Badalona will bury the highway and make a city. Gone are 20 years of discussions about what to do, and the new government has rejected the proposal made by the Metropolitan Area to create a “metropolitan greenway” for, according to the mayor, “little ambitious”. The agreement of the Badalona City Council is a commitment to public-private collaboration in which the construction of houses with their facilities (which will begin to be built in parallel) and a new park inspired by the Glorias de Barcelona park are foreseen. The new Can Ruti Hospital will be installed on the land of the old Llamas factory, thanks to the purchase made by the City Council 4 years ago. And the outpatient clinics will be located under the Pere Gol soccer field, which will see its equipment renovated. The Cordillera de Marina will recover and take the shape it had before the construction of the complex, in the second half of the 20th century.
The planning work has been intense, and it is planned to bury the underground 24 meters deep – the perimeter of two metro tunnel boring machines – to guarantee the safe passage of vehicles. The work incorporates public transport lanes and 30,000 trees are expected to be planted. A new neighborhood is born, which is going to sew Badalona erasing forever the border of the highway.
A consortium of companies will be in charge of the works, which will take 12 years. The companies, which will invest around 2,000 million euros, and the administration, which will invest another 1,000, have set up a technical office in the Olympic pavilion that will bear the name “Nova Badalona”. This will be the sponsorship of Club Joventut for the coming years. “Nova Badalona Joventut”, which is the name of the club’s first team, will have a contribution of 24 million euros in these 12 years of transformation. This sponsorship ensures its future and puts it at the level of the first teams in the State. The club is grateful that, as in the nineties with the sponsorship of “Montigalà”, a commitment to transform Badalona will have repercussions on its reference club for dissemination.
How is it that in Hospitalet, Montcada, Sabadell or Sant Feliu the work of burying infrastructures has already been done and in Badalona we continue without knowing where to go?
The mayor of Badalona, the president of the Generalitat and the representative of the Spanish government have expressed their satisfaction with the agreement, which adds to other pacts that have been made in previous years to transform and bury infrastructures in Hospitalet, Montcada, Sabadell or Sant Boi de Llobregat.
The European Union finances some of the actions, due to the positive impact they will have on the generation of GDP in the city, due to the direct and indirect jobs that will be created and the commitment to infrastructures and equipment that will reduce the carbon footprint. current. The transition to electric vehicles in recent years helps in this direction.
With this decision, Badalona leads the investment projects in the metropolitan area and becomes a capital for the southern Maresme. The new real estate offer, distributed in half for free and social housing, will make it easier for many workers from the main focus of activity in the city to come and live. In fact, it is said that of the 10,000 direct and indirect jobs around the Can Ruti Campus, 6,000 are covered by people from outside Badalona. The commitment that the city made in its day for the two levers identified for its growth, which were sports and health, find all their meaning in this project.
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Spoiler: this is not going to happen. Badalona will be satisfied with the 100 million work proposed by the Metropolitan Area, if it arrives, unless an agreement between political forces overturns the inertia or comfort of being able to explain that “it is the Metropolitan Area” who has decided how we should be. In my opinion, the Area is essential, and good, but in recent years the municipal collapse has given it too much prominence. Help is one thing, and substitution is quite another.
Question: how is it that in Hospitalet, Montcada, Sabadell or Sant Feliu the work of burying infrastructures has already been done and in Badalona we continue without knowing where to go?
Ferran Falcó, president of the Restarting Badalona Association
