The chief architect of Barcelona under Olympic-era mayor Pasqual Maragall has filed a complaint against the current mayoral incumbent Ada Colau for the city's Superblocks planning scheme, as El Periódico reported and the ACN agency has confirmed. It was a step he had attempted in the past and now Josep Antoni Acebillo has returned, with a judicial complaint lodged this Friday against the mayor of Barcelona along with the deputy mayor responsible for Planning, Janet Sanz, for an urban planning offence as well as misuse of public funds for what are known in Catalan as the superilles - the Superblocks or green axes of the central Eixample district. The 27 page document is also signed by lawyers Francesc Jufresa and Ferran Grasas. A few days ago, public prosecutors rejected other complaints lodged last year by the same complainants and the anti-superblocks platform Salvem Barcelona.
Acebillo, Jufresa and Grasas demand a precautionary halt to the works on the Superblocks to "avoid the full consummation" of the crimes that they consider are being committed and the damages that may be caused - estimated at more than 100 million euros. And they assert that this is "a manifest regulatory violation of the property law that could have devastating effects" both for individuals and for businesses, to the point of generating "accessibility problems to the addresses for basics services themselves". It would also affect the public treasury, "because just the concept of tearing up the asphalt and eventually replacing it" would involve expenses of 100 million euros.
Eliminating essential public roads
Beyond Colau and Sanz, the complaint is also directed against all the members of the city council's committee of governance who voted, in the session of May 26th, 2022, to give final approval to the final working plans for the project to create green axes through the densely-populated Eixample district - unless they had maintained a reservation when casting their vote on the legality of the agreements. In this regard, the experts who reported favourably in technical reports on the superblocks are also included.
The architect and the two lawyers assert that in order to carry out the replanning of this public space, Barcelona's General Metropolitan Plan (PGM) must first be modified, in the form established by these axes. The text states that the city council approved the agreements on "executive projects for the redevelopment of the area around the new square located at the crossroads of the new green axes", referring to the plan for Carrer Consell de Cent (between Carrer Vilamarí and Passeig de Sant Joan) - as well as other streets crossing this one between Diagonal and Gran Via, an operation integrated into the city's Superblock programme. By means of these agreements "essential public roads of the city are being substantially transformed, if not eliminated".
Radical change in mobility
The complaint adds that "a radical change to the street plan and mobility system" is being promoted in the centre of Barcelona, "effectively eliminating the circulation of vehicles on the affected streets". Despite this significance and "its obvious impact" on people, goods and businesses, the problem is that the project has been approved as if it were "simple ordinary urban construction works, ignoring the urban implications that this decision has " and that "it required a prior or simultaneous modification of the current urban planning approach, specifically of the PGM". They also point out that the municipal action "contradicts" the property law that reserves control for the "layout and characteristics of the road network" to the PGM.
As well, they criticize the decision of the public prosecutors to reject the investigative proceedings that were opened following the earlier complaint and state that the prosecution service "has limited itself during 10 months of alleged processing" to "carrying out a legal pseudo-investigation" - while asking the city council itself to report on the reasons behind the implementation of the Eixample superblocks. "That is to say, that instead of receiving a statement from the council members as people facing a complaint, the prosecutor asked them to draw up a legal report, which obviously does not give any explanation, it is nothing more than a self-exculpatory allegation", they conclude.