City Lab Barcelona

If there is a place in the city that we need to be safe, healthy and livable, it is near schools . Our children deserve the very best city we can give them: one that is safe and fun, healthy and nurturing. Oddly however, street design near schools has not always been considered a top priority. Of course we might have special crosswalks or signs, but few cities have devoted programs specifically to re-think the urban spaces around schools.  In the last decade, this has started to change, with the development of School Street initiatives in cities in the UK , France and Colombia . In Barcelona, the initiative is called Protegim les Escoles (Let's protect our schools), and this week the City of Barcelona announced which schools were selected as part of the 2021 cohort.   The program will consist of street calming, sidewalk extensions and in some cases the removal of vehicular lanes or the conversion of a chamfered corner within Cerda's urban grid into a public space. With a budge

City Lab Barcelona is a blog about experiments in urban planning . The word 'experiments' can take on different meanings, and here I use 'experiment' to refer to 'doing things that are new or different' but also, and perhaps more importantly, 'to test formal hypothesis about how cities work'. Experiments are always exciting because we do not know in advance what the outcome may be. In this sense, city planners are experimenting all the time, testing new ways of engaging with the public or new ways of promoting sustainability. I have already made the case for formal urban experiments in the City Fix and academic writings such as here and here . This blog will be a place to extend my argument for urban experimentation. I also hope to engage in productive exchange and learn from others who are 'thinking experimentally'.  Right now, most urban experiments are informal and there are very few formal experiments. I hope (and expect) that in the next d