What's going on in Santa Pola?

Santa Pola municipality takes part in the “Health&Greenspace” Project, belonging to the URBACT action planning network, which is promoted and funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the URBACT programme.

In response to various health risks related to the quick densification and urbanization of our cities, the Health & Greenspace Project is focused on the benefit and healing that green and natural spaces can report to our mental and physical health and its vital role to improve social health as well as enhance urban air quality and reduce heat stress

Not only is the target goal for the planning action network to promote changes in urban green areas in order to make them more sustainable, but also to be more available so that more social activities be developed by citizens as a way for a healthier lifestyle.

In the second leg of this Project (May 2020 to May 2022) the nine cities involved are exchanging political challenges and sharing their experiences regarding problems and possible answers to their needs and shortcomings which hang from four key issues, that is to say:

1 Heat stress

2 Air quality and noise

3 General impact of green areas on mental and physical health

4. Social and physical activities, and lifestyles

Although Santa Pola will be addressing the four topics, nevertheless it is mainly focused on Heat Stress and Social and Physical activities as a way of well-being and lifestyle.

Our recent Urban Local Group, ULG, is in a planning phase now, trying to define our own IAP Roadmap, that will give raise to the future “Integrated Action Plan”, in which all the answers to our local challenges and the actions to be implemented, to get the desired results, will be properly detailed.

It is of the utmost importance for Santa Pola to improve the management of its green infraestructure by promoting policies in town planning and by landscape strategies that increase the number and quality of plants and trees so that they be able to reduce “heat island” and other global warming effects. Another goal for our municipality to take into consideration is to engage people and encourage them to a healthier and more social lifestyle taking advantage of open air activities and outdoor sports.

We have established a weekly meeting in which the ULG members from the municipality with the core team try to develop an estrategy so that everythig falls into place. Our first step was to expose the different viewpoints about Santa Pola shortcomings and needs, and the best proposals to overcome them. The second step was to hang all the future actions according to four main challenges, so that every proposal is related to one of them, though there are some which may hang from more than one,

Afterwards we developed a table in which every planned action was numbered and assessed with the following criteria:

• Needed funds ( expensive, medium, cheap )
• Needed time (long, médium, short) and running status ( long term, about to start, started )
• Influence/ repercussion ( high, medium, low)
• Replicability potential ( high, medium, low)

While the first two features-funds and time/running status- are considered to be negative,- the higher the worse-, the second ones -influence and replicability- are considered to be positive, -the higher the best-. According to these four characteristics among the 24 possible needed actions from our brainstorm, 12 of them have been selected as the best ones to undertake, be it either because they are easy to implement, or already started or with a high impact on the citizenship.

Our last step was to elaborate a draft schedule that should be complete by December 2020. As we are a little group, our leader is distributing the work so that everyone is responsible for one issue, such as social networks, or engage local business people and has to give a weekly reply of its status.

Besides that, there is something new for us as a group. On the one hand we are learning from each other and becoming a close-knit circle, needed to bring about change for Santa Pola. On top of that our attending to the e-University and our European partners sharing is being very benefitial for us. As a result of that, new ideas and small scale actions are coming across in our meetings.

A good example of them could be the use of public parks for children to attend open air classes, so that we might help local schools, or turn their courtyards from concrete floors into greener areas with more trees and shelter, or even a draft for the use of recycled materials on the bar terraces, such as wooden pallets and plants, taking out car park spaces, because of the Covid-19, and creating new opportunities that might involve locals such as we learnt from our Irish partners in Limerick.

(Written by Mari Carmen González Vives, Santa Pola communication officer, URBACT Health&Greenspace)