By Karin Bendixen

Barcelona has an ambitious ten-year plan to make the city truly accessible to all. In practise, this major task is co-ordinated by a relatively small organisation, CRID.

Since the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, Barcelona’s local administration has made an increasingly individual mark by means of a number of remarkable projects related to accessibility and concern for people with different kinds of disabilities. The most ambitious of these projects is a ten-year plan, running from 1996 to2006, whose aim is to make the city’s public areas accessible to all.

Seen as a continuation of the far-reaching urban renewal that took place in Barcelona in preparation fore the Olympic Games in 1992, the ten-year plan is the most thorough-going project affecting the city’s accessibility since the engineer Ildefons Cerdà’s visionary chessboard city plan for the new neighbourhood of the Eixample more than 100 years ago.

Accessibility Consortium

The task of developing the accessi-bility plan has been entrusted to the municipal institute for town planning and the accessibility consortium CRID (Consorci de Recursos i Documentació per a l´Autonomia Personal). With a staff of approximately fifty people with a variety of different backgrounds, such as architects, engineers and ergonomists, CRID functions as the town council’s accessibility centre, draws up surveys and furnishes advice ion accessibility issues. Its board is made up of political officials and representatives of disabled people’s organisations, which in practice means Spain’s powerful organisation, originally only for the blind, called the ONCE Fondation.

ONCE is one of the main driving forces behind Barcelona’s accessibility project – and not least from a financial standpoint. The total budget for Barce-lona’s ten-year plan amounts to a sum of 9.1 billion pesetas, or approximately 55 million Euros. ONCE covers five percent of this amount with regard to streets and municipal buildings.

Measuring accessibility

The process of drawing up Barcelona’s accessibility plan (Pla d´Accessibilitat de Barcelona) called for an evaluation of the level of accessibility in streets and alleys, public transport and public buildings.

CRID had completed this process of evaluation by July 1996. The results showed that only 55 percent of the city’s roads and streets, only 28 percent of the public buildings, only 27 percent of the public bus connections and only eight percent of the under-ground stations were accessible.

It was these figures that led to the December 1996 decision to carry out a ten-year accessibility programme for all the city’s public areas. The day-to-day tasks related to information and follow-up about accessibility were entrusted to CRID.

Improving the plan

CRID’s Technical Director, 39 year old Francesc Aragall, explains that flexibility is one of the cornerstones of the Barcelona Accessibility Plan. In practise, this means that the Plan is constantly being adapted to new circumstances and priorities. For example, the criteria for a better adaptation of public buildings for deaf and blind people were included in 1999, while the plan provides for all the buildings used as polling stations to be made accessible in 2000.

“There is no doubt that the attempt to make the underground accessible for all is the most difficult. At the moment, Barcelona has 112 underground stations and only 20 are accessible. We shall have to renovate all the other stations before 2006, a task that calls for a tremendous financial and technical commitment,” says Aragall.

“Nevertheless, we shall be developing a plan to make the underground accessible in the course of this year. The initial cost analysis points at a probable outlay of 163 million Euros for adapting all the underground stations.”

The railway

2008 is the magic year for the Catalan Railway Company, Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya, FGC. That is the deadline for all the train lines to be accessible, just two years after Barcelona’s official ten-year accessibility plan is completed. Deriving from the Catalan Parliament’s Law No. 20 of 1991 dealing with the accessibility of public transport, the assignment facing the Catalan Railway Company is no mean task.

Judging from the statements of managing director of the Railway Company, Miquel Llevat, the work is already in full progress and is following a precise plan.

"We convey no less than 47 million passengers a year. Approximately 30 percent of our passengers are people with various kinds of disabilities, people who are temporarily disabled, or just people who might have difficulties carrying some heavy luggage. This percentage is increasing. This is why it is important to come up with solutions that can be used by ‘one hundred per-cent’ of the population," says Llevat.

"The best approach for our company is to make our preparations and set to work in the light of some basic design criteria that satisfy the users’ demands and expectations and derive from our concern for our company’s potential users."

Changing the stations is no easy task.

Emphasises Llevat: "26 of the 70 Catalan railway stations are underground and 80 percent were designed at a time when attitudes towards and approaches to accessibility were very different. Social criteria change faster than architecture."

So far, 33 stations are completely accessible and 11 will become accessible by the end of this year.

Published in Crisp & Clear No.1, April 2000