Children-friendly Eixample. Barcelona
New tools for a sustainable urban transformation
The project is focused on defining a way of doing more than a fixed design. The tactical interventions around the entrances of the schools with a soft and reversible urbanization, permit a flexible planning of the new spaces giving a quick answer to the school’s and neighbour’s demands.
Rethinking the Eixample
The Eixample of Barcelona is a reference in modern urbanism and it´s internationally recognised. However, it is currently facing big challenges regarding urban mobility, environmental pollution, lack of green areas and comfortable public spaces. It is a highly densified network where the car predominates over pedestrian sidewalks and spaces.
Barcelona is working on a new urban model that prioritizes pedestrian needs and a healthy lifestyle by promoting sustainable mobility and diverse, vibrant and friendly public spaces in a city where the topography lends itself to a comfortable mobility by walking or cycling.
In this framework, the schools of the Eixmaple: parents, kids, teachers…have started demanding better public spaces around the entrances of their schools. They defend that the spaces surrounding the schools should be designed as children-friendly places for community life understood as an extension of the playground.
Flexible urbanization
Taking into account the dimension of the modal transformation of the Eixample, the project is focused on defining a way of doing more than a fixed design. The tactical interventions around the entrances of the schools with a soft and reversible urbanization, permit a flexible planning of the new spaces giving a quick answer to the school’s and neighbour’s demands.
Testing, measuring and defining
These new temporary and reversible spaces are part of the redesign process of the Eixample. The flexible urbanization allows neighbours to experiment and feel the new uses, spaces, environments… and finally decide on the best solution: for the school’s surroundings, the sidewalks, squares… It is a participative process between citizens, council and designer that enables the building of better public places, learning by experiencing and measuring.
The schools have taken part through workshops on the design of the meanwhile urbanization, that now, must be monitored by observing and collecting the data that will inform the future design of the public spaces around these schools and the Eixmaple of Barcelona.
