Healthy streets, healthy life – POLITICO
Beach Drive in Washington, DC, remains a walker’s paradise. | Getty Images American cities that closed streets during the pandemic to give residents additional outdoor space for recreation have returned most of them to drivers. Those reopenings are a missed opportunity to improve health if the prognosis from an ongoing experiment in urban redesign in Barcelona, Spain, is any indication. POLITICO’s Helen Collis reports that Barcelona has seen promising results from a decade-old project to close large sections of three neighborhoods to traffic. A survey of people living in the repurposed areas found they reported better rest, increased socialization and…