22@Barcelona Project

The 22@Barcelona Project is the most important project of urban transformation made in Barcelona over the past years, with 180 million euros invested for its infrastructure plan. The aim of this project is to transform the old industrial areas of Poblenou in a high-quality environment for working, living and learning.

The question is, why did they decide to focus the project on this neighborhood? Well, this project is located in Poblenou because the engineers wanted to maintain the industrial past in Barcelona, because the neighborhood has low density and functional balance. In addition, it has centrality and accessibility. 

The main axes of the project are:
-Urban density (they change from individual to new economy)
-Diversity and complexity (preserve diversity and complexity of the land)
- Flexibility.

Furthermore, they have also included some more important elements that they are willing to develop or maintain, such as the following ones:

- The Activities: they want to improve art activities in use of progress.

- The Industrial Patrimony

- The subsidized Housing

- The Facilities for citizens and companies.

- The Green Spaces.

- New energy networks.

- The Infrastructures. One of the most important issues with which they are dealing of is the centralization of the heating and the cooling network to reduce CO2 emission. 

Nowadays, the 70% of the project is already done, and it is said that it will be finished by 2020. The neighbourhood has changed a lot since the project started:
- Between 1996 and 1999 the Diagonal Avenue was opened.

- For the Olympic games they constructed the underground, some public spaces,...
- In 2004 big infrastructures for the city were built, such as Forum.
- in 2013 there will be a new train connecting Barcelona with the rest of Europe.
- in the future, Sant Andreu and Sagrera will be connected.

In my opinion the 22@barcelona Project is a very good plan although there are some points of it where I have to disagree. It is true that when it is finished it will give loads of high-quality life and environment to all the citizens that live in the neighborhood. However, I think that some points of the project are irrelevant, such as wanting more space between trees, and this kind of changes cost a lot of public money, which could be used for other more interesting things. Nevertheless, I think there are some parts of the project that are very important for Poblenou and will make it a better neighborhood.

Dreaming New World

I get up to the sound of birds singing and as soon as I open my eyes a thin sunbeam makes me want to close them again. I don’t really have anything to do today, so I decide to stay in bed for some more minutes. While trying to evade the sunbeam, I start remembering those days when every child, which obviously included me, had to get up early to go to school… Oh, those days! I don’t really miss them, but I remember perfectly how everything changed.

I was still going to high school, I was on my senior year, so all my classmates and I were the oldest in the school. We were supposed to be respected by all the youngest children, but we weren’t. They all put themselves airs and we were in no way happy with that, as when we were juniors, we gave respect to seniors. However, when it came to teachers, they knew how to get on well with us. We had very good atmosphere in class, and we knew how to talk to them, as we had known them for a while then.

However, the cool environment we had in school was not the same as we had in the streets at all. The government was going madder every day, and people didn’t really know what to do. They made prices and taxes increase, and the country wasn’t in its best moments. Every single person wanted to move away to Germany, Great Britain or the USA, where employment was better paid and prices weren’t so high. However, few people could really do that, so a group of people started thinking how to make the situation change radically.

They started appearing in the news and the govern started worrying about the fact that they could get their ideas working successfully, which is what finally happened. In the end, that group of people became famous all over the country. They were called 1D, which came after “one delegate”, and after expanding their ideas to the Spanish people, they could finally defeat the previous government on the elections. Afterwards, some more changes were made, such as removing the royal family or changing lots of laws.

Nowadays, everything is so different. Children don’t go to school, as they learn everything they need to know at the age of 5, when a microchip is inserted in their brains to help them with their everyday life. Nevertheless, there is still some more capability for new things they can learn when it came to love, friendship, and all those “human” emotions.

 Somebody could feel that nowadays we feel more like robots, but it isn’t true at all. We can do whatever we want, as we work while we sleep. We can travel everywhere, as 1D scientists have invented the teleportation machine after years of investigation. We don’t need money to buy food or clothes, because we can get whatever we want at any time with our new refrigerators and wardrobes, which create anything you need in some seconds. We have loads of spare time to interact with our relatives or friends.