The new University of Barcelona Diagonal Clínic Campus presses the accelerator

This Monday, the constitution session of the Joint Monitoring Committee of the project took place.
This Monday, the constitution session of the Joint Monitoring Committee of the project took place.
News | Institutional
(21/10/2024)
New progress in the promotion of the future University of Barcelona Diagonal Clínic Campus on the Diagonal Health axis: this Monday, the constitution session of the Joint Monitoring Committee of the project took place. It will act as a governance and coordination body for the administrations involved. The Commission has already begun to specify all the key aspects for making the campus a reality in terms of cooperation between the different actors, the planning and programming of each of the phases and the needs in terms of uses, financing, the agreement on the transfer of the spaces of the current University of Barcelona sports complex at Avinguda Diagonal, 695-701, and the urban transformation, and the infrastructures on which work will have to be done.
This Monday, the constitution session of the Joint Monitoring Committee of the project took place.
This Monday, the constitution session of the Joint Monitoring Committee of the project took place.
News | Institutional
21/10/2024
New progress in the promotion of the future University of Barcelona Diagonal Clínic Campus on the Diagonal Health axis: this Monday, the constitution session of the Joint Monitoring Committee of the project took place. It will act as a governance and coordination body for the administrations involved. The Commission has already begun to specify all the key aspects for making the campus a reality in terms of cooperation between the different actors, the planning and programming of each of the phases and the needs in terms of uses, financing, the agreement on the transfer of the spaces of the current University of Barcelona sports complex at Avinguda Diagonal, 695-701, and the urban transformation, and the infrastructures on which work will have to be done.

The constitution of the Joint Monitoring Commission is a fundamental step towards providing the project with a coordination body with a very broad and transversal structure, with representation from all the institutions and departments that are part of it. Albert Dalmau, councillor of the Presidency, is at the head of the Commission, and one of his first tasks will be creating the consortium that will manage the campus, an instrument already foreseen in the January agreement and which is expected to be set up over the course of the coming year. 

Moreover, the Commission will activate, coordinate and promote all the necessary preliminary studies — some of which are already underway — and to define the timetable of necessary phases and actions. Two specific working groups will be created to define two relevant issues: one on the financing model and the other on the definition of the future uses of the current Hospital Clínic headquarters in Carrer de Villarroel. 

Juan Echániz, currently commissioner for Strategic Projects at Barcelona Provincial Council, will coordinate the commission. 

The rector of the University of Barcelona, Joan Guàrdia, who will represent the institution on this body, stressed that “today, we are seeing a little more of what will be Europe’s most important hub for research, knowledge and clinical care”. He stressed that “we will have an ecosystem that will connect leading institutions such as the UB, Hospital Clínic, Hospital de Bellvitge and Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, among others. If we add to this the Barcelona Science Park, the relevance is extraordinary”. 

Work in progress and next steps 

Significant progress has already been made in defining the uses and services of the future hospital and in preparing preliminary studies for the transformation of the entire affected area. The Hospital Clínic and the UB are working on a proposal for a functional programme for the future hospital and other components of the campus — research institutes, Faculty of Medicine, etc. — which will be available before the end of 2024 for evaluation and study. 

At the same time, the master’s degree in Hospital Architecture promoted by the UB and the Hospital Clínic, in collaboration with the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, has already begun and will take place over the academic year 2024-2025. The final result of the master’s degree will be the drafting of various preliminary studies that will serve as the basis for the international architecture competition that is due to be launched in 2026, coinciding with the year in which Barcelona will be the world capital of architecture. The aim of the competition is to attract the best proposals and ideas from architecture professionals from all over the world to draw up the architectural and urban planning implementation project for the different functional programmes of the future campus. 

All the actions planned for the planning of the surroundings and the construction of the hospital and research and academic centres, and a timetable that sets a horizon for the inauguration and start-up of the future campus in 2035. In the same year, the new metro station around the new facility should also be completed and operational.
 


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Towards a Clínic with a new metropolitan centrality

The final aim of the initiative is to establish the new Diagonal Clinic Campus of the University of Barcelona, strengthening the Diagonal Health axis, in an area of some 9.6 hectares on Avinguda Diagonal itself which, due to its strategic location, will give it a new metropolitan centrality and inter-municipal scale. It will have excellent connections and will be linked to other areas of health, biomedical research and innovation, as well as to major infrastructures such as the Josep Tarradellas Barcelona - El Prat airport.  

The facilities of the future Clínic will include a hospital with 200,000 m² of floor space — currently 151,000 m² of healthcare space is divided between different sites; 40,000 m² of teaching space for the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences — currently 26,000 m² — and 50,000 m² for the research and innovation institutions associated with the hospital and the UB (currently 30,000 m²).  

The transformation allows the Hospital Clínic to consolidate itself as the leading facility it is today, with a top-level clinical capacity and high technology, closely linked to university teaching and scientific research, making it one of the most important health complexes in Spain and Europe. In addition to the facilities of the new Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, the Health Diagonal axis will house the UB’s new Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and several leading research centres. Together with the Sant Joan de Déu Campus, the UB’s Barcelona Science Park and the University Zone, the Clínic Campus is one of the most ambitious strategic projects that Catalonia has ahead of it over the next decade. This condition makes it an axis of vertebration of society from the point of view of excellence in the conception of public services, and gives it a position of institutional reference that goes beyond the healthcare framework. 
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