My first veritable relationship with the concept of integrated and sustainable urban development was around 2004. The Catalan Parliament approved the law to improve neighbourhoods. We all thought it was a very advanced law, because it used architecture and urbanism projects to solve social problems. The necessity of whole visions was talked about. As well as transversal aims. Professionals talked about the necessary involvement of the neighbours, and of the need to evaluate the results in order to be later shared. When the small municipalities or the neighbourhoods in large cities, detected a series of social problems clearly related to an urban deficiency, they commissioned a project to a multidisciplinary team - sociologists, geographers, biologists, urbanists, architects - that presented proposals to try to reverse these problems. Many times, it was the citizens themselves who, through neighbourhood associations, had repeatedly asked the local administration to take action on the matter. The Generalitat established from the “Llei de Barris”, an annual assembly to co-finance these interventions jointly with the municipalities. Behind all this was Oriol Nel·lo, a geographer, with a political position in the regional government. And, of course, there were also the FEDER funds. I was part of the jury that evaluated the proposals presented to the calls of “Pla de Barris”, as representative of COAC for 2 years. I work in that direction, both as a teacher and as an architect

The exchange and learning process at transnational level goes a little further than working in an international team. It means starting a work process -observation, analysis, strategies, actions, proposals-, simultaneously in several places with different dynamics, cultures, uses; and knowing how to share the learning provided by the monitoring of the process, especially if the fields to be self-evaluated are shared and can be compared. My relationship with these learning processes is also mainly found in my work as a teacher. I would like to clarify that the result of my courses is always a set of different approaches to the same starting situation. Very similar to an exchange and learning process. As a teacher, my relationship with international environments has been some Courses taught at foreign universities, as the 2009 Fall Semester Degree Studio at Sam Fox School or Architecture, at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri; the 2012 Master intensive workshop at the Universidad Iberoamericana (IBERO) in México DF; some workshops developed between the ETSAV and l’École de la Ville et des territoires de Marne-la-Vallée in Paris; la Facoltà di Architettura del Politecnico di Torino in Verona; la Università di Genova, in Genova; la Ensan in Nantes; and the Urban Planning Department of the City of Rome and the MAXXI Foundation in Roma; and the assistance to several Mid and final Reviews in several universities as ETH or University of Virginia.