Barcelona. Read it again and let it trip off your tongue: Barcelona. Nestled between the Mediterranean Sea and the hills, Barcelona is a complex and simple place. Filled with tourists in all the tourist areas, Barcelona can sometimes feel too crowded. But stroll on a boulevard such as Sant Joan and you will be enchanted by the beauty and design.
On our second day here, after touring the small Picasso Museum (I really like small museos), I put Sherry and three of the young people into a taxi for the apartment and walked there, with camera and notebook. I made my way to the Arch de Triumph through a business/commercial district. My first view of the arch had a very large rack of public rental bicycles in the foreground, and a large flatbed truck carrying more bikes. People with cameras were recording their moments at the Arch, as I did. People on bicycles rode past, and traffic moved busily along surrounding streets. From the arch to the sea was a park-like walk, and this also extended from the arch in the other direction, actually to our rented apartment.
Walking along a boulevard like Passeig de Sant Joan in Barcelona is an experience. The aware walker quickly understands that the boulevard does not just give a nod to pedestrians, cyclists and trees; rather, it is designed with them at the forefront. These boulevards are wide; I paced across Sant Joan and estimated it to be about 150 ft (about 46 m) across. This width is not mostly dedicated to motor vehicles. Starting at a building and walking across, one encounters: 1) a wide sidewalk, often paved with patterned blocks or concrete; 2) a green space with trees, shrubs, flowers and park benches amid paving of rows of bricks with soil and grass between the rows (storm water infiltration); 3) two traffic lanes, one marked for buses and taxis; 4) in the middle of the boulevard is a raised, curbed cycling path with two lanes and grass strips. From there it is a repeat of 3 - 1, above. The green space sometimes has a playground for children, and some areas have tables with umbrellas and chairs for adjacent cafes.
Another rather unique feature of Barcelona boulevards is how the intersections are designed. Here is a screen shot from google maps:
Notice in the photo above where the crosswalks are located. You can also see the bicycle lanes in the middle of the boulevard running from bottom right to top left. And the trees in the green space almost obscure the wide sidewalks.
Another interesting feature of BArcelona is that there are trash and recycling colletion containers - small dumpsters - located at many intersections. Residents and businesses carry their garbage and recycling to these containers, and the city picks it up. There are different containers, with different color tops, for a large variety of materials.
How about some photos? OK, here is a link to my Flickr album "Sustainable Barcelona:" https://www.flickr.com/gp/95157126@N03/B19Lww
There are a couple of other things illustrated in the photo album. One is that there are numerous small trash receptacles located along the sidewalks. I never saw one of these overflowing; in fact, I often saw a uniformed worker taking away the bags with trash and replacing them with new ones. And they were also sweeping trash off the sidewalks.
And Barcelona has a system of public bicycles, "bicing," that are everywhere. I saw numerous flat-bed trucks carrying bikes around to be certain there is a minimum number available at every bicing station. I checked online, and you buy an annual pass for 30 Euros (about $33). I was told that you can use a bike for up to 30 minutes before you have to re-rack it somewhere. I saw people on these bikes everywhere I went in the city.
How did Barcelona accomplish these sustainable ideas? The street designs originated in the mid-ninteenth century when the city government decided to tear down the old city walls and expand the city outward. Ildefanso Cerda' was the planner who proposed and started to implement the designs for the city streets and boulevards; he even coined the term "urbanization." Here is a nice article from The Atlantic Citylab about Barcelona urban design: http://www.citylab.com/design/2012/11/6-ideas-every-city-should-steal-barcelona/3998/
As for the trash and recycling collection and street cleaning, I found an excellent article in the Journal of Urban Affairs that examined how the city government manages these services that are contracted to private companies. It is an interesting read, if this kind of stuff interests you. Here is a take-away couple of sentances: "The city was ready to pay more for a service with improved quality that was environmentally friendly. High-quality standards, sustainability, flexibility, and responsiveness are critical requirements in a complex global city with an important tourist sector." Here is the link to: Managing Competition in City Services: the Case of Barcelona. (2009 Journal of Urban Affairs) - http://www.ub.edu/graap/JournalofUrbanAffairs.pdf
OK, so maybe I'm being too wonky about this stuff, but I have to tell you, that as a proud resident of Portland, Oregon, USA, a city often touted by itself and others as one of the most sustainabale cities, I see a lot to envy about Barcelona. Yes, Barcelona is larger than Portland (about 1.6 million residents compared to about 600,000). And Barcelona has the advantage of a progressive urban plan that guided the construction of buildings and streets as the city expanded. But a major difference is leadership and political will to spend money and also to manage city services in ways that reduce monopolization and promote innovation. The City of Portland does not provide services that keep sidewalks clean, and the street sweeping in Portland is ineffective. There are no public trash receptacles along Portland sidewalks. The exception is in the downtown area, where there is a Busines Improvement District (BID - see the article in Journal of Urban Afairs, above) that taxes every business to pay for sidewalk sweeping and trash cans. Portland does not have a public bicycle system, although one was proposed a few years ago.
So visit Barcelona and experience what a truly well designed urban space can be.
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Hi, Paul--
ReplyDeleteHaving visited and walked around Barcelona a couple of years ago as a longtime admirer of Gaudi, I say your observations and comparisons are spot on. We stayed in the Barri Gotic and walked with pleasure to places like the Picasso Museum and Sagrada Familia. I wondered at the time if some of Barcelona's willingness to invest in maintaining a walkable, livable, clean city was in part a way to distinguish themselves from Spain; a way of showing that Catalans are more civilized? I also thought yet again of how our city commissioners get caught up in managing their bureaus and so don't have time or energy to make larger visions and carry them out. You can probably imagine who I am thinking of. Some of them live in neighborhoods that effectively insulate them from experiencing the streets that are dirty and dangerous, too, they all ought to have to walk across 82nd or Powell Boulevard to remind themselves. Did you ever meet Linda Robinson, the activist who advocated for parks in Gateway? She's got stories about how hard it was to get the city to pay attention to the east side.
We were lucky to learn about Herbert Dreiseitl's waterscapes in Germany and Switzerland and to get the money from the city to hire his firm to guide the plans for the parks in NW like Tanner Springs. I will never forget him standing up in a meeting and saying, cities are always covering up and replacing natural features, what if a great hand descended and swept away urban development to reveal a lost stream? It was a real honest to god transformative idea you would never expect to hear from a city commissioner. The park neighbors got all excited and soon reported that some of the old steel rails had been saved, so Dreiseitl used the steel to create that wall along the park's edge, representing the great hand pushing aside the warehouse district to reveal Tanner Creek.
So yes, I wish our city leaders could embrace thinking like Barcelona's, even little flashes of it are so positively affecting.