is also considered responsible for elevated noise levels. Over 60 per cent of Barcelona’s residents live with noise levels higher than those deemed healthy by legislation. The city council also cites road accidents, sedentary lifestyles (one in five chil- dren in Barcelona are overweight or at risk of reaching that state), and the lack of green spaces as reasons driving the plan. Improving the qual- ity of the city in general, road safety and the efficiency of the entire mobil- ity system result are other principal objectives of the Plan, other than air quality. The Superblocks (superilles) have
been identified as the main measure in the UMP and solution to the chal- lenges that the city of Barcelona has been facing. The objectives are high: by imple-
menting the superilles, the city wants to reduce car and moped use by 21 per cent by the end of the imple- mentation and increase mobility by foot, bike and public transport. At the same time, it aims to keep the level of traffic network saturation simi- lar to the present. The plan wants to return 60 per cent of the street space currently used by cars back to the citizens for pedestrian use. The amount of usable public space would thus increase by whole 268 per cent. The goal is that this transformation humanise public space, increasing Barcelona residents’ access to the city, with new areas for recreation and social interaction along the his- toric city streets. “As
a Mediterranean city, extensions its
residents spend a long time on the streets – those streets need to be second homes, or
of
one’s residence, at all times”, says Janet Sanz, city councillor for ecol- ogy, urbanism and mobility and dep- uty mayor of the city1
. This Superblocks model turns on
its head the way most cities have been organised since the second half of the 20th century: there, streets have been
What is a Superblock?
The Superblocks model is a way of organising the city based on reversing the distribution of public space among vehicles and people, giving priority to the citizen, to improve environmental conditions and people’s quality of life2
.
designed under criteria that give pri- ority to private traffic, seeking maxi- mum motorised-traffic
fluidity and
capacity and providing the shortest and straightest route for cars, by tak- ing up the central part of streets and ensuring continuity at junctions. The new proposal, in contrast, prioritises the use of roads by people in most cases, by relegating cars to their role as a means of individual transport, behind public transport.
BACK TO THE ROOTS Barcelona’s
revolutionary design,
engineered by the Catalan urban planner Ildefons Cerdà i Sunyer in the late 19th century, had at its core the idea that the city should breathe and – for both ideological and pub- lic health reasons – planned for the population to be spread out equally, as well as providing green spaces within each block. The flexibility of the grid system
designed by Cerdà has enabled the city to absorb a growing population and subsequent rise in traffic levels, as well as the various user require- ments that have been changing over time. Compact cities have numerous indisputable social and environment advantages. However, Barcelona has one of the highest population densi- ties in Europe, having grown continu- ously in the last century. Barcelona government’s new plan has essen- tially aimed at the same vision that Cerdà had -
reclaiming most of the streets for the community, and
increasing the sustainable mobility. The plan is modelled on the origi-
nal idea of the Eixample area from the 19th century. It is designed in a simple grid that means that the neighbourhood can easily be sec- tioned off: nine blocks will become one pedestrianised superblock, with 160 intersections inside converted to city squares. Superblocks will be smaller than neighbourhoods, but bigger than actual blocks. Car, scooter, lorry and bus traffic will then be restricted to just the roads in the superblock perimeters, and they will only be allowed in the streets in between if they are residents or providing local businesses, and at a greatly reduced speed. This will turn the secondary streets into the so-called ‘citizen spaces’ for culture, leisure and the community.
STRATEGIC GOALS AND IMPLEMENTATION MEASURES The strategic goals that charac- terise “The implementation
of
the Superblocks programme in Barcelona: Filling our streets with life” can be summarised in the fol- lowing four points: • Improving
the public spaces;
• Moving towards more sustain- able mobility;
• Increasing and improving urban greenery and biodiversity;
• Promoting public participation and joint responsibility.
Technical criteria are to be estab- lished that will shape the action lines behind those strategic goals, ie related to habitability, greenery and biodiversity and mobility. The Superblock Programme provides for three types of actions accord- ing to the level of intervention in the public space: basic, tactical and structuring initiatives. The basic initiatives refer to meas-
ures focused mainly on traffic prior- itisation, such as changes in traffic
65 habitability of
Social and Economic Impacts of Transport
BARCELONA
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