_FUS Fusion Energy Research Center. This is an initiative of the Generalitat de Catalunya’s Ministry of Economics and Finance and Barcelona City Council’s Tax and Economic Protection Area. It has two missions: to lead several European research programs in the fusion technology field and to facilitate the participation of Spanish companies in supply contracts for the Fusion for Energy program.

Water Cluster. Agreements have been signed with CETaqua, a water technology center that was formed by the Barcelona water company AGBAR, the UPC-Barcelona Tech and the Spanish National Research Council to integrate and manage water research and technological development. It is planned that the Water Cluster will participate actively in doctoral programs.

Project “hotel”. This will be one of the most unusual aspects of the Campus. It involves a new, more flexible way of managing research. The “hotel” will be a set of areas in which ambitious, interdisciplinary research projects can be carried out by agents from different origins. Once a project is finished, the space is left for a new project.

Business incubator. To promote entrepreneurship, some specific areas of the new campus will be allocated to a business incubator, to support individual and group business initiatives.