On the assumption that one day there is a consensus to plan metropolitan Barcelona, urban planners will find themselves with a serious problem: if they wait for the moment, many of the spaces now available will have already been occupied without any other criteria than obtaining of an immediate benefit.
Developers of housing, residences for the elderly, supermarkets or hotels for students are pressuring mayors to start building already on land that urban planners point out as ideal for designing metropolitan strategies. The interest of the promoters is legitimate, but if the metropolis was already agreed upon and planned, this urban development could be done in an orderly manner, it would suit the communications network and it would not incur more duplicity than the inevitable.
Fortunately, from time to time projects that cater to this metropolitan scale see the light of day. In the next few days, for example, the town councils of Esplugues de Llobregat and Badalona will make public two studies for the promotion of innovation districts, commissioned at the time to the consultancy Aretian, a startup born from the Harvard Innovation Lab which the Catalan urban planner and researcher is co-founder and CEO.
The details of Aretian's proposal (which has also worked for Barcelona in the past) will be known soon, but it incorporates as a novelty that enhances the complementarity of two poles based on the synergies between reference hospitals and universities. And, secondly, the fact that the two projects have been consulted with the neighboring municipalities: in the case of Esplugues, with Barcelona (in whose area the new Hospital Clínic will be located) and, in the case of Badalona, with Sant Adrià de Besòs (the two towns share the Tres Xemeneies space).
In other words, we try to avoid the recurring mistake 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 future projects. And it would be interesting if they did it with metropolitan generosity, placing their brand-new districts under this umbrella of innovation (technological, scientific, cultural and social) which should be the benchmark for the future of the entire Barcelona conurbation.
In the case of Esplugues-Porta de Barcelonana, Aretian's plan identifies actors such as the Sant Joan de Déu hospital (in the process of expansion) and the hospital as referents of a district in which public and private universities 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 Clínic, a high-level hospital which, due to being encapsulated in its current location in the Eixample, has not been able to create in around the desirable ecosystem, a development that the Germans Trias i Pujol in Badalona is able to do. Can Ruti and the UPC are the major players in the Badalona-Tres Xemeneies innovation district, where important developments in sophisticated manufacturing and the recruitment of startups are expected.
It is clear that it is urgent that the political and urban planning decisions on metropolitan construction be streamlined. Time runs against a metropolis that lets the decades pass with reckless indolence. There is no shortage of correct diagnoses about 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 town by town, without an overall vision .
Unfortunately, if this inertia continues, one day it will be necessary to agree that metropolitan Barcelona was, in reality, a chimera.
