The phrase may seem crazy to you, a prototypical exaggeration of someone who, like me, was born, lived, and hopes to kick the bucket inside this my dearest Grid, but there is nothing more scientific than singing the greatness of our best engineer. Richard Sennett perpetrates it very well in Building and Dwelling, a delicious book that you can devour in Anna Llisterri's beautiful Catalan translation for Arcadia and in which Cerdà's Barcelona project is placed at the same level of modernity and audacity as that of the boulevard genius Georges-Eugène Haussman and the imagination of my dear New York gardener Frederic Law Olmsted. Jokes aside.
But Cerdà would float without Yankee hermeneuts to justify him and also without shoddy biographical documentaries like the one TV3 recently programmed for him, because to gauge his greatness you only have to climb one of our friendly hills, contemplate Barcelona, and see how the mathematics of the neighborhood blocks tames the movement and passions of the citizens as if an Egyptian princess had hypnotized them.
As Ignasi de Solà-Morales very well said, the Eixample embodies the controversy itself because from its beginnings it contrasted the rational spirit of its creator with the subsequent flourish of the architects who truffled it with a fantasy that still surprises tourists from half the world today.
Cerdà invented the Eixample, endowing it with a practically military force and structure, closed and hermetic in its form but nuanced with the brutal Cerdà-esque intuition of landscaping its interiors. It is not strange, therefore, that the city's mayors have not known very well how to adapt the skeleton of its form to the needs of a changing Barcelona and that they have racked their brains with a thousand inventions such as resurrecting the idea of the garden/promenade in an exterior version. Maragall restored the wild facades of Modernism to make it pretty, widening the sidewalks to give air to pedestrians (the funny thing is, Cerdà had designed the neighborhood thinking above all about promoting car transport) and now Colau has landed in the neighborhood to extend superblocks like those of Poblenou and Sant Antoni in the Eixample, a project that the hyper-mayor has presented as the culmination of her mandates in ten years. Colau's idea, they say-they say-they say her spokespeople, will consist of "making a leap of scale" in the idea of the superblock, not by imitating it in random places in the Eixample, but by pacifying 21 vertical and horizontal streets (that is, reducing their traffic to residents and services) to give birth to the same number of squares at their intersections, in the same way that happens in many places in Gràcia in a very natural way, and thus gain six hectares of green land at each resulting intersection of the invention.
A trap pacification
Once the propaganda and the advertisement have been transcribed, let's take out the scalpel. First of all, it's somewhat amusing that a project called "Superilla Barcelona" doesn't end up building a single damn super-block, but rather actually gives them up to form pacified street intersections with traffic, which is something very different. In fact, if we look at the works that Colau has promised to materialize during the current mandate, the experiment would consist of testing this structure on Consell de Cent, Rocafort, Borrell, and Girona streets to create the consequent squares at the respective intersections.
At this stage of the issue, we would reach a trap pacification, because in the vicinity of these places, as already happens in the Mercat de Sant Antoni, cars could circulate as long as they did so at less than ten kilometers per hour, but also because these streets would border others where traffic would flow normally (and who knows if with even more car volume!). In that sense, the Colau Plan would only multiply the pedestrian corridor that the City Council has already tested by painting the ground yellow and with a series of bollards at the corners (of a Stalinist aesthetic, by the way, deserving of all the evil that purgatory can bestow) and that have not caused more accidents or contusions because God is perhaps Catalan or a militant of Barcelona en Comú.
More than a super-block plan, I insist, Colau's gift to the city consists of mutating Cerdà's old and brilliant gardening pretension, currently unrealizable due to the urban colonization of the interior space of the blocks, into a series of green corridors. To be fair to the Comuns administration, one must admit that this pretension (which had already been explored by the Hereu and Trias administrations) would improve the sustainability of the neighborhood by creating a much more habitable, walkable, and human green area.
The problem is that what has been presented as a plan is a simple remodeling that, once the works are tendered, would begin in a first stage in 2022, just before the next elections to the City Council, you tell me what curiosities life has, and would pass the project's ball to the next administration chosen by the people of Barcelona. In turn, once the streets are pacified, almost the entire Eixample would continue to be a passable area by car, so Cerdà's spirit would rest more than peacefully, but the apologists of ecologism would be very, very much in the middle. Because the superblocks project only makes sense, in short, if internal transit is only practiced to go to a very specific internal destination.
As Salvador Rueda, the very wise soul of the Barcelona Urban Ecology Agency, has explained, the superblocks model can end up reducing traffic by 21% not by magic, but precisely because of this factor I was just telling you about: it makes no sense to cross them with a car, because the structure itself kindly forces you not to enter unless you are going to a very specific place in that sector of the neighborhood. It is for this reason, and this is not magical at all, that the vehicle can reduce its speed when it is inside. In a combined model of pacified streets that intertwine with other passable ones, this factor is not so clear, because as one has seen in the experiment of Calle Consell de Cent, pedestrians had to be aware of the occasional traffic that entered through the perpendicular streets through their intersections, something that Cerdà had encouraged because he loved that one could travel through Barcelona on four wheels and at high speed.
In parallel, Rueda himself has stated that superblocks must be accompanied by a total re-dimensioning of an effective public transport network for the people of Barcelona that keeps them away from the temptation to get into a car for longer journeys than a short walk. Without streamlining the journeys one imagines within the Eixample, the car will not completely disappear.
With this, it does not intend to say that the superblocks model is incompatible with the Eixample structure. On the contrary, precisely because if there is a neighborhood that can be divided into small self-sufficient areas, this is the one Cerdà conceived (currently each superblock would have an average of 6,200 people, practically like that of a small town), which also allows them to be created with perfect geometry.
In turn, the idea could prosper very naturally in terms of the life of the eixamplencs, who perimeter our existence thinking about the schools, shops, and public facilities we have a few meters from home. The limit of your Eixample, a good friend says, is the area that exists from your house to your tobacconist or your kiosk, a distance that perfectly adapts to the notion of a small city in itself. There is a difference, in short, between the game of urban porosity and the trick of adding a rectilinear green area in the form of a corridor to another where automotive speed still persists, with the consequent risk of tension that I mentioned earlier. All of this, the urban agents and Ada Colau's most astute advisors know perfectly well, but for reasons of life (and politics!) no one dares to contradict the mayor because contradicting her orders implies being old-fashioned or unmoving.
In fact, it's amusing to see how the Colau Plan, if it shows anything, is the extraordinary political intelligence of its mastermind. By approving it halfway, the hyper-mayor has managed not to make her government partner, the PSC, nervous, as they had long raised many objections to the pacification of Gràcia with the excuse that it mitigated commerce. On the other hand, Colau knows perfectly well that ERC's moderation caused her many problems in Barcelona's Eixample, where the Comuns want to regain lost ground through improvements to certain green areas on a few streets that, ironically, will significantly increase the economic value of their respective properties.
But Cerdà's shadow is very long, and it will make this project not only suffer from lameness, but also end in more than problematic mobility tensions.I must admit the play is perfect, because Colau has found a cause without opponents –sustainable mobility, environmentalism, etc.– that she can present under the slogan "Common Sense", which is as much 15-M as I am... But Cerdà's shadow is very long, and it will make this project not only limp, but end in more than problematic mobility tensions. But all this, dear readers, will happen after the next elections, in which some voters will happily go to the polls to thank the mayor for having won the lottery and having a flowering tree right at their doorstep.
In parallel, there is a small detail that has not quite scandalized the journalists of the tribe. If you browse the splendid English version of Cerdà's Theory that I mentioned before, you will find a map of his Plan with very precise annotations for each segment of the neighborhood. To put it with a certain anachronistic spirit, Cerdà gave birth to a plan in the form of an Excel. Colau's Plan, on the other hand, has been made with a simple Power Point, with pacifying, sustainable, and so on proposals without providing a single piece of data on the matter. In short, and not to bore you any further, the Colau Plan for the Cerdà Plan mainly demonstrates one thing: that Ildefons is still so brilliant that he ends up ridiculing those who intrude in this, his neighborhood.