Urban microsurgery operation so that children have somewhere to play in Plaza Castella in the Raval neighborhood. These days Barcelona City Council will try to make one side of this place a safe space where the students of Plaça Castella can play happily.
Here, in the very central Castella square, between the Universitat and Catalunya squares, the most modern characters typical of Tallers street come, a lot of university students in search of cheap beers, globetrotters who stock up on cans of beer in the grocery stores. , people who have no other place to sleep, very insistent graffiti artists… and the kids from the Castella school, who usually spend their breaks in front of the center, who do not have a proper playground, one in proper condition, because of all the They end up cornered in life, they always have the upper hand.
So the City Council will install a kind of wooden stand with different levels on the perimeter of one of the large planters in this square, the one closest to the educational center, so that the planter itself becomes a play area. . This action, as detailed yesterday by the City Council itself in a statement, will allow the floor of the square to be joined with the planter.
The City Council will also renew the pavement by installing a floor more suitable for children’s games. During school breaks, three ropes will delimit the space dedicated to the kids. We are talking in total about a thousand or so square meters. In addition, the fountain located in front of the parish of Sant Pere Nolasc will be moved to a more central and open point in the square, much less hidden. The cost of this action will be 175,000 euros.
This is not the first time that the City Council has tried to improve coexistence in Plaza Castella with surgical measures. The government of the then mayor Ada Colau installed some flower pots against the façade of the school so that people would stop urinating in front of the walls of the educational center. And although the flower pots in question reduced urination, they also made things easier for graffiti artists, who have since then climbed these walls better.
For years, the City Council has opted for urban microsurgery to solve coexistence problems in the Raval neighborhood and the entire Ciutat Vella district. On this side of Barcelona, ??the usual reforms were always more complicated. And the government of Mayor Jaume Collboni also seems to be betting on these surgical interventions. But the results of these ways usually have a rather palliative nature. They never finish solving problems in a definitive way, meeting their objectives. In the Gòtic neighborhood, in the previous mandates, a square was designed that also functions as the playground of the Àngel Baixeras school, and in the end one day a child while playing pricked himself with an abandoned syringe.
