Plans include making one in three Eixample streets “green zones” and creating 21 public squares
Smog around Agbar tower in Barcelona in 2015. The city’s residents own 6,000 cars per square km, the highest in the EU. Photograph: Josep Lago
Barcelona has launched an ambitious 10-year plan to reclaim the city’s streets from cars and cut down pollution with the creation of green spaces and public squares.
One in three streets in the heavily polluted central Eixample district – the 20th-century grid devised by the engineer Ildefons Cerdà – will become green zones under the scheme, giving priority to pedestrians and cyclists, and 21 public squares will be created at intersections so that no citizen is more than 200 metres from a square or small park.
“The Cerdà plan modernised Barcelona at the end of the 19th century and we are reviving that spirit of urban transformation to bring the Eixample into the 21st century,” the deputy mayor, Janet Sanz, said.
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