The Menéndez Pelayo International University has brought together several leaders of three major metropolitan strategic projects, at the initiative of Oriol Nel·lo. The conferences took place in the Mirador room of the CCCB, which has large windows just behind the speakers, from where the disordered rooftops of Ciutat Vella can be seen. This always helps to remember that Barcelona is not New York; we live with an urban disorder that has a very special charm, it really is an old city.
Of all the future projects discussed, the most consolidated is that of the Alba Park in Cerdanyola. It is an urban operation of great ambition, because it regenerates an area degraded by old industrial activities and soils degraded by urban activity. It is a sector with a large area of public ownership, justified by the designation of the sector as a Directional Center by the Metropolitan General Plan of 1976: it was drawn more than 40 years ago, and is being executed now. I always say that the construction of the great avenues of Alba Park will appear in the black and white photos of our great-great-grandchildren. The community of the Autonomous University that lives in the affordable apartments of Alba Park or the scientists of the Synchrotron will be, in a few years, neighbors of Cerdanyola with an exceptional level of scientific services and equipment.
The mayor of Sant Adrià and Carme Ribas made a solid defense of the opportunity (and the historical debt) that the Tres Chimeneas area represents. City limits always accumulate less pleasant uses, and the legacies of infrastructures and poor connections with Badalona and the streets of Poblenou discourage normal use of the beach. Mentally, the Tres Chimeneas are much further from Barcelona and Sant Adrià than the maps show. Luckily for the icon represented by the turbine hall and the chimneys, elements completely out of scale. It is their monumental brutality that will allow, if one day the administrations finally urbanize the sector, to attract passers-by who notice the visual landmark that the three iconic tubes are. Monuments have historically been the resource of urban planners to project visuals and lead people from one place to another. Here, it is not necessary to invest in anything too iconic, because the three chimneys already exist in the image of the city that we all have of the Besòs, and they are seen from the Rondas. The project for a new neighborhood specialized in technology and the audiovisual sector is ambitious and all the appropriate urban plans have been processed; now it is only necessary to urbanize and re-parcel, so that the new residents and a new pole of innovative activity bring the expected jobs.
Finally, it was the turn of the new campus of Hospital Clínic. The Clínic will be the great monument of the 21st century for two reasons. Firstly, as a tribute to the healthcare community: doctors and nurses, who gave their all in the pandemic. Secondly, for the audacity of moving it to a more affluent periphery than that of Besós (perhaps not so much the L'Hospitalet part, but certainly the Esplugues part), creating a new void in the center of the Eixample. The Eix Salut Diagonal has the ambition to develop the virtuous triangle of assistance, research, and teaching. There will be almost 300,000 square meters of floor space that will need to be organized around Avenida Diagonal. The ownership of the land for the future Clínic belongs to the University of Barcelona, and this cannot be overlooked. It was mentioned several times, throughout the conferences, that the great deficiency of Catalan university assets is that they have not known how to build a temporary housing park for students and professors, being unable to attract talent that cannot afford to study and pay a 1,000 euro apartment. But the chosen location is suitable, because it is large, it is a piece of equipment owned by a single public owner, and it has the commitment of all political parties to invest the necessary money.
After the conferences, which recharged my batteries, it only remains to hope that the CCCB will be encouraged to disseminate these reflections, and others that will arise from so many involved people, in an exhibition for the public to know about it.