Just over a year before the next municipal elections, Barcelona is preparing to open several nerve axes of the city and to apply in them, without the provisional measures that have been usual during pandemic times, the urban criteria of the Mayor Ada Colau’s government team. On March 7 the tramway works will begin on Diagonal, in June the drastic reduction of the passable road of the Pi i Margall promenade and the transformation of Consell de Cent into one of the green axes of the Eixample superilla, in March the pacification of the roaring Via Laietana and throughout this year, the first section of the facelift to the Rambla. In all cases, expansion of the green space available for pedestrians and reduction of the space available for road traffic.
The debate It is on the table what the performance will be in terms of habitability and commercial attraction of each of these interventions, considered in isolation. Despite the reservations, the experiences of previous cases indicate that they have tended to be positive. Another thing is to know if the policy of interspersing spaces around the city that are closed to cars and motorcycles ends up dissuading their use or does nothing more than redirect, divert and concentrate the negative effects of road traffic, without diminishing its global impact. over the city. Here the answers admit many more nuances and require much more contrast with reality than ideological apriorisms. And, in the specific case of the Eixample Superilla, carry out a dialogue exercise, until now very insufficient, with the government partners and the affected merchants, with a willingness to adapt the necessary aspects of the initial project.
Regardless of the urban policy expressed in these interventions and the assessment it deserves, the most immediate effect that the citizen will experience is to see the center of the city turned upside down during the next year. With all that it entails irritating nuisancesof feeling that the Administration that is about to put its continuity in the hands of citizens actively intervenes in its transformation and, finally, of timely openings. Costs and benefits that a municipal government always decides to manage over time. It is practically a physical law (only slightly altered on this occasion by the pandemic) that in a four-year municipal mandate, the third is marked by the first stones and the fourth by the inaugurations in its final stretch. Something that has more than one explanation, from the temporal logic of planning, approving and executing projects (particularly arduous in a municipal government with complicated majorities) to the more traditional and inveterate electioneering calculation.
The ‘commons‘ arrived at the Barcelona City Council (like their Podemos partners to the Government of Spain) with the slogan of ending the old ways of doing politics. And it is so true that they have contributed new points of view and accentuated the commitment of the left-wing governments in which they have participated for certain social policies such as have ended up assuming quite a few practices associated with those old ways of doing. Either because of the inertia of the functioning of the institutions and sometimes vitiated practices that are difficult to separate from the exercise of power, or because there was no reasonable alternative to what was seen one way from the street or the academy and another when assuming responsibilities. And that is true both in something as common as the multi-year programming of investments and in other practices that can never stop being under the light of transparency and the exercise of self-criticism.