The entry into the new phases of lack of confidence will be an opportunity for many people from Madrid to discover the 131 neighborhoods of the city they inhabit. Little by little they will leave their houses, but many will continue to telework, they will avoid traveling in the Metro for fear of contagion and they will not have the option of going to large events in soccer stadiums, WiZink or Ifema because they will continue to be prohibited. In a city where the offer of leisure and culture in the center was a powerful magnet for those who live in the periphery, many will look for alternatives close to home. This extraordinary and temporary situation can be an experiment to test the feasibility of proposals such as “The city of the quarter of an hour”, a pre-pandemic plan of the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, where you can find everything you need within 15 minutes of home, on foot or by bike.
It is a return to the local, one of the horizons of urban planning since the time of Jane Jacobs, the American who in the 1960s led the opposition to plans to build a large highway in southern Manhattan that would have crossed the current neighborhoods of SoHo , Chinatown and Greenwich Village. The fight against climate change and for sustainable mobility has brought these ideas into vogue. The coronavirus can give them a new boost. “We have given very little importance to the disappearance of the corner store. Now proximity is going to gain a lot of value, ”says former dean of the Madrid College of Architects José María Ezquiaga. “Not everyone has a green area or a health center near home.”
Perhaps for this reason and due to fear of physical contact, some urban planners are pessimistic about this new stage. The proposals of Jacobs and his successors promote coexistence and what could happen is just the opposite. “People are going to spend more time at home because in the neighborhood they have no place to be. The public space in a large part of Madrid is not prepared for people to take a leisurely stroll, “says Agustín Hernández, professor at the Polytechnic University.
During phase 0 citizens can only take walks within a radius of one square kilometer from their homes. Many will notice that it is difficult to respect the recommended two meters of separation between people. 65% of the sidewalks in Madrid are less than 3.5 meters wide. Several cities have already announced emergency plans so that pedestrians can respect distances. Barcelona, Vigo, A Coruña, Vitoria and Paris have announced that they will ban several streets or widen sidewalks. Critics say the epidemic requires the opposite: give more space to the car.
Hernández directed in 1997 the book Ciudad de Ciudadanos (along with Julio Alguacil, María Medina and Carmen Romero) in which he defended the area of the Barrio-Ciudad, defined as an urban area of two kilometers and with a population of 30,000 inhabitants, where there should be necessary endowments for the development and satisfaction of the needs of its inhabitants. It is a measure that approximates to most neighborhoods according to the administrative division of Madrid. 27 have between 25,000 and 35,000 inhabitants. ″ It is the size of many medium-sized towns where you have everything at hand in 15 minutes, “says Hernández. According to urban planners who defend polycentric design, it is time to put a stop to the centralizing trend that has guided the megalopolises for decades , according to which jobs and leisure are at the center and citizens spend a good part of their day on the move.
The city of 15 minutes or Ville Du Quart D’Heure It is a promise that the mayor of Paris made in January in the campaign for the elections interrupted by the pandemic. His new plan is a deepening of his proposals to reduce car traffic and return the city to pedestrians. According to his advisor, the Colombian-born Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno, six things make an urbanite happy: a decent home, a job in the right conditions, the ability to get basic goods, well-being, education and leisure. “To improve the quality of life, it is necessary to reduce the access perimeter to these six functions”, he told the newspaper Liberation.
Madrid is far from meeting the goal of 15 minutes. Each person from Madrid spends an average of almost an hour and ten minutes a day on trips around the city. according to the latest mobility survey of the Community of Madrid, presented in February. Two intense flows are those motivated by work and school.
The goal of 15 minutes is not new in Madrid. The City Council has made an analysis of equipment by neighborhood since the urban plan of 1985. The next and current, from 1997, It even includes an accessibility criterion that takes the circle of the kilometer away as the optimal location for schools, health centers or senior centers. What has gone wrong?
According to María Medina, urban planning technique of the City Council for 40 years, the city of 15 minutes will be nothing more than good wishes if it is not accompanied by other measures that reduce the strong segregation of income between north and south in the city. It also puts the focus on the liberalizing policies of the Popular Party in the Community of Madrid, in particular those that have allowed choosing a health center or school regardless of the place of residence. “We must end liberalization and make it possible for all Madrid residents to have access to quality public health and education centers, regardless of their income level and neighborhood of residence,” says Medina.
Central Madrid, the most determined intervention that the City Council has taken to make the capital more livable, is limited to the city center. Experts ask to extend these measures to neighborhoods, as the Madrid 360 plan of Mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida already contemplates. Hernández sets the example of Barcelona’s “superblocks”, urban cells of about 400 by 400 meters, where car traffic and surface parking are minimized.
Isabela Velázquez, from the Gea21 architecture studio, believes that the new Keynesian cycle of public investments should be used to decentralize Madrid. Emphasizes the availability of jobs in neighborhoods. “It could be promoted that there is more employment in public transport nodes or in deserted work areas. Also remember that the City Council cannot settle for equipping neighborhoods so that only a few use them. He says that recently I was in Vallecas looking for a cultural center and I didn’t have a battery in my cell phone. Asking the neighbors, almost nobody knew how to guide it.
His study partner, Carlos Verdaguer, warns that the new stage represents an opportunity, but also a threat. “There are reasons for optimism but you cannot predict the future,” he says. “We seek decentralization while maintaining social density. And now we find fear of human contact. The worst that could happen would be that from now on the model of closed and separated communities will proliferate, more socially and ecologically damaging. We must walk towards something more positive ”.
Information about the coronavirus
– Here you can follow the last hour on the evolution of the coronavirus.
– Key measures of alarm status.
– The coronavirus map: this is how cases grow day by day and country by country
– Coronavirus action guide
– All measures against the coronavirus in Madrid
– In the event of symptoms, the Community of Madrid recommends avoiding going to the health center except in cases of extreme necessity and using the phone 900 102 112
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