The troubled approval of the Eixample uses plan has had a facet intensely tinged with pre-election color. An agreement agreed except for minor discrepancies by the still government partners was on the verge of going down the drain due to the picking up of one of the components of the municipal government. The project has been saved by the capes launched by ERC and Junts, the opposition parties that could end up agreeing with one or the other party of the terminal government coalition, which has led to the re-enlistment of the Socialists. All this in the course of a week and, of course, just under four months from the next municipal elections. A period in which evidence of a demoscopically close scenario and with diverse and uncertain potential agreements, it will surely offer more surprising situations.
But the ups and downs of the approval of the project are only a part, striking but minor, of an initiative that appears as one of the central elements of the already open electoral debate. Not only circumstantial but seriously programmatic. Inseparable from the controversy over the ‘superilla’ of the Eixample. Or more precisely, of the decision to intertwine the central plot of the city of green axes. A not always sufficiently accepted rectification of the philosophy started in Poblenou of creating the ‘superilles’ as pedestrian blocks of three by three blocks, separated by private transit axes.
The motto of defending the Eixample model against the plans of the Government of Ada Colau seems to focus this demand for the arrangement devised by Ildefons Cerdà in its defense as a network of fluid and non-pedestrian traffic routes. The extent to which the design of a mesh with interspersed green axes is effective or not for improving global mobility and pollution should be subject to debate, the Eixample model to be defended has another characteristic that perhaps distinguishes it even more: a regular geometry accommodates a mixture of diverse, mixed and plural architectures and commercial and residential uses, from Gràcia to Ciutat Vella and from Sants to Sant Martí. The use plan intends to maintain this characteristic of the central district of the city. And precisely to avoid one of the potential problems of the green axes strategy: turning them not into spaces for expansion and rest for neighbors, visitors and customers, but instead into magnets for the monoculture of nightlife and 24-hour commerce, as happened in the Enric Granados street. If the designers of this urban strategy have been aware of one of its potential negative effects, the most critical should still agree more on the need for this antidote.
Until now, the analysis of what happened in the commercial fabric of the parts of the Eixample subject to precautionary measures (Girona and Sant Antoni) show that to a certain extent it has been possible to control (more in the commercial than in the residential) the gentrification risks of this localized upgrading technique of the urban landscape. It is good, however, that the project includes periodic reviews and analyzes to make sure that, now on a larger scale, it is also like this. There is room in the modifications agreed this Friday to clear up doubts that still stand in the coming years, such as which streets should have a more intense level of protection and the risk of overflowing in those that are outside of it.