Although with less convening power than the Cercle d’Economia, the Barcelona Federal District (BDF) association has held its own round table to publicly formulate the same request that Josep Antoni Acebillo raised in mid-December: that Consell de Cent street be returned to cars. Acebillo claimed it in the Cercle d’Economia from mayor Xavier Trias (he had him sitting right in front of him) and, on this occasion, the speakers who have demanded that the works be reversed have been others, although with very similar arguments: Josep Miro Ardevolformer CiU councilor in the Barcelona City Council, Ramon Garcia BragadoSocialist deputy mayor at a later stage, and Cristian Bardají, RACC director.
Only three months before the elections and contrary to what happened in previous appointments with the polls, contaminated by the tension of Catalan politics, there is a debate on city projects, sometimes vehemently, but the parties (candidates, lobis, neighbours, platforms…) on literally palpable things, such as green axes and ‘superilles’. BDF has said its own in a somewhat soulless act (not even half of the auditorium has filled, barely 30 people), with an unequivocal title, ‘Does it make sense to deconstruct Barcelona?’.
García Bragado, responsible for municipal urban planning with Joan Clos, already spoke in December at the Cercle d’Economia event. He then he eclipsed the torrential verb of Acebillo. As a lawyer who is has repeated in essence his thesis, which from an administrative point of view is processeds to carry out the works in progress in four streets of the Eixample to make them almost entirely pedestrian they are defective in form. Between 10 and 15 appeals are filed against the green axes, but the courts have dismissed the halting of the works as claimed by, among others, García Bragado.
bad arts
The former deputy mayor, paradoxically, lives in Consell de Cent, a street where there is no evidence of the presence of protest banners on the balconies against the works and neither can attest to opposition from the merchants, They rather believe that they will benefit, but despite these circumstances, they consider that the project is, in addition to being legally incorrect, nonsense. In his opinion, the current government team intends to reduce the volume of traffic in the city by promoting congestion in its streets.so that every day more drivers give up using the car.
Bardají, on behalf of the RACC, has shared this suspicion and has argued that any traffic reduction strategy that consists of reducing the number of lanes in the city cannot be carried out if the benefits of the public transport, especially the intercity. None of the three speakers, by the way, is in favor of connecting the two lines of the metropolitan tram through the Diagonal.
At a certain point in his speech, the representative of the RACC came to suggest that the Eixample is not owned by those who inhabit it, or at least no more than by those who suffer traffic jams every day at the accesses to the city.
Related news
The most detailed intervention, however, has been that of Miró Ardèvol, an agronomist by training and, for at least a couple of decades, a militant of the most fundamentalist wing of Catalan Christianity. Maybe that’s why his intervention has been the most apocalyptic. Also, it is true, the most orderly. He has outlined 20 reasons to be against the ‘superilles’.
He has described the decision to promote them as a “joke of whoever governs & rdquor ;. He has defended that if the Cerdà plan has a great virtue it is that it mitigates social differences and that reforms such as that of Sant Antoni accentuate them. He has predicted that maintenance of green axes will be expensive. It has heralded the future proliferation of large bottles. Also, in that apocalyptic ‘crescendo’, he has predicted that streets like Consell de Cent, Rocafort, Borrell and Girona will be taken over by the destitute for sleeping. Productivity will fall, he added. The city council will see itself in the need to regulate more and more, through plans of uses, the economy of the city. He has not come to say that Soviet, but almost. In summary, he has expressed such a strict opposition that he has considered that the only possible remedy will be to reverse the situation, with urbanistic nuances if necessary, not necessarily with the same configuration of the streets prior to Ada Colau, but opening up again to the car traffic streets like Consell de Cent.