Urban gardening was an important aspect of life in Barcelona until the late 20^th century. Infrastructural developments and the urban renewal that spread across the city around the 1992 Olympic Games removed almost all its urban gardens – between 1993 and 2000 almost 8,000ha of agricultural land in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region was lost to make way for new transport links and urban developments. As a result, the urban gardens of Barcelona today have mostly emerged since the early 2000s.  

The urban gardens that have emerged in Barcelona since the turn of the century have often been the result of protest, occupying the empty spaces the city’s urban expansion left behind. One of largest community gardens in Barcelona is Can Masdeu; situated on the site of a former leper colony on the outskirts of the city, it was occupied in 2001 to raise awareness of climate change, and has since been associated with social and ecological protest movements. The city’s urban gardens, and the protests that led to them, also exist at much smaller scales. L’Hortet del Forat in the El Borne neighbourhood began in 2004 following local struggles over how space created by the demolition of a building in the Ribera district should be used. The open space, that used to be known as the “hole of shame”, is now a thriving self-managed community garden, with allotments, a football pitch and children’s playground.  

Whilst many of the urban gardens are the result of protest and occupation, there have also been initiatives led by the city council, promoting urban gardening to increase the amount of green space in the city. The Network of Urban Gardens is a participatory programme established in 1997, encouraging citizens over 65 to develop urban gardens on public land; providing social and environmental values to both the people involved and their local communities.  

Following the economic crisis of 2008, there was a proliferation of urban gardening initiatives across Barcelona, with bottom-up movements occupying vacant spots to grow food, foster community cohesion and improve public space. In 2013, the city council launched Pla Buits (meaning ‘empty plan’), a co-management initiative that aims to involve civil society in the design, implementation and management of unused spaces across the city.  

On a trip to Barcelona in October 2019, I came cross one of the community gardens that emerged as a result of the Pla Buits. The ConnectHORT garden in the Poblenou neighbourhood was created in 2016 as a space for education, agriculture and community engagement. The garden occupies the empty space of a walled-off derelict plot, hardly noticeable from the street. However, within the walls, the garden was thriving a space, growing food and encouraging the community to come together, offering a range of classes from agriculture to woodwork.  

The benefits of the community gardens that have emerged throughout Barcelona are not just social. Research by URBES found that the gardens of Barcelona provide 20 key ecosystem services to the city’s residents, including the supply of high-quality food, pollination and stress reduction.  

Barcelona’s high density means that public space, and how it is used, can be a controversial and highly politicised issue. Urban gardens in Barcelona are under increasing pressure due to the city’s rapid sprawl. These gardens also highlight the contradictions of public policy in managing urban development – on the one hand, community-run gardens support the sustainability goals and “greening” initiatives that city’s such as Barcelona are pursuing; however, on the other hand, the same gardens may pose obstacles to the advancement of urbanisation, with mainstream urban policy supporting their removal in favour of more economically valuable development.  

The repurposing of empty spaces within the city, and the neighbourhood groups that develop and manage these plots, demonstrate the impact that community initiatives have had on the evolution of Barcelona’s urban fabric. Whilst the commitment shown by community gardeners to cultivate land and spread environmentalist messages throughout the city is becoming increasingly recognised by the formalisation of gardens, they are still at risk of removal due to mainstream urban policy’s pursuit of growth. The importance of the recognition of urban gardens, in Barcelona and other cities around the world, for their social, economic and environmental potentials is increasingly important, especially in the face of climate change and an uncertain urban future that may require a move away from conventional food production.

I mentioned Barcelona’s superblocks in passing in my post on the city’s air pollution, but due to the significance of the policy in reconfiguring the urban structure of the city, this post will look into the planning, implementation and future of superblocks in more detail.

Car-dependant city planning has resulted in high levels of pollution, sedentary lifestyles, noise pollution and car dominated streets. Barcelona, like many European and global cities, is facing these issues with pollution levels exceeding the EU limits for NO₂, almost 20% of children at risk of becoming overweight and 61% of the city’s residents suffering from noise that exceeds permissible limits.

When the iconic city block structure of Barcelona was designed in the late 19^th century, Ildefons Cerdà, the plan’s architect, envisioned a city that promoted diversity, social cohesion and liveability through vast amounts of public space, with the original plan reserving 50% of each block as open space. However, 100 years after the plan’s proposal, the built-up space in the average block had increased from 67,200m³ to 294,771.61m³. 

The superblock plan of today’s Barcelona builds on Cerda’s vision, combining 9 blocks and limiting the use of cars on internal roads, re-producing public space for culture, leisure and community.

Barcelona’s first superblock was created in the Poblenou district in 2016. It was originally built with no new permanent infrastructure; using tires, paint and potted plants to create new public spaces that could be re-imagined by the neighbourhood’s residents. There was initial opposition against the creation of the superblock, but six months after the introduction of the first superblock, following extensive public consultation, attitudes turned around and the city built a more permanent playground, planted green spaces and added picnic tables.  

The city has so far built 6 superblocks, all of which are unique and have been developed with the help of local communities. The public were able to have a direct impact on the design process via the SuperBARIO platform – a gaming interface that collects user feedback on the design of public space, collecting data about citizen’s needs, desires and proposals. This data was then used to create the public spaces within each superblock, directly influenced by those who will use it daily.  

Despite the initial opposition to the scheme, the superblocks are now seen as environmental, social, health and economic successes, and there are plans to implement another 503 superblocks throughout Barcelona.  

If all the planned superblocks are realised, private vehicle use is estimated to decline from the current 1.2 million trips per week to 230,000, due to an uptake in public transport, walking and cycling. This in turn is predicted to reduce nitrogen dioxide levels, which are currently 47 micrograms, by 23%, bringing them below the legal limit of 40 micrograms set by the EU. The health benefits the superblocks will provide via improved air quality, reduced temperatures, increasing social cohesion and promoting more active lifestyles are predicted to increase the life expectancy of the average Barcelona resident by nearly 200 days, and prevent 667 deaths per year.  

Barcelona’s superblocks are re-creating the city, turning previously vehicle-dominated streets into places where communities come together and children play, re-imagining city life. To find out more about the superblocks and get a real idea of what it’s like to experience them and the change they have had to city life, take a look at the video below, created by StreetFilms.

Barcelona’s temperatures are increasing and the hottest periods are becoming more frequent, whilst rainfall in the city is become increasingly less regular. In 2008, Barcelona almost ran out of water and had to resort to importing water in vast quantities. In order to avoid another water emergency, the city needs to adapt. Much of the city’s water system is dated and dysfunctional, with reports of faulty systems loosing up to 800,000 litres a day.  

Problems in Barcelona’s water supply are not new; the history of the supply has been ridden with competition and conflict, with the city’s intermittent population and urban growth since the late 19^th century having triggered multiple struggles over water supply and water rights in the city.  

In the late 19^th century, Barcelona’s rapid urban expansion beyond its medieval walls and industrial growth required an increase in the city’s water supply for both domestic and industrial use. Before this point, most of the city’s water came from the mine of Montcada, a local source, via an aqueduct. However, the urban expansion covered this and a new water supply from the Besòs River was secured under the management of the private company Sociedad General de Aguas de Barcelona (SAGB). The period of between the late 19^th century and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was characterised by the struggle between private and public interests in the ownership and management of water, debating whether water should be seen as a public resource to be equitably distributed, or whether it was a private good, owned and sold according to market rules.  

Over the 1940s and 1950s there were significant improvements in the city’s infrastructure, doubling the number of customers connected to the water network. To secure the city’s water supply, the 1957 Water Plan for Catalonia proposed the Ter River as a new source for the city, which was successfully achieved, despite the opposition to the plan, in 1966. Once again, the rapid growth in the city’s population and economy in the 1960s led to issues in the supply, leading to the proposal of the Ebro River, 200km south of Barcelona, as a new source for the city. However, this was dismissed due to opposition from the regions around the Ebro and the economic recession of the 1970s-80s.  

Between the 1980s and the turn of the century, the population of Barcelona remained relatively stable at around 4.2 million, although there was a significant spatial redistribution towards the outer periphery of the city. Despite the stable population, the change in lifestyle of much of the population, to low-density single homes with gardens and swimming pools, increased water demand in the city once again, with the city declaring five drought warnings between 1990 and 2005, restricting water use.

In Barcelona’s most recent water crisis of 2008, the city almost ran out of water, with reservoir levels dropping to 18% – at 15% the water in the reservoirs would no longer be drinkable. The city implemented hosepipe bans, drained public fountains and urged residents to conserve water. The city council proposed two solutions: importing water internationally from Marseilles, and domestically from Tarragona, a port city to the south of Barcelona; or building an emergency pipeline to transfer water from the Ebro River to Barcelona. Both plans were met with hostility, and just as the shipments of water began to arrive at the city, Barcelona’s water situation began to improve with heavy rainfall increasing reservoir levels to 30% – still below average, but safe enough to scrap the plan for the emergency pipeline.  

The importing of water into cities is not rare, but has happened across Spain and many other countries around the world, leading to the outbreak of “water wars” as different regions scrabble for extra supplies.  

Water is one of the most essential resources cities need in order to function. The conflicts, inconsistencies and competition around the city’s water supply are not unique to Barcelona, but demonstrate capitalism’s inability to organise fundamental resources, and similar issues can be seen in the water supplies of countless cities around the world.  

Flowing on from last week’s post on the production of nature and the ecosystem services Parc de Collserola provides, this week looks at the issue of air pollution in the city of Barcelona.  

Due to Barcelona’s urban density, lack of green space, warm climate and private vehicle use, it is one of the most polluted cities in Spain. The two main pollutants Barcelona faces are nitrogen oxide (NO₂) and particulate matter (PM₁₀), which come predominantly from traffic and to a lesser extent from construction work and the industrial sector. Barcelona’s air pollution problem is a product of its rapid urban growth and development, with CO₂ levels having more than doubled since the 1990s. 

Both ambient (outdoor) and household (indoor) air pollution cause negative health impacts and can lead to cardiovascular or respiratory disease; a 2017 study found exposure levels in Barcelona lead to almost 3,000 preventable deaths per year. Air pollution and its health consequences are not felt equally across the city and tend to impact the those living in the most deprived areas the most; with those that gain the most from polluting activities often being impacted the least. In Barcelona, this is seen as areas with higher levels of ethnic groups face higher exposer to NO₂ than the city’s general population. 

Despite this unequal distribution of air pollution across neighbourhoods, official monitoring systems in cities tend to be based on sparse networks of monitors, producing ‘baseline’ data that summarises the state of air quality in neighbourhoods or regions. This has been criticized by urban political ecologists, as these systems fail to capture localised human exposures to pollution. In Barcelona, 11 stations, monitoring over 10 pollutants, make up the Atmospheric Pollution Monitoring and Forecasting Network. The stations are in locations that represent different street categories (urban-area, suburban and traffic) in order to obtain data that can be extrapolated to other areas with similar urban conditions across the city.  

However, in Barcelona, CITISENSE is working to provide more thorough monitoring of the city’s air. The project is still in its planning stages, but will include both static sensors placed on balconies across the city, and portable sensors to be worn by volunteers for a period of one week to one month. Projects such as these that will provide a more accurate understanding of air pollution across the Barcelona may enable the city to make changes in the most polluted areas, readjusting the distribution between the previously mentioned ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of air pollution.

Urban residents are often responsible for creating the air that they breath, and the city of Barcelona is no exception to this. Urban and regional traffic are the biggest contributors to air pollution in the city, accounting for 48.2% of NO_x and 61.6% of PM₁₀ emissions. Over the past few years, the city council has been very active in introducing policies to reduce private vehicle use and promote public transport, cycling and walking in an effort to reduce air pollution. Most recently, as of 1 January 2020, the Barcelona Ring Roads LEZ has been introduced; an area of over 95km² where the most polluting vehicles are restricted, with the aim of reducing environmental and health problems associated with air pollution. The city’s innovative urban planning superblock policy is also intended to have a significant impact on air and noise pollution, with ambient levels of NO₂ predicted to reduce by a 25% in superblock neighbourhoods. The policy creates ‘superblocks’ of nine city blocks where traffic is restricted to roads around the outside and streets are turned over to pedestrians and cyclists.  

Air pollution in Barcelona is an element of city life that greatly impacts, and is impacted by, the behaviours and activities that occur within the city. Its effects are felt unevenly across the city, with winners and losers not reflecting responsibilities. Whilst this post has discussed improvements in monitoring systems and urban policies that are movements in the right direction, more action needs to be taken to make Barcelona a more equitable city in terms of air quality.