Neither the neighborhood entities, nor the current mayor of Barcelona, nor the previous mayor and not even the merchants' association that filed the lawsuit against the redevelopment of Consell de Cent street. Nobody wants the green axis of Eixample to return to the way it was before, a thoroughfare for cars. This was made clear today by the president of Barcelona Oberta, Gabriel Jené, who expressed his surprise at the forcefulness of the sentence of a magistrate who has condemned Barcelona City Council to reverse the work when it is practically finished.
"We want to give peace of mind to the entire city," Jené said at a press conference at the Foment del Treball headquarters shortly after meeting this morning with Mayor Jaume Collboni. "It is not our desire to return to the previous Consell de cent," insisted the president of the entity that brings together 21 commercial and tourist hubs in the city.
The intention of Barcelona Oberta and the Foment del Treball employers' association is to open a new stage of dialogue with the current municipal government, a condition that they consider did not occur during the time of Mayor Ada Colau and that has led to the judicialization of this and other municipal projects.
"We understand that the solution is not going to be resolved by the bricklayers. We have to resolve it together with the dialogue that has not existed and that we want," said Jené.
How will this dialogue take place? The question does not have an easy answer. To begin with, as explained by the president of Barcelona Oberta, there is a firm commitment from the socialist mayor to create a working group that allows, without hardly touching the Consell de Cent, to attend to the demands of the merchants, that is, to adopt new measures that facilitate access by private vehicle to the city center and overcome a traffic situation that has been described as "infernal."
Some of those measures could affect another prominent road in the city with a profound transformation underway and with the works already very advanced, the Via Laietana.
The president of Barcelona has been quite optimistic about the possibility of improving the relationship between the entity he represents and the City Council and has clearly differentiated the attitude of Ada Colau and her deputy mayor for Urban Planning, Janet Sanz, from that of Jaume Collboni and his first lieutenant, Laia Bonet. In this sense, he has regretted Colau's reaction to the court ruling, which he has described as "lack of respect." "He had the opportunity to reach out to dialogue and recognize that he made a serious mistake," he stated before demanding that the opinion of this sector be taken into account in future urban transformations that affect commerce.
