About

Joan Busquets is the Martin Bucksbaum Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Prior to joining the GSD faculty, he served as Chair-Professor of Town Planning and Urban Design at the Polytechnic University of Barcelona from 1979 to 2002. He is a renowned urban planner, urban designer, and architect with extensive experience in strategic urban planning and design, often involving public-private partnerships, for cities such as Barcelona, Den Haag, Lisbon, Marseille, Rotterdam, Singapore, Sao Paulo, and others. His work includes urban rehabilitation strategies, city transformations, harbor front developments, housing projects, and urban renewal initiatives across Europe and beyond.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Humanities
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Civil engineering
• Geography
• Law
• Mathematics
• Linguistics
• Architectural engineering
• Engineering
• Epistemology
• Visual arts
• Pure mathematics

Selected publications

• Pour ou contre une relation de Reformulation ? Un début de réponse

  2025-12-23

  articleSenior author

  International audience

  Publisher

• Pour ou contre une relation de Reformulation ? Un début de réponse

  Discours · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Cet article propose une réflexion sur la caractérisation de la notion de reformulation en se centrant sur la question suivante : dans les théories formelles du discours, la reformulation devrait-elle être ajoutée comme une relation de discours à part entière ou en tant que sous-type d’une autre relation ? Afin de fournir des éléments de réponse, nous présentons le traitement de la reformulation dans différentes approches formelles et nous examinons le rôle du marqueur c’est-à-dire pour sa reconnaissance. Nous soulignons un argument clé en faveur de la Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) : la reformulation relève de la relation d’Élaboration, laquelle étant subordonnante, confère à la reformulation le statut de stratégie discursive de subordination.

  PublisherDOI

• Jugement de perception chez Bolzano et sémantique temporelle

  2024

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Psychology

  International audience

  Publisher

• Introduction. La reformulation, un objet d’étude commun en linguistique et didactique. apports, réflexions, complémentarités

  Éla Études de linguistique appliquée · 2023-01-27

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Truth and Proofs. From Tarski’s Convention T to Game Theory

  2021-11-10

  book-chapterSenior author

  This paper presents an analysis of Tarskian truth, and adopting the fundamental assumptions of Game Theory, it shows that this definition of truth can be extended to natural languages. Evidence is provided for the applicability of Tarski’s definition of truth to Hintikka’s Game-theoretical Semantics, , and to the more recent version of Game Theory of Girard’s Ludics (, 2.

  PublisherDOI

• Le jugement de perception chez Bolzano : Perception et logique temporelle

  2021

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Philosophy
  • Psychology

  International audience

  Publisher

• The largest art: a measured manifesto for a plural urbanism

  Journal of Urban Design · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Civil engineering

  The book sets out to define urban design or urbanism as plural urbanism and takes the form of a manifesto to claim its role as ‘the largest art’. In a field of varied and undefined profiles, this i...

  PublisherDOI

• Contrast, Verum Focus and Anaphora: The Case of<i>et pourtant si/non</i>in French

  Journal of Linguistics · 2020-07-27

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This study examines the anaphoric status of the sequence et pourtant si/non in French. This sequence displays some properties not only of TP-Ellipsis but also of propositional anaphora. Consequently, the antecedent of this sequence can be recovered by means of either type of anaphoric process. I argue that the salient and relevant antecedent is constrained by the presence of a modalized environment. I claim that the discursive marker pourtant is assimilated to a modal operator (Jayez 1988, Martin 1987) expressing discourse contrast between two propositions anchored in two possible worlds that are not contradictory. Polarity Particles (POLPARTS) involved in this sequence are analyzed as emphasizing the truth of a proposition. As such, they are conveying semantic contrast between two polarities, that of a salient and accessible discourse antecedent and that of the missing part after et pourtant si/non . This is how POLPARTS upgrade the Common Ground. I develop a focus-based account for Verum Focus , building on alternatives along the lines of Hardt &amp; Romero (2004). I suggest that the scope of an epistemic operator (Romero &amp; Han 2004) and the conditions of use are relevant in order to reconstruct the adequate antecedent, which is not possible in an analysis based solely on lexical insertion and upgrading the Question Under Discussion ( qud ) by conditions governing the felicitous use of et pourtant si/non .

  PublisherDOI

• Contrast, Verum Focus and Anaphora: The Case of et pourtant si/non in French

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2020-07-27

  preprint1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Urban Grids: Handbook for Regular City Design

  2019-03-15 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Christian Bassac

  17 shared

• Richard Moot

  13 shared

• Philippe Blache

  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

  8 shared

• Martine Versel

  Artistic Realization Technologies

  7 shared

• Robert E Vann

  Western Michigan University

  6 shared

• Laure Vieu

  Université Toulouse-I-Capitole

  6 shared

• Dale A. Koike

  6 shared

• Nicholas Asher

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Urban Planning and Design

  Harvard Graduate School of Design

Awards & honors

• Spanish National Award for Town Planning (1981)
• Spanish National Award for Town Planning (1985)
• Gubbio European Prize by ANCSA (2000)
• International Erasmus prize (2011)
• Grand Prix Spécial de l’Urbanisme, Paris (France) (2012)