Conservationists fear Madrid's design blueprint will repeat past mistakes

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/23/madrid-conservationists-design-spanish-capital-heritage

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It's been a tough year for Madrid. In September the city lost its third consecutive bid to host the Olympics. Months later a 13-day strike by rubbish collectors left rotting meat, vegetable peelings and plastic packaging piling up around the city. All this as the city continues to reel from an economic crisis that has shuttered more than 4,500 of its bars and hundreds of its cultural institutions.

But now city officials say they have a plan to get Madrid's mojo back.

If they get their way, it will soon be a city of grand boulevards, pedestrians and public transport rather than one plagued by dwindling tourism and crippling public-sector strikes.

It is part of the vision laid out in Madrid's general urban plan, a blueprint designed by the city every 15 or so years to guide its next decade of development.

This time around, the city wants big changes. Car lanes will be replaced by bicycle lanes, trees will be planted to line the streets and green spaces across the city will be connected through a series of corridors.

"It's a plan that will take the corset off the city," said Paz González, the city councillor responsible for urban planning. "It's the 21st century – we can't have our city all tied up."

For the past eight months, she has paid close attention as more than 3,000 residents and 200 experts have weighed in with their opinions on Madrid's future.

The result is a 4,000-page document that sketches a city of car-free neighbourhoods, ample parking for bicycles, and shops on the bottom floor of apartment buildings. The council recently approved an early draft of the plan and it is now open to the public for comments until early 2014.

The plan will see the city's major streets radically overhauled, becoming boulevards that hark back to a time before cars dominated the roads. "It's a return to what used to exist in Madrid," said González. "Because eventually the car won out over the pedestrian."

In a reversal of that victory, parking spots will be sold off or redeveloped, while business owners will receive incentives to build wide awnings to protect pedestrians from Madrid's sweltering summer heat.

"It's imperative that the city gets it right," said Julio Vinuesa, a geography professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid. The last general urban plan, put in place in 1997, unwittingly helped to inflate Spain's housing bubble.

"The plan predicted the city would grow indefinitely," said Vinuesa. Construction became the top priority and the city eagerly issued licences to build homes – more than 540,000 of them were handed out between 1997 and 2011.

Over the same period, the population grew by just 390,000, not nearly enough to fill those houses. The bursting of Spain's housing bubble ensured that what little demand there was for these houses dried up.

The city now has suburbs littered with empty construction sites, abandoned buildings and roads that lead nowhere. "Now everyone realises that it was excessive. We put so much more emphasis on construction than was necessary," said Vinuesa.

Vicente Patón, president of the conservation group Madrid, Ciudadanía y Patrimonio (Citizenship and Heritage), said this plan may set the city up for another disastrous run: "The truth is we're really worried."

His organisation has spoken out against the plan's idea to remove the automatic heritage designation given to buildings more than 100 years old. "Around the world, cities are expanding their lists of protected buildings. But here, they're taking buildings off the list," he said.

The city is instead inviting proposals on what they can do with these buildings. "There's no business left selling houses or land in the periphery of Madrid. So what's left to exploit? The historical centre of Madrid." In these crisis-ridden times, he claimed, decisions on what to with the city's rich collection of historical buildings will now be made by the highest bidder.

His worries touch on the biggest challenge facing the general urban plan: finding the funds necessary to carry it out. The city wants to start implementing the plan in 2015, a lofty goal for a city €7.5bn (£6.3bn) in the red.

González said the city had started setting money aside where possible but she called for the private sector to get involved.

The answer, she said, lay in convincing more than just the locals to get involved in remaking the city. "Anyone who wants to come and invest in the city of Madrid, whether it's to renovate or build, these people will have an opportunity."

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