Assuming that one day there is a consensus to plan metropolitan Barcelona, urban planners will encounter a serious problem: by waiting so long for the moment, many of the spaces now available will have already been occupied with no other criterion than seeking profitability. immediate.
Housing developers, senior residences, supermarkets and student hotels are putting pressure on mayors to start building now on land that urban planners point out as ideal for designing metropolitan strategies.
The interest of the promoters is legitimate, but, if the metropolis were already agreed upon and planned, this urban development could be carried out in an orderly manner, it would be adapted to the communications network and it would not incur more duplication than the inevitable.
Luckily, from time to time projects that serve that metropolitan scale come to light. In the coming days, for example, the municipalities of Esplugues de Llobregat and Badalona will make public two studies to promote their innovation districts, commissioned at the time by the consulting firm Aretian, a startup that emerged from the Harvard Innovation Lab of which he is a co-founder. and CEO the Catalan urban planner and researcher Ramon Gras.
The details of Aretian's proposal (who has also worked for Barcelona in the past) will be known soon, but this incorporates as a novelty that it enhances the complementarity of two poles based on the synergies between reference hospitals and universities.
And, secondly, the fact that both projects have been consulted with the neighboring municipalities: in the case of Esplugues, with Barcelona (in whose area the new Clínic hospital will be located) and, in the case of Badalona, with Sant Adrià ( both locations share the space of the three chimneys).
That is, we try to avoid the recurring error of promoting isolated initiatives that incur redundancies and dispersion of efforts. Two mayors of different signs, Pilar Díaz (PSC) and Xavier García Albiol (PP), will be able to exhibit exciting projects for the future.
And it would be interesting if they did so with metropolitan generosity, placing their brand new districts under that umbrella of innovation (technological, scientific, cultural and social) that should be the guiding flag of the entire Barcelona conurbation.
In the case of Esplugues-Porta in Barcelona, Aretian's masterplan identifies actors such as the Sant Joan de Déu hospital (in the process of expansion) and the Clínic hospital as references for a hub in which universities and public and private schools also participate, existing companies and new additions such as AstraZeneca, which will locate a hub for new therapies in the municipality.
To support the idea that physical space generates new opportunities, Gras provides the example of the Clínic, a high-level hospital that, due to being encapsulated in the heart of Eixample, has not been able to create the desirable ecosystem around it, a development that Yes, he is being able to do the Germans Trias i Pujol in Badalona.
Can Ruti and the UPC are the big players in the Badalona-Tres Xemeneies innovation district, where important developments in sophisticated manufacturing and the attraction of startups are expected.
It is evident that there is an urgent need to streamline political and urban planning decisions on metropolitan construction. Time is running against a metropolis that lets decades pass with reckless indolence. There is no shortage of accurate diagnoses regarding the need to define it. On the contrary, they proliferate in a Barcelona fond of psychoanalyzing itself.
Examples are the Metropolitan Commitment, the Rethink analysis space or the Strategic Plan (Pemb), whose general coordinator, Oriol Estela, never tires of warning that it is nonsense to plan solutions municipality by municipality, without an overall vision.
If this inertia continues, one day we will have to agree that metropolitan Barcelona was, in reality, a chimera.
