The fifteen-minute city idea has staunch supporters and ruthless detractors. Like everything these days, urbanism is also a matter of life and death in a world that seems governed by social networks. But, in any case, it is not a motto that can be applied in all cities equally. It serves as a pattern, but the suit must be tailored.
The author of this very Barcelona concept, the Colombian Carlos Moreno, admits that fifteen minutes can actually be thirty, depending on where and for what it is applied. Moreno is now publishing his translation of La revolución de la proximidad in Alianza Editorial, where he reconsiders the use of urban space to promote proximity and, with it, the advantage of recovering such a scarce commodity as time.
It is about providing services and attractions to neighborhoods to limit the need to travel, something that successive Barcelona governments have promoted for years with the decentralization of markets, libraries... In this sense, Barcelona has already done its homework. The opposite extreme, in Spain, would be a Madrid designed around the car, at risk of becoming one of those American cities of “two hours by car”.
Unlike the vast Paris (Moreno has advised Mayor Anne Hidalgo), in the Barcelona of al barri hi ha de tot, fifteen minutes are enough to get to many places, and thirty, anywhere. In the particular case of the Catalan capital, the challenge, now, would not be so much to avoid trips, but, conversely, to combat this tendency to believe that what is important only happens in that uncertain space called the center, an area that would include Ciutat Vella, the Eixample and even the Gràcia neighbourhood.
Let's see how this concept would be transposed to the field of cultural consumption, that is, to the trips that Barcelonans make to go to exhibitions, concerts or libraries.
In fact, Barcelona –understood as the so-called municipality and those that border it–, has a sufficiently human scale to fit, as a whole, in that concept of proximity to the city of 15/30 minutes. It's just that there are a series of psychological barriers that make many Barcelonans believe what doesn't happen in that narrow idea of the center happens in a remote suburb.
The success that the García Márquez de la Verneda library has had since its inauguration has convinced some Barcelonans that they must change their mental scale when it comes to attending cultural events, something that already happened when art galleries began to be established in l' Hospitalet, 20 minutes by metro from Plaza Catalunya. Because barely 20 minutes is what it takes to go from Paseo de Gràcia to the new library on line 2, a journey that in any global metropolis would be considered extremely close. Like approaching the corner store.
On the same line 2, also from Paseo de Gràcia, it only takes 26 minutes to reach one of the hidden attractions of this city, the Piramidón cultural center, located on the upper floors of an old skyscraper in the La Pau neighborhood. . A visit to the exhibition gallery of this private initiative cultural complex –it also has residences for artists– is an invitation to broaden the concept of cultural Barcelona.
As is also the case, a few minutes away on the same L2 (less than half an hour from Paseo de Gràcia), the Museum of Immigration History of Catalonia, already in Sant Adrià de Besòs, an essential stop to understand – and anticipate – the keys to the migratory phenomenon.
At the end of L2, still to be developed, the Besòs front, defined by the Bon Pastor polygons (and the old Mercedes factory), Torrent de l'Estadella, Montsolís and La Verneda, is the last to be completed. In the words of Ramon Gras, researcher in Urbanism and City Science at Harvard, the Besòs area "has the potential to become the reference innovation district of the city".
The lack of political and mental specificity in the metropolitan area – the jump to Tres Xemeneies and Badalona is the pending issue – perhaps means that Barcelona lives within a very narrow psychological framework, which prevents us from enjoying the city of 30 minutes of culture that invites us to think that many, many things happen "in the boondocks."
