From the Consell de Cent superblock, a symbol of her career at Barcelona City Council, Janet Sanz, the leader of BComú on the council, announced this Monday that she is leaving politics. After 14 years as a councilor, she explained that she will step down before the end of the year, once the Commons group has been able to restructure itself. "I am leaving full, satisfied, proud, and happy," emphasized Sanz, who revealed that she has been considering this step for more than two years.

With a little delay compared to the first announcements, Barcelona has already activated the countdown to start works on the first four pedestrian-first streets in Eixample's superilla: Consell de Cent, Rocafort, Borrell and Girona, and the squares that will appear where two of these streets cross. The preliminary work, which is to move bicycle hire statiosn and loading and unloading areas for delivery lorries, will be launched during the second half of July. The works as such will start in the second half of August, with an expected duration of eight and a half months, which should allow the City Council to complete them before the next local elections.

A little more than a year ago, Barcelona City Council presented an agreement sealed with the owners of the plot where the old Mercedes-Benz factory used to be in Bon Pastor, Conren Tramway, to convert this space –in disuse since 2007– into a new estate with up to 1,450 homes (3,500 residents), universities (some 2,000 students and 500 professors) and economic activity to attract over 4,000 workers. This is what the promoters of the project claim will be the city's first eco-district, because they want plenty of green spaces and no traffic, becoming an urban link between Sant Andreu de Palomar and Bon Pastor. But once the project's specifics have become known and, above all, the developer has revealed its first simulations, neighbourhood tensions have arisen over to overcrowding concerns. The City Council insists, in the face of criticism, that nothing is definitive yet.

The rush of works that the City Council is preparing before May 2023 elections is already starting to show its head with a succession of big announcements this week: the last one, this Thursday, when a date was set for the start of the works of the so-called Superilla Barcelona, which will create 21 pedestrian-first axes and 21 new squares across the Eixample from now until 2030. In June work will begin on the first four axes, around Consell de Cent street, as well as the four squares where the axes meet. The forecast is that work will be very fast and will not extend beyond the first quarter of next year (about eight months). The timetable says that the project, which is En Comú's flagship project, has to be ready before the elections.

A neighbourhood market, sports courts or schools. These are just a few examples of the facilities that the Barcelona City Council plans to locate in a 35,000 square meter reserve (15 plots) in its technology district: 22@. The urban planning changes that are being prepared in this area of the city, which was born twenty-two years ago, are focused above all on correcting the lack of neighbours to make it not only a good place to work, but also a neighbourhood of Barcelona. The municipal government has been working for years on a modification of the general metropolitan plan (MPGM) to change the rules of the game in 22@ in order to finish developing the spaces that remain unused - 40% of the area has yet to be developed - and to add housing, and today it presented the final document that is expected to be approved next week at the Urban Planning Commission. The final proposal adds a thousand more apartments to the one that was initially processed in 2020 and leaves the final figure at 8,000 apartments to be added to the 9,000 that were foreseen in 2000.

Four years after Barcelona City Council decreed a moratorium on tourist flats, landlords who had already secured a license to turn buildings into tourist accommodation in the old town will be allowed to go ahead with the conversion. This is one of the main changes in the new draft of the Special Urban Plan for Tourist Accommodation (PEUAT), which was presented today by Barcelona City Council. But it is not the only one.

May the announcement of urban improvements not translate into the expulsion of neighbours and lifelong commerce, as has already happened in so many places in Barcelona, from the Born to Gràcia. With this premise in mind, the City Council has approved a suspension of new business licenses in the streets where the pacification of the Eixample will begin to unfold, in the surroundings of the future green axis of Consell de Cent. The aim of the measure is to avoid that, once the streets are places with less space for cars -they will not have asphalt and the speed will be limited to 10 km/h-, they are filled with new bars and establishments of the same style. In short, what happened in Enric Granados street, now converted into a hub of leisure and food, or in Blai street, in Poble-sec, which is full of tapas bars.