Barcelona: green axes strata

A few weeks ago, in this same newspaper, the architect Jordi Badia He declared himself decisively and unequivocally in favor of Barcelona's green corridors. He maintained that private transport is unsustainable, that other means of transport should be promoted, and ventured to say that few professionals oppose them. Finally, he described the green corridors as "an extraordinary idea."

When I advised the Uruguayan government on developing a project in the La Aguada neighborhood, the first thing we did was visit the General Artigas Central Station, located next to the neighborhood we were to remodel. Upon seeing this disused space, I exclaimed my enthusiasm and referred to the station near the port area as a site...extraordinary"From the city of Montevideo. Mariano Arana, the city's mayor at the time, looked at me strangely and a little disappointed by my unfavorable opinion about the project we had to develop. Later I learned that in Uruguay they use the word extraordinary to refer to something uncommon, rare, and therefore bad.

I don't believe my colleague Badia, a notable architect, meant to refer to Barcelona's current green spaces in the Uruguayan sense, that is, as something harmful to the city. A pity, because perhaps this time he would have been right.

Let me explain. In 1999, during Mayor Clos's term, Proeixample commissioned a project from the team formed by ERV Arquitectes Associats and the Center for Planning Studies, then led by Josep Maria Bricall. It was a proposal for improving the green spaces of the Eixample district. The first step involved surveying, plot by plot, the zoning classifications and ownership of all the parcels in the district. Finally, the proposal called for the creation of green corridors—yes, you read that right: green corridors—although these were entirely different from the ones that were ultimately built, a poor imitation that distorted the original idea.

The 1999 project consisted of a structuring green network occupying streets where vehicular traffic flowed in the same direction and intersected by a parallel street. The guiding principle was to avoid disrupting the city's existing mobility pattern. Thus, the vertical axes were Llançà Street intersecting with Tarragona Street, Conde Borrell Street intersecting with Viladomat Street, Enric Granados Street intersecting with Balmes Street, and so on. The horizontal axes included Provenza Street intersecting with Mallorca Street, and the Gran Via Avenue served as a major civic axis with landscaped sidewalks. However, unlike the hasty approach taken now, which disregarded urban planning regulations, the selected streets/axes only involved widening the sidewalks, respecting, maintaining, and calming traffic, as seen in the 2009 renovation of Enric Granados Street.

The proposal was not intended to be against cars, nor to criminalize car owners who need their vehicles for transportation. Without stifling mobility or shifting it to other parallel streets in the Eixample district, it favored pedestrians. Thus, the true purpose of the proposed axes was to create pedestrian routes that would link the courtyards slated for restoration to the planned green spaces. In this way, the axes became mere conduits for the true green structure of the Eixample, comprised primarily of the succession of courtyards reclaimed as public gardens. In other words, it reworked Ildefons Cerdà's project, adapting it to the existing urban reality. To make this feasible, the study also identified the most suitable courtyards for conversion into green spaces, connected and accessible from the proposed axes.

In this way, without seriously affecting the circulation of vehicles or discriminating some streets against others, and maintaining the isotropic principle proposed by Cerdà, the proportion of green areas in the district was improved and a network of internal routes in the grid of the Eixample was achieved.

Naturally, implementing this proposal required a significant management effort. Dealing and negotiating, one by one, with all the owners of each of the interior plots of land is an enormous undertaking that demands time and dedication from city officials. This work, of course, wouldn't have been necessary if the intervention had been on public land, supposedly to convert a road into a green space. This approach requires no management effort and only the necessary budget and the processing of a planning amendment. In the case of Barcelona, ​​not even this was implemented.

The negative consequences remain to be seen. For now, we are merely curious to see how the conflict between the privileged owners of the affected streets and the court rulings against the green corridors will play out. Judges watch, astonished, as their sentences inevitably become unpopular and reversible, even though—we mustn't forget—they are legally binding. Later, we will experience the potential degradation, the cost of maintenance, the increase in rental prices for apartments and businesses, and the possible transformation of the street into a nighttime festival of drinks and noise. That is, causing the displacement of the very residents. A tantalizing scenario, provided the process isn't reversed. An unlikely scenario, but one that shouldn't be ruled out, lest by rendering the green corridor ruling meaningless, we further enrage the already questioned judiciary.