The image of a street semi-converted into a pedestrian zone in any neighborhood of Barcelona is not far removed from those preserved in the archaeological site of Pompeii. The theoretical basis on which they are based is the same, although the needs twenty-one centuries later are different. Shaded spaces are now needed to face the intense heat waves resulting from the climate emergency, bike lanes have appeared, public transport requires bus lanes, neighbors deserve spaces for recreation… and at the same time, everything cannot have accommodated in the disputed public space of a particularly dense city.
In view of this finding, the chief architect of Barcelona City Council, Maria Buhigas, is working on the design of a new street model, as she announced yesterday at the Barcelona Tribuna forum, organized by Amics del País, the Spanish Association of Managers and La Vanguardia at CaixaForum Macaya. It is about conceptualizing the street of the 21st century, adapted to the new times, clearly defining basic standards.
“The time has come to recover the category of elements that any street must have”, sums up Buhigas about this new street model that is still well known what it will look like, but which is already emerging as one of the biggest challenges it will have in front. At the moment, he has created a working group to define this continuous low of the city with the involvement of all the actors involved, from those in charge of design to maintenance. An example is the need for shade prevailing in the summer, which at the same time must be compatible with the increasing drought we are facing.
The resulting theoretical reflection will be part of the public space style book that Buhigas has undertaken to create, to recover the old care of socialist governments that became internationally famous for taking care of all the elements they put on the streets of the Catalan capital, from the traffic lights to the bins, passing through the panots. “The signature of the author of Barcelona’s public space must be put by the City Council”, clarified Buhigas yesterday during a conference that was a song in defense of the city in full measure. Not only of Barcelona, ??but of the concept of the city as such, that space where more than half of the world’s population lives and where “the challenges are evident, but also the solutions”, according to the chief architect.
Maria Buhigas avoids setting herself many goals for the coming years. He limits them to two, albeit very ambitious ones: redefining urban quality – through what has been said previously – and adapting the built city. “We will play Tetris, we will adapt the pieces of the game that are already there and move them, we have to be skilled to see what addition we can make to revitalize an area”, summarized Buhigas, who considers it essential to adapt urban planning to new needs. That is, to overcome once and for all the metropolitan general plan (PGM) and be able to base it on the new metropolitan urban master plan (PDUM), which precisely the chief architect knows well, having been involved in its drafting during the years he worked in the Barcelona Regional urban development agency. Buhigas equates the current situation on an urban scale “as if we were operating with instruments from the seventies in an operating theater instead of the highly sophisticated tools that are already there”.
The metropolitan vision of the chief architect can also be seen in her work plan for the city. The maps he projected on the screen went beyond the administrative limits of the city and included l’Hospitalet, Santa Coloma, Esplugues… The first concreteness in this sense may be the Gran Via, which now climbs the final project to the central area of ??Les Glòries, but it will have to be redefined as “a metropolitan avenue with the character of a civic thoroughfare”.
As part of this objective, it also aims to give shape to the island interior recovery plan promised by Mayor Jaume Collboni, with the intention of going much further. Buhigas prefers to talk about an interior plan, dryly, because he plans to act in many other places that are not precisely the classic interior spaces of the urban fabric of the Eixample. “There are spaces between blocks of buildings that have no urban quality, facilities that do not take advantage of their entire plot…”, pointed out the chief architect, who is willing to work on different lines. The easiest will be the one that is circumscribed to spaces of public ownership, but it is also ready to find imaginative formulas that improve wasted corners in deprived hands.