The greatest urban innovation in recent years on the streets of Barcelona are the superblocks and the recent green axes, wrapped in an electoral context that has amplified defenders and detractors of a type of action that can be seen in many other cities in the world. In parallel, the City Council has opted to deploy other urban innovations in a much more discreet way and with numerous actors involved, with the consensus that some criticized that there was not in the transformation of Consell de Cent.
There are few symbols more Barcelona than the panot, the tile with its characteristic flower design. And that is how it will continue to be in plain sight for all those who walk above it daily, although its way of being is destined to change completely to adapt to the 21st century. The new panot is made with recycled material and its greater porosity seeks to minimize the heat given off by the ground in a city increasingly threatened by the climate emergency. This aspect is also taken into account in its production, a process in which specific measures are taken to reduce the carbon footprint. And the result is designed for the long term, seeking greater resistance and durability. Nothing new under the sun, like those indestructible cobblestones of yesteryear.
The way of selecting new tiles also says a lot about a different way of acting. The pieces that are being tested on a section of Almogàvers Street are the result of a challenge launched by the City Council through the BIT Hàbitat foundation, in which three finalist projects were selected and received funding worth 240,000 euros to make the corresponding tests.
The first deputy mayor, Laia Bonet, points out the importance of this way of "collaborative work between industry, academia and experts that helps advance the transformation of the city". Companies like Escofet (which won the 1906 competition to unify the Eixample's pavement) and Sorigué, architects and research centers like Eurecat and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) have been involved in it.
For an entire year, the results will be evaluated and if they pass the test, their characteristics will be included in future public works tenders to progressively spread the new model of the iconic Barcelona tile throughout the city.
Photovoltaic panels to produce solar energy do not have to be only on the roofs of buildings and public facilities, where they are increasingly common. Under this starting point, the Bit Hàbitat foundation launched one of its most successful challenges, which can be seen in Plaça de las Glòries. It is an electrical energy-generating pavement designed by the Sorigué group to test the possibilities of installing such a novel system on sidewalks or asphalt.
The generator modules are not affected by the passage of people and bikes over them thanks to a resistant and non-slip glass. The energy that is generated on the ground can power a Bicing station right next door.
A hundred elderly people who lived alone have started to do so with Ari, the acronym for the intelligent robotic assistant who has moved to share a roof with them. With a tablet instead of the face, the robot is responsible for remembering the time of the pill, provides conversation and is responsible for being the platform to connect with the telecare service or with family members. The objective of this project, coordinated with Mobile World Capital Barcelona, is to end up integrating it into the City Council's social services portfolio.
A block of eight floors and 45 homes has been built in just four weeks on Marroc street in the Sant Martí district. The milestone, unthinkable with traditional construction methods, has been achieved thanks to the use of 104 three-dimensional modules. Each home is made up of two of them, produced and previously equipped in a factory with the corresponding kitchen and sink furniture, as well as windows and other installations.
The works, adding industrial and field work, have lasted just over a year, thus reducing the construction period by half. In addition, waste and emissions are reduced in this way and jobs depend less on environmental conditions.
The Municipal Institute of Habitatge of Barcelona has seven promotions underway with industrialized methods. They are the evolution of social apartment blocks created from shipping containers, also very controversial at the time and fully integrated now.
A digital twin is an exact replica in the virtual world. Applied to cities, it becomes a kind of virtual laboratory where urban planners can evaluate indicators on the existing urban fabric and test possible changes before implementing them. In this way, the effects on mobility of the elimination of a lane for cars or the temporary closure for a festive activity can be analyzed.
In the case of Barcelona, work is being done jointly with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the Barcelona Regional development agency. The first tests have revolved around the concept of the 15-minute city, devised by Carlos Moreno, which marks that walking clock time as the maximum distance in which a series of services and services should be available to all citizens. public facilities. In the digital twin you can check, for example, the areas of the city that are better or worse served by the public library network or the entire population that now has metro stations further away than desirable and that will now have them at a distance. more pleasant distance when the central section of line 9 comes into service.
A similar system applied to the construction sector allows Fira de Barcelona to have its pavilions at the Gran Via de l'Hospitalet venue recreated in digital format. They are down to the last detail, toilets included, which allows replacing the manual calculation system of the structures hanging from the ceiling and speeds up the assembly and disassembly processes of the rooms.
The deployment of the new cleaning contract on the streets of Barcelona is accompanied by a layer of technology that seeks to make it more efficient, driven in part by the digital transformation processes that companies in the sector are promoting to be more attractive in the eyes of the administrations. in public tenders.
For a few months now, the service inspectors in the Catalan capital have had a mobile application with all the real-time data on the routes of the cleaning and waste collection vehicles. In this way, itineraries can be adjusted immediately in the event of incidents or needs when it is detected, for example, that a container is overflowing with garbage or that more dirt than usual has accumulated in an area.
The potential of real-time data with specific applications is also taken advantage of by the deployment of 5G telephone networks in recent years. In that sense, they allow emergency services to have more immediate and reliable communication, but the urban innovation commissioner of Barcelona City Council asks: “Is the objective to have 5G?” And he answers clearly: “No! The objective is to have better coordination and communication between emergency services. What urban innovation has to help us with is finding solutions that resolve challenges such as social inequalities, the climate emergency or the need to move in a sustainable way.”
The new municipal challenge that the City Council will launch together with the Bit Hàbitat foundation during the Smart City Expo seeks to improve the Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) bus network, hampered by a lower-than-desirable commercial speed that reduces its attractiveness.
