Barcelona is a compact city, with a high residential density, an aging housing stock, a deficit of green spaces, and mobility excessively dependent on private vehicles. All these factors negatively affect the environmental quality of the Catalan capital and, consequently, that of its citizens, who live with high levels of pollution and noise and streets dominated by cars.
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The Barcelona City Council is working to promote a new urban model that improves the quality of life of its inhabitants and, at the same time, fights against climate change, which could become one of the main problems the city will have to face in an increasingly near future. The constant increase in pollution over the last decades and global warming have placed the city in a risk situation. For this reason, on January 15 of this year, Barcelona declared this Climate Emergency, setting as one of its challenges to transform the urban model, increasing urban green spaces, transforming public space to improve environmental and health conditions, and preventing the loss of biodiversity.
For some time now, the city council has been promoting actions aimed at reducing the presence of private vehicles in public spaces, fostering sustainable mobility, reinforcing the network of bike lanes and improving the public transport network, and creating pedestrianized zones, such as those created long ago in Ciutat Vella or in the historic core of Gracia, and the actions of the Superilles Program in neighborhoods such as Maternitat i Sant Ramon, Hostafrancs, Horta, Poblenou or Sant Antoni. Areas with more green spaces that contribute to the good health and well-being of people and the city's biodiversity. All these policies must serve to increase green and natural spaces in the city, also fostering biodiversity. Since 2015, about 50 hectares of vegetation have been gained in Barcelona, highlighting the creation of new green areas, new inner courtyards, or the first part of the new Glòries park. Now, the city council wants to go further, making Barcelona a super-block.
Superilla Barcelona: the scale jump
The biggest change in this transformation of urban space that the City Council wants to achieve in Barcelona is the one being brought about by the Superblocks Program, which is now making a leap in scale and rhythm, aiming to transform the entire city into a large superblock. Until now, the program acted in very specific and delimited areas, such as Poblenou, Horta, or Sant Antoni. But now it proposes to create a network of green axes and squares, with priority for pedestrians, which will extend throughout the city.
This network will begin to become a reality primarily in the Cerdà grid and especially in the Eixample. This area of Barcelona is the one that suffers the highest pressure from road traffic ---350,000 vehicles cross the city horizontally daily and a large part of the Eixample's traffic is through traffic---, with more pollution and more noise, and it is the district with the greatest scarcity of green spaces.
The project Superilla Barcelona, which brings together all the public space policies that the City Council is implementing, wants the residents of the Eixample to have a car-free square or a pacified street at a maximum of 200 meters, improving the offer of meeting and enjoyment spaces in the central area of this district. Globally, in the Eixample, 21 green axes will be created, which will mean 33 kilometers of route, and 21 squares, which will add up to 3.9 hectares of citizen space. All this will involve gaining a total of 33.4 hectares of new priority space for pedestrians and 6.6 hectares of urban green space.
During this mandate, the transformation of Consell de Cent, Rocafort, Comte Borrell, and Girona streets into green axes will begin, with resting places and trees, and four large squares will be created at the chamfers of Consell de Cent with Rocafort, Comte Borrell, Enric Granados, and Girona, each with 2,000 square meters.
A global transformation throughout the city
The program Superilla Barcelona concentrates the different initiatives that the City Council is developing to advance towards a new urban model in the city, promote sustainable mobility and public transport, and reduce pollution in Barcelona. Superilla Barcelona encompasses the impulse in the Low Emission Zone, which limits the entry of the most polluting vehicles into the city, or the will to limit the speed to 30 km/hour on most streets in the city, to make traffic safer for people moving on foot.
Likewise, the city council is working to recover public space by protecting the accesses of 200 schools with the project Protegim les escoles or by expanding terraces of bars and restaurants. On the other hand, the project Obrim carrers acts on major roads such as Carrer de Sants and Gran de Gràcia, cutting off traffic every weekend, with the aim of incorporating more streets into this initiative.
Impact of covid-19
The pandemic, clearly, has accelerated this commitment by the City Council. During the state of alarm, when only essential businesses were open and walking became one of the only possible leisure activities, the lack of public space in cities, not only in Barcelona, became evident.
During the first phase of de-escalation and faced with the need to create new walking areas, guaranteeing safety distances, the city council carried out a series of emergency actions, already guided by its conception of Barcelona's new urban model. For example, public space was gained through tactical actions with paint and urban furniture on streets such as Consell de Cent, Rocafort, and Girona. To carry out these urgent interventions, tactical urbanism has been used, which had already been used in the Poblenou superblock, but the City Council's intention is for these elements to become structural, through works in the near future.