Citizens are finally getting the urban patios and parks promised when the cramped medieval city was extended in the 1900s
At the turn of the 20th century, the Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerdà had a revolutionary idea for extending Barcelona beyond the cramped confines of its medieval walls. In the grid system of the extension he planned, each city block would be built around a large open space or patio, designed to be a park for residents.
When he began his work, the old city was hemmed in physically and psychologically, desperately overcrowded and disease-ridden, with frequent outbreaks of cholera and a lower life expectancy than London or Paris. From the mid-19th century, plans for change had started, then faltered.
Cerdà, whose ideas on urban planning were radical at the time, in effect designed a new city with broad streets and open spaces. The Eixample, as the extension became known, now makes up most of central Barcelona, but 100 years on, nearly all of Cerda’s patios have been paved over for commercial use and Barcelona is once again one of Europe’s most densely populated cities.
Its 1.6 million people live crammed into a small space between the sea and the mountains, bound to the north and south by rivers, and overspilling into satellite towns that take the metropolitan population to around 5 million. There is almost no breathing space.
In fact, its citizens breathe air that consistently exceeds EU and WHO limits for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and PM10 particulates, and according to the World Economic Forum the city also has the worst noise pollution in Europe.
Read the full article on The Guardian
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