Change of urban model

The metropolitan city of Barcelona is compact, with high residential density, an old housing stock, with a shortage of green spaces and a mobility system that is over-dependent on motor vehicles. They are all factors that have a negative effect on its environmental conditions.

To reverse those factors, improve the city’s environmental conditions and move towards a new urban model, it is essential that the climate variable is included in all urban management and transformation processes, whether they involve public spaces or urban fabrics.

By 2050 we want to be a metropolis with balanced neighbourhoods that foster habits of short distances and healthy mobility, with a much more efficient and sustainable building stock. We want a comfortable, traffic-calmed city with lots of green spaces that contribute to people’s good health and well-being, and biodiversity.

Most important challenges

  • Increasing the urban green space and ensuring it is distributed evenly throughout the city.
  • Transforming the public space to improve its environmental and health conditions, reclaiming space allocated to private vehicles for social use and an increase in urban green, fostering sustainable and collective modes of mobility.
  • Equipping urban planning instruments – planning regulations, indicators, speed and funding mechanisms – with climate tools.
  • Avoiding the loss of biodiversity in the current context of global change.

Key actions and actors

Transforming the public space

  • Step up the scale and pace of the Superblock programme. Transform 15 km of streets into green axes by 2024.     
    • Barcelona City Council
  • Protect schools with environmental and road safety measures. Action at 200 schools up to 2024.    
    • Barcelona City Council
  • Introduce the climate emergency vector into strategic metropolitan transformations such as Parc de les Glòries, Avinguda Meridiana, Parc de la Sagrera or the seafront.    
    • Barcelona City Council
  • Intervene in 10 sunbathed spaces (e.g. Passeig Marítim de la Barceloneta, Passeig de l’Exposició del Fòrum, etc.) to provide shade and thermal comfort by means of various solutions: vegetation, fabrics, photovoltaic pergolas or mixed solutions.     
    • Barcelona City Council
  • Increase 40 hectares of public green space in Barcelona so they provide high socio-environmental services, prioritising those places with the biggest deficit (e.g. Av Meridiana, the La Sagrera linear park, La Marina, etc.) and approve an instrument that will enable effective protection of private green spaces.
    • Barcelona City Council

Naturalising the city

  • Develop 10 green roofs and façades on municipal buildings to serve as an example and, by means of agreements with the private sector, promote the development of 50 productive roofs on other buildings, including green roofs, energetic roofs, aljubs or reflectors by means of a call for grants.    
    • Barcelona City Council
  • Create 10 biodiversity nodes and nature reserves as an essential part of the urban green infrastructure Barcelona City Council.
    • Barcelona City Council
  • Develop the necessary programmes for protecting the species that are most vulnerable to climate change.
    • Barcelona City Council
  • Promote urban green corridors, paying special attention to the Ciutadella-Collserola corridor with the intervention on Carrer de Pi i Margall.
    • Barcelona City Council
  • Permeate (unpave) 3 ha and reclaim the organic soil.
    • Barcelona City Council

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