Cases, Strategic planning

The Metropolitan Urban Master Plan (PDUM) is a strategic tool that will facilitate the future development and transformation of the Barcelona metropolitan area. It is also an urban planning figure of supra-municipal scope which, with a strategic vision, establishes the main objectives and the main guidelines that must be developed in the 2050 horizon in the metropolitan area of ​​Barcelona related to the infrastructures, green areas, mobility, social cohesion, urban metabolism, economic competitivity, urban fabrics and open spaces.

The metropolis of Barcelona is a unique Mediterranean city forged over the centuries. It is a very lively city, with a great diversity of highly consolidated urban fabrics and others that are more dispersed that make up a metropolis with 48% of the urbanized land in need of urban renewal to improve habitability and 52% of the land occupied by spaces open spaces of great environmental and social value that represent a great opportunity to build a more sustainable and healthy metropolis.

Understanding the growing complexity of the contemporary city is a challenge that forces us to periodically reconsider both the concepts analyzed and the instruments to address the territorial phenomena that are revealed in the process of reflection.

The metropolitan area of ​​Barcelona is no exception. The urban processes of the last decades have radically transformed the territory and make it necessary to re-analyze the municipalities that make it up, from an interdisciplinary perspective and with current tools, in order to be able to plan the future with maximum success through the Metropolitan Urban Master Plan (PDUM).

The territorial diversity and the complexity of the cases that characterize this territory call for new approaches, tools and planning instruments that, forty-one years after the approval of the Metropolitan General Plan, ensure environmental sustainability, economic competitiveness and social cohesion. In short, to improve people’s quality of life and guarantee a better future for the next generations.

Tags: Governance, strategic planning, metropolitan area, metropolitan governance, citizen participation, open data

Challenges addressed

The approval of the PDUM will give way to the replacement of the General Metropolitan Plan (PGM), in force since 1976, which covers 27 municipalities and which, together with the general plans of the remaining 9 municipalities, has made it possible to build the cities we have today. After 40 years and more than a thousand modifications of the PGM, the current needs of society and the territory call for a different approach to urban planning. Rehabilitating the already built city, attending to the diversity of open spaces and environmental requirements and putting the focus on people’s needs are some of the main objectives of the metropolitan PDU.

The metropolitan PDU involves a process of global reflection on the different scenarios and challenges facing the metropolis that are projected in the medium and long term. This process, at the same time, must revert to improving the quality of the nearest urban environments; in the face of a pandemic such as COVID-19, tools such as the metropolitan PDU take on special relevance, as they provide the framework to jointly rethink a common territorial model and the criteria for achieving quality nearby environments.

We can say, then, that the Plan straddles two logics and two very different scales of work, which have conditioned both the perspective with which the objectives and work areas of the Plan itself have been defined, as well as the philosophy with which the participation process that has accompanied the Advancement of the Plan has been designed.

Main objectives

• The PDUM represents the opportunity to respond to the specific principles and values ​​of a society that aspires to enjoy a healthy, democratic, equitable, socially just, sustainable and resilient metropolitan area. There are 10 main objectives:
• The PDUM must strengthen this metropolitan capital by enhancing the role that the Barcelona area has played historically as the articulating center of the metropolitan region and capital of Catalonia and extend it to the world system of cities based on its characteristics and values ​​as in the Mediterranean metropolis.
• The PDUM must overcome the current logic with a view in which green spaces and trees have the capacity to provide cultural and leisure services, environmental regulation and supply. All of this must make it possible to articulate spaces that reinforce the ecosystem functions and those of use and enjoyment by citizens.
• The PDUM must encourage the consumption of resources depending on their availability: the generation of energy from renewable sources, the consideration of closer and more efficient water and food supply alternatives or the possibilities of reuse or recycling To improve the efficiency in the use of resources, it is necessary to carry out good planning and management from the territorial level.
• The PDUM must increase the connectivity of the territory by rethinking the functions of the mobility infrastructure along its route and providing the metropolitan area with a structure made up of many and diverse centers, which guarantees the population the access to services and basic equipment.
• The PDUM must promote active and sustainable mobility that takes advantage of constant technological and information innovations to form an increasingly accessible, healthy and inclusive city, where metropolitan continuity and the recovery of public space for the citizenship To respond to this new model of mobility, the PDUM must evaluate the existing infrastructures and detect the necessary transformation possibilities, it must incorporate new actions and take into account already existing projects
• The PDUM must contribute to reducing social segregation through four vectors that will improve the quality of life of citizens: housing, equipment and services, open spaces and public transport.
• The PDUM must consider land as a scarce and precious asset, and work fundamentally with the already existing urban fabrics to increase their quality and energy efficiency and to enhance the value of the urban heritage, through rehabilitation and recycling.
• The PDUM must guarantee the complexity, that is to say, the diversity of uses and the habitability of the fabrics to tend to balance the ratio between residence and activity. Increasing the complexity is an opportunity to promote urban green, the production of energy or other resources and the coexistence between residence and economic activity.
• The PDUM becomes an instrument of solidarity thanks to the ability to adapt its determinations to the different municipal realities while protecting and strengthening the interest of the whole.
• The PDUM must provide the necessary conditions for the development of diverse economic activities that can adapt over time, but also the urban and social environments that allow the use of synergies, the personality of its products, the solidity of the networks of proximity and the benefits that the neighborhood provides.

MORE CONTENTS