City Lab Barcelona

             Photo credit: Patricia Alvarez @patalgar  The image of kids riding their bike to school in a big city is highly inspiring. Kids on bikes. Together in a group, going to school. Pedalling together along city streets, each on their own, yet together in unison.  Yesterday we saw images of the first Bicibus in the Eixample grid of Barcelona (see here  or here ).  You can think of BiciBus as a sort of critical mass for kids going to school. This was not the first Bicibus in Barcelona, that honor goes to the group in Sarrià, and yet the first group in the Eixample somehow feels like a turning point. If we can insert kids on bikes here, we can do it anywhere.  @BicibusEixmaple is an experiment that we should all be watching closely. Until recently, most #BiciBus projects have been in smaller towns, with bikable streets and distances that are amenable to cycling school commutes for kids and parents. In the suburbs, one can ...

In September 2021 I began a new research position at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology ( ICTA ) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). It has been a pleasure to meet new colleagues and get settled down in a beautiful eco-friendly building that is LEED Certified. I look forward to focusing my research agenda on Barcelona and this blog will be a platform for sharing some of the research ideas that are emerging, and become sort of the embryo for the new research team based at ICTA.  My new research group will be called  City Lab Barcelona and our mission will be the generation of new knowledge that accelerates the transition to sustainable urban planning and design . To call a research team a Laboratory or Lab has become quite fashionable recently, especially in the social sciences. I welcome this analogy because there is much that we social scientists can learn from those researchers that run physical labs - of course, adapting as appropriate. In ...