The Power of the Superblock in Barcelona

By Salvador Rueda

Every year in the Barcelona metropolitan area there are 3,500 premature deaths, 1,800 cardiovascular-related hospitalizations, 5,100 cases of chronic adult bronchitis, 31,100 cases of pediatric bronchitis and 54,000 asthma attacks — all the consequence of air pollution.

These smog-filled conditions inspired the Barcelona City Council, in March 2015, to create a sustainable urban mobility plan for the city. The result of a two-and-a-half year-long participatory process, the plan’s main objective for 2018 is a reduction in air pollution, and one of the tools for achieving this goal — the superblock — happens to have a wealth of other remarkable benefits for traffic safety and the health of Barcelona.

Superblocks Defined

A superblock is a new type of urban cell measuring approximately 440 x 440 yards (nine square blocks). It contains a network of basic vehicle routes connecting starting points and destinations throughout the city. The interior routes (intervies) constitute a local network where the speed limit is 10 km/h (6.2 mph). You can’t drive across a superblock, which means movement inside a superblock makes sense only if the starting point or destination is on one of these intervies. This ensures that the roads inside a superblock are local, and cuts down on pollution, noise, and crashes. It also frees up more than 70% of the space currently occupied by motor vehicle traffic passing through the area, making it available for pedestrians and cyclists.

This is a superblock in its first phase — the functional phase — which guarantees mobility. In the second phase — the urbanistic superblock — new citizens’ rights and customs are incorporated, such as the right to leisure (games, partying, sports), the right to exchange (markets and the collaborative economy), the right to culture and knowledge, the right to expression and democracy, and of course, the right to movement.

The implementation of the superblocks throughout all of Barcelona has the potential to free up 7 million square meters (2.7 square miles), and would transform the city into the world’s most important urban recycling project — transforming roads into parks, playgrounds, and other public space — without demolishing a single house.

Superblocks Save the City

Today, traffic is the single most important contributor to dysfunction in Barcelona. Traffic crashes cause 40 deaths a year in the city. Motor vehicles are responsible for most of the city’s noise, as well as polluting emissions. The blackness of the asphalt combined with car emissions creates heat islands, causing as much as a nine-degree temperature increase, which especially affects the most vulnerable — children, the elderly, and the infirm.

In the Eixample neighborhood, for example, which occupies a good part of the city’s urban fabric and where vehicular traffic has a preeminent role, 50% of the population is exposed to hazardous levels of noise (daily values in excess of 65 dBA). This district also has only 1.3 square meters of green space per resident, well below the 10 square meters recommended by the World Health Organization. For every kilometer of road in the Eixample there are more than 30 injuries a year.

To tackle these severe problems, the Sustainable Mobility Plan set a goal of reducing vehicular traffic by 21%. It is estimated that if Barcelona reaches this goal, the pollution readings in every measurement station in the city will fall below European Union limits. Superblocks are one of the tools that should make this possible.

This is not the first time Barcelona has attempted to solve the myriad problems of traffic by taking space from private car drivers. Prior to the 2015 Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan, Barcelona saw success in piecemeal efforts to widen sidewalks and create small public squares where it could do so without modifying the mobility model. The failure to change the mobility model meant that the car was — and still is — predominant.

Despite the widening of sidewalks, in Barcelona, like much of the world, streets have been designed with one goal — mobility — and a single right, the right to movement. With superblocks, Barcelona is attempting to give people back the possibility of exercising all of their rights in the street by making the street a public space. Fewer cars mean less pollution, which in turn leads to an increased presence of non-governmental organizations, companies, business and commerce in the more attractive superblock neighborhoods. Superblocks abandon the old model of city planning, transforming the pedestrian from a mode of transportation into a citizen, and city streets from highways into public spaces.

Superblocks in Action

In September 2016, Barcelona saw the implementation of the first superblock of the new era, fresh from the maps of the Barcelona Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan.

Today two transportation networks can be distinguished in the superblock: the city network (on the periphery of the superblock), which allows for travel from one point of the city to another at a maximum speed of 50 km/hour (31 mph), and a local internal network with a maximum speed limit of 10 km/hour (6.21 miles per hour), which services residents and local activities.

In their first phase, superblocks use only traffic signals and signage to modify traffic flows, which means they can be implemented throughout the city at relatively little cost. Most of the space is reserved for pedestrians, and cyclists accommodate their speed to that of pedestrians. The space is emptied of cars, and with the drastic reduction in automobiles comes a decrease in the impact of their use.

To achieve the objectives of the Barcelona Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan, firstphase superblocks need to be implemented throughout the entire city, since superblocks make the most sense when they are networked. At the same time, Barcelona must introduce measures to reduce the number of vehicles in circulation. This will be achieved not only through the extension of superblocks throughout the city, but also through the implementation of Barcelona’s innovative orthogonal bus network and the expansion of its network of bike lanes, a reduction in the number of free parking spaces and an increase in the price of short-term parking.

Now that mobility issues have been dealt with in Barcelona’s first new superblock, a participatory process with neighbors, businesses and companies has been launched to define new uses for the space that has been freed up and fill the streets with life. In this way, we will enhance the exercise of all the rights of Barcelona’s citizens.

[This article first appeared in Transportation Alternatives’ Vision Zero Cities Journal in 2017.]

Salvador Rueda is the founder and director of the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona and has served in the Planning Department of the governments of Catalonia, Barcelona, and Sant Adrià de Besòs. Rueda is the author of several books and technical articles, is a major contributor to masters and postgraduate courses, and has acted as scientific advisor and speaker at many national and international conferences. From 1994–2000, he was a member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on the Urban Environment. Daniel Sherr, who translated this article from Catalan, is an interpreter who works in Barcelona and New York in the public and private sectors. His working languages are English, French, Spanish, and Catalan.