The city, in the spirit of the original design by Cerdà, is transforming mobility and access to public space by introducing the Superblock.
When Catalan urban planner Ildefons Cerdà i Sunyer, back in the 1850s, designed the Eixample, the expansion of Barcelona outside the old city walls, he envisioned a city based on community living, where people could interact on wide streets, with a wealth of public and private gardens, and where transportation of people and goods wouldn’t dominate public space.
As Geoff Boeing, of the University of California, Berkeley – Department of City and Regional Planning, wrote on his recent paperInternational Lessons from Barcelona in Linking Urban Form, Design, and Transportation: “Ildefons Cerdà’s 19th century utopian plan for Barcelona’s Eixample district produced a renowned, livable urban form. The Eixample, with its well-integrated rail transit, serves as a model of urban design, land use, transportation planning, and pedestrian-scaled streets working in synergy to produce accessibility,”
The Eixample is widely considered one of the best designed city areas in the world and a case study for urban planners. It is mentioned by leading architects, such as Jan Gehl –a global leader in people-centered urban design– in the same breath as Copenhagen and Lyon, as the epitome of a great European city.
What Cerdà could not foresee in his plan, approved by the city on 1859, was the arrival of the automobile and the resulting transformation of mobility that took place in the middle of the 20th century.
Fortunately, by the time cars became an important part of city life, most of the Eixample’s original plan had been executed, maintaining the “human scale” across the urban landscape.
....
The Superblocks are not only being deployed in Barcelona. Rueda has been working with other cities and the concept is already at work in Vitoria (Basque country), Ferrol and La Coruña (Galicia)
“It’s no secret that the good days of the automobile are over,” urban planner Jan Gehl says. “In 2009, we saw the peak of driving in the world, and it’s on the way down. The automobile was a good thing in the ‘Wild West’ of Detroit in 1905…. The days of the automobile as something for everyone in the world are definitely over…. In a denser city, with walking and bicycling you can get anywhere quickly.”
Barcelona wants to be the best city for people in the world, Salvador Rueda says, and the Superblock is the key to reclaim public space that people lost over the last century. Now it is up to the politicians to be bold and implement the plan without delay.