Delhi, go to Barca

Barcelona is the steal-ideas city for the world’s best town planners who cannot believe how correctly it has expanded through a plan model built four centuries ago. From a vibrant walking culture, to integrated work-home-market spaces, it has cut down not only the 100 bus routes to a compact 26 but also managed to keep mobility of the local population to the minimum with a 30 per cent cut in car traffic. MEENAKSHI RAO walks around Barcelona to tell you how this model can be used to bring sanity back to Delhi

The best thing about Barcelona is not just its iconic football club and stadium. It is not even the rare opportunity of spotting one Mr Lionel Messi walking casually down its most famous people’s street in the world – La Rambla. What is greater than the rich history, culture and vivacity of Barcelona is how its town planners have kept it small, straight and simple despite all the growing up that Barca has seen since the iconic town planner Iidefons Cerda devised a development plan for it in the 1800s.

Here’s one example. While all cities in the world are going upwards, into underground and onto extensive bus transport systems, Barcelona has been orchestrating an unbelievable revolution. Not only is it in the midst of cutting down its 100 bus feeder lines crisscrossing the city to a compact 26, but also watching how public mobility on its wide clean roads is reduced to the minimum.

Of course, this would be unimaginable for Delhi and its planners, what with some of its work force commuting distances upwards of 40 km one way to office (Greater Noida to Gurgaon or vice versa). You tell Barcelona’s chief town architect Vincente Guallart about this and he looks genuinely stunned. He, however, insists that the only route to go for Delhi still is to cut down on mass public mobility.

“Traditional town planners may find this an impossible argument but no amount of elevated roads, bus routes or even the metro can stand the test of an expanding city. It has to come alongside a clear vision of fighting all odds and devising a way to reduce local public mobility to the minimum,” he says.

And how does Barcelona do that? For one, it has given up the official, commercial, residential segregation that is the norm the world over. “That entails a long haul for daily commuters, which clogs traffic eternally,” Vincente points out. Barcelona being a tourist city, has put the residential and office blocks together with localised marketplaces so that the working population has no need to take its cars out. To that, it has added a vibrant cycling culture which blooms on its wide-as-road cycle lanes.

Above all, with long awareness campaigns, inculcated in the manifestoes of all political dispensations for the past four centuries, Barcelona has determinedly changed the thinking of its populace, turning it into a walk-loving population. It has doggedly stuck to its original plan and has dedicated 50 per cent of street space to pedestrians and the other 50 per cent to the rest of all forms of traffic.

Guallart refuses to believe that the whole of Delhi refuses to walk. “There has to be a reason and that must lie in the absence of safe walking places and also the noise and vehicular pollution which can deter even bravehearts from taking that long stride,” he points out.

Perhaps, if Delhi had even one La Rambla, it would have loved to walk. This street shows how Cerda and his futuristic plan model made walking an irresistible affair. The five-km-long straight street sprawling across the heart of Barcelona is unique in many ways. As nowhere in the world, the two-road broad pedestrian way is right in the middle of this three-laned space with the two narrower motorable streets flanking it on either side, extending into quaint shopping walkways. You may talk of London’s Oxford Street, but La Rambla, sitting pretty on wide avenues and open boulevards, is nothing short of inspirational for all cities worldwide, especially those with a tourist economy. It has made “rambling” an essential do in Barcelona, which basically meaning walking around most of the city.

Barcelona’s uniqueness lies in the fact that it has consistently thought about the city not as a town planner but as a citizen with needs. Its legendary planner Cerda may have died a pauper in 1876, not paid by the Government for his elaborate plan blueprint that Barcelona follows even four centuries after him, but his theme of basing the city entirely on well-lived public life has made Barca the world’s most successful and inspirational city acclaimed globally for its innovative town planning. Such was this civil engineer-turned-architect’s democratic approach on developing all communities and areas into safe, clean and prosperous neighbourhoods that he was even accused of socialism by the rich and the famous, especially property owners.

But even today, Guallart an unabashed Cerda fan, tells you how not a single building, high on the rise or otherwise, can come up in Barcelona if it does not follow strictly specified parameters of length and width. It has to be built in a manner in which sunlight filters on every floor through every window and door! And, in any case, it cannot be more than nine stories, much like Cerda had planned.

If you compare Delhi to Barcelona, the latter indeed has advantages. “All the migration into the city, unlike Delhi, happened and ended in the 1960s. Intra-nation influx, thus, is no problem,” Guallart says. Other than that, there is no scope of any big boundary expansion of the city as it is flanked on all four sides with natural barriers. There is the Pyrennes mountain range on the north, the sea on the south and two rivers closing up the space on the east and the west.

So, for this Catalunyan gem of Spain to have expanded, adapted and changed to times so cleverly it is a feat in itself. Its 5 million tourists every year and its 1.5 million population will vouch for its cautiously built three lives over five centuries – the first which Cerda unfolded in 1859, the second when the Olympics reformed its old quarters and opened up the seafront a little bit in 1992 and the third, ongoing one which is coming up with its hitech zone and hyper community.

“But through all this, we will never forget our 520 street blocks and our initial garden city of 1859 and all expansions will be based on that module only,” Guallart says. For all the modernism Gaudi has given to Barcelona, it is stunning how it still has managed to stick to its basics and given its aam aadmi the centrestage of all considerations.

Now cowering to aggressive property dealers, no bowing down to expansionist complaints, no bias of benefits only to rich neighbourhoods, an eco-awareness and a walking culture, that’s all you need to build a true urban legend. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 20 October, 2013