Air pollution causes 30 000 premature deaths per year in Spain. Poor air quality is directly related to childhood asthma and other illnesses as well as to learning and memory. And to no one’s surprise, traffic is one of the main causes of air pollution in cities. What’s more, automobile-centric urban planning has consequences stemming from infrastructure itself, such as heat islands and the lack of green spaces.

Cities need pubic space for us to be able to stroll, socialize, play, and just simply be. They also need to harbor natural spaces to mitigate heat, the effects of the climate crisis, and pollution. This is why the Clean Cities platform—encompassing Ecologistas en Acción, ECODES, ConBici and ISGlobal— has launched the campaign #EspacioParaRespirar (Room to breathe). And we had the great fortune of participating.

Its launch comes in the final run-up to the 28 de May municipal elections. City Councils are the institutions that are closest to citizens and they have jurisdiction over the management of public space.  Furthermore, municipal bodes are responsible for safeguarding their inhabitants’ health and wellbeing as they promote measures to turn cities into places affording greater quality of life. The campaign is participative, urging all candidates to engage to:  

• Implement effective and urgent measures to improve the quality of the air we breathe, in line with World Health Organization standards.

• Foster a redistribution of public space putting people first.

• Ensure smoke free, noise free, automobile free spaces near particularly vulnerable places such as schools, health centres and centres for the elderly.

Our perception of what is normal in our present model of cities, the fact that we interact with automobiles as we do, is so deeply engrained, and our unawareness of the real consequences traffic has on our health is so great that it is hard to convey the severity of the problem and the need for radical change.

Together with health consequences, we also need to explain the proposals and the common benefits of the change in lifestyle for the entire population. But how can we talk about “wellbeing” and a “better life” for everyone when this concept is understood differently according to social, educational and cultural milieu? How can one put together a positive, mobilizing campaign that more and more people can join, even those in the habit of driving their cars into the city centre every day?

The complexity of what we have to communicate led us to seek a campaign with a versatile narrative where everything fits: health facts and figures, the consequences of poor air quality, specific proposals and the benefits of a changing our model for cities. With a visual element that enables us to talk about urban space that has been gradually usurped and the air quality. While both of these issues are interrelated, each has its own specific lines of argument. A single, prominent conceptual element able to support climate discourse and a campaign for cities’ inhabitants but incorporating a planetary awareness.

The image of an astronaut suggests both space and breathing. It is evocative of what is fun while it enables us to develop the entire communication. We then went on to seek out 8 collaborators (actresses, actors, models and friends) who joined our mission and with them we took off to conquer public space.  

We collaborated with the marvelous Bandiz Studio in order to produce the campaign comprising a spot, 8 graphic and audiovisual pieces, flyers, rollups, T-shirts and a filter for social media. And for the campaign presentations (in Madrid, Valladolid, Saragossa, Valencia and Seville) we will have one of our colleagues appear in a blazing urban spacesuit.  

The materials can be downloaded here together with a petition to City Councils:

https://spain.cleancitiescampaign.org/petitions/espacio-para-respirar/