The promotion of the PAI del Grao, the most ambitious urban plan of the Valencia city council, has once again generated discrepancies between the local government and the opposition. After the municipal government meeting, the Councilor for Urban Planning and Housing, Juan Giner, explained that with the change to indirect management by the land owners (until now the project was in the hands of the public company Aumsa), the PAI del Grau gains strength.
Giner has defended that public-private collaboration will serve to undertake one of the priorities of the current executive led by María José Catalá: the construction of new publicly protected and affordable rental housing. The councilor understands that with this new formula “the streamlining of the project is achieved, without loss to the general interest and public control of the actions.” As expected, the opposition has criticized “privatization” and the fact that it is given away to developers.
Giner emphasized at a press conference that the project to be developed by the new urban development agents will maintain the large green delta of 160,000 m2 (16 hectares or 16 football fields), which will join the 200,000 m2 of the mouth park, to complete the large green lung of Valencia, which is the Turia garden, and which with these extensions will reach a length of more than 12 km.
In addition, the construction of 2,550 homes is maintained, of which 450 will be public protection and the planned provision areas are not modified.
In his speech, the head of Urban Planning also maintained that the project seeks to make road and bicycle traffic compatible. Municipal sources emphasize that the project “takes sustainable mobility into account, enabling platforms for public transport (bus and tram) and for non-motorized mobility (bike paths and pedestrian routes).”
It is precisely the aspect of mobility that least convinces the opposition. From Compromís they denounce that, with the changes, the Catalan Government “is destroying the green delta of the Grao neighborhood.” Its spokesperson, Papi Robles, has stressed that “from an entire green area for citizen enjoyment that gave continuity to the Turia garden and the future mouth park, we move to an area where there will now also be car traffic, destroying this idea of a completely green walking area that is highly resilient to climate change.” For Robles, “the obsession of Catalá and its government with the car reaches an unhealthy point and goes against the European green city model of the 21st century.”
Furthermore, the leader of Compromís has regretted that public management of it is renounced, “so that the city council has control, and that private investors are the ones who develop it so that they are the ones who obtain the benefit instead of the coffers. public”.
Along the same lines, the spokesperson for the Municipal Socialist Group, Sandra Gómez, has assured that “the Popular Party and María José Catalá are lost, and since they do not know where to go, they only know how to return to the past. A past, in the case of the PAI del Grao and the Formula 1 circuit, dark and corrupt.”
Gómez has denounced that the PP is committed to maintaining the planning approved 14 years ago, renouncing the planning modification initiated by the previous progressive government to adapt it to the disappearance of the F1 circuit, the 2030 Agenda, the gender perspective and the the city’s need for housing and tertiary land.