Valencia will regain space for sports and travel on foot after confinement | Spain

The Valencia City Council draws up a plan for the recovery of public space to adapt to the needs of citizens in the current scenario created by the coronavirus. The objective is to promote safe movements on foot, as well as to facilitate authorized outdoor activities, such as sports, with sufficient safety distance. At the moment, today Sunday, the Jardín del Túria, the green channel of the river, reopens coinciding with the departure for the first time of those under 14 to take a walk since the state of alarm was declared.

Deputy Mayor Sandra Gómez explained that the Department of Urban Development and Renovation “is already working on the recovery of public space throughout the city to allow the necessary social distance to carry out outdoor activities or travel on foot.” The capital thus prepares for the different scenarios that are going to happen in the de-escalation of confinement.

“To avoid that reluctance to public transport translates into an increase in the use of private vehicles,” Gómez has announced “the creation of pedestrian axes through flexible tactical urban planning actions that allow citizens to be able to move around on foot with sufficient security, and the use of the private vehicle is avoided ”. The Deputy Mayor adds that “emergency provisional actions will be carried out in order to have these spaces available on time”.

In addition to travel, he has indicated that it is intended “to provide safe spaces for outdoor activities that are authorized by the Government, such as doing sports.” In this sense, he explained that “spaces closed to traffic will be delimited creating squares or superblocks in different areas of the city.” “An example is the crossroads of the city’s extensions, where there is enough space to generate large squares,” said the Deputy Mayor, who noted that “the model adopted in the Barcelona superblock will be followed, or the one proposed for Valencia by the Architectural association ”.

“Cities have already had the challenge of recovering public space and reducing pollution for a long time, but the current pandemic shows us that we cannot wait to guarantee the safety and quality of life of people,” he said. For this reason, he assured that “urgent actions will be carried out, some of which will be temporary and others that may be final.” In the case of the definitive ones, he specified that “as soon as we have the Flexible Actions Guide that is being drafted, we will adapt the spaces to the urban quality standards that are set.”

The Deputy Mayor has indicated that the Urban Development delegation has been working on this strategy of recovering public space since the previous mandate with the plan Valencia, city of Plazas. He recalled that the redevelopment of squares of the City Hall, the Queen and the City of Bruges-Central Market-Lonja will create a pedestrian axis that will recover one of the most emblematic spaces in the city.

In the case of the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, he pointed out that the action must be “in accordance with the emblematic space” and, therefore, “it will be reorganized and recovered using polished asphalt with red aggregates that perfectly underlines the space recovered for the citizenship”. The objective is to get “an advance impression of recovery of public space until the project is finally approved and executed.” In this regard, he pointed out that the ideas competition must be held that will take into account the conclusions of the citizen participation process and, subsequently, the work will be tendered and executed.

Gómez has valued the actions that are being developed in the neighborhoods and which have resulted in the recovery for citizens of squares such as those of the Rojas-Clemente Market, San Marcelino, Lorenzo la Flor and El Rosario. Specifically, it has indicated that in the last five years “110,000 square meters of public space for pedestrians have been recovered.” “Now it is necessary to accelerate this transformation to run, walk and play according to the new reality,” he concluded.

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