Landscape Architecture Magazine

The nearly unquestioned dominance cars have had over our cities for more than half a century, we’re told, is a very expensive problem to fix. Now that we have millions of miles of car-serving infrastructure, is it too late and too expensive to replace it?

No. The Spanish have a better way. Developed by Salvador Rueda of the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona (and documented in a video by Vox), the plan for Barcelona “superblocks” (or “superilles” in Catalan) gives urban planners and transit engineers a simple template to gradually reclaim streets from automobiles.

Best applied to nine-block areas as discrete superblock districts, the plan confines regular traffic to the perimeter of the site. Streets internal to the nine-block area become one-way loops, are stripped of on-street parking and through traffic, and reduce traffic speeds drastically to less than 10 miles per hour. These city blocks eventually grow into their new identity, perfect for a stroll amid sidewalk cafés and boutiques. It’s a laissez-faire approach to developing urban plazas and pedestrian blocks that’s far cheaper than building them from the ground up, and can lend an air of old-world charm to just about anywhere.

It’s most easily applicable to gridded streets but can be applied elsewhere. And Rueda estimates that this plan could be implemented across Barcelona for only $22 million. He envisions better mobility through dense urban centers, more opportunities for green space, better social cohesion as people have reason to slow down and socialize, and more commerce as they slide into the line at the frozen yogurt stand as they do. In the Spanish city of Vitoria-Gasteiz, instituting superblocks has increased pedestrian space from 45 percent to 74 percent of its central superblock.

And a trial run in North America might not be that far away—though in the form of new construction rather than new traffic patterns on existing streets. In Chicago, Barcelona Housing Systems and WELink are proposing a superblock-style system for the South Works site, the former home of US Steel on the far South Side.

Editor’s Note: The term for superblocks, superilles, was originally identified as Spanish, but is in fact Catalan, the local language of Catalonia. We regret the error.