Entering Barcelona at the top of Diagonal has been a challenge for years. Right now, it's a busy road that pushes out residents and acts as a barrier to the area. But this could change. The construction of the future Clinical Health Campus It's an opportunity to redesign the border between Barcelona, Esplugues, and Hospitalet. To humanize it and make it more suitable for residents. The criteria document for defining an urban strategy for the Porta Diagonal – Campus Clínic area prepared by Barcelona Regional highlights a series of changes that go in this direction. The document proposes converting the Ronda de Dalt and the Diagonal, where it connects with the B-23, into two roads that are more urban than interurban.
Specifically, Avinguda Diagonal could gain approximately 800 meters from the highway, with a promenade, trees, and wide sidewalks, while a similar intervention would be carried out on the Ronda de Dalt at the same point. Furthermore, the roads that currently connect the B-23 with the ring road could be simplified with tunnels, which would allow for the gain of 60,000 square meters of developable land. Extending metro line 3 to the center of Esplugues, as planned, would also help transform and connect the area. And improving intercity mobility should also serve to improve the city's public transport connections, one of the major challenges still pending. The intention is to open the new health campus in 2035, so this transformation should begin as soon as possible.
All this redevelopment, if carried out and done quickly enough, is good news, not only because of the significance of the new Clínic, which is to house the facilities of the new hospital, the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the University of Barcelona, and several research centers (€07,000, all next to the current San Juan de Dios Hospital), but also because it allows for a clean slate of one of the main entry routes into Barcelona, making it more humane, connecting the city with its surroundings, and expanding the urban fabric without taking up more land by rearranging what's already there.
Faced with the current housing crisis in the capital, the city needs to find new ways to grow, gaining green spaces and services, areas for humans rather than cars, but without further complicating mobility. This can be done directly, by recovering part of the space occupied by a road escalator, for example, or indirectly, by improving road and public transport connections with the surrounding cities. Connecting the city in a more harmonious and rational way.
Barcelona cannot think alone; it is not alone. It is a connecting hub for the entire country and, above all, the nerve center of a dynamic metropolitan area that must be more and better connected. The project at the Puerta de la Diagonal could be an example of future projects in other areas on the outskirts of the city and the metropolitan area that will help better connect greater Barcelona, an urban center where well over a third of Catalonia's population lives.
