City Lab Barcelona

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 ...

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...