I have lived in Barcelona for about four years, and have followed Superblock development closely. Last Friday, I visited the site in the St. Antoni area. It was awesome to see the former intersection filled with people. They were seated, standing, walking, talking, having a drink, playing. It is a stunning transformation and an awesome improvement in the city. It makes me want to move to that neighborhood - Superblocks won't reach my area for a couple of years.
I live right beside the St Antoni market and I'm loving it. Not that I use it that much myself, but others do and they are already doing it. Yesterday I walked around and it was filled with people enjoying it, and some streets just opened a few days ago. Although it looks very strange, different, kind of "industrial-like" (for the lack of better description) with all the yellow triangles, I'm liking it very much :)
Let's hope it works out, there are many people rallying against this initiative (Dey Turk Er Ckers!!1) I think it will prove to be for the best (of course this is my opinion).
Are there any US cities doing experiments similar to this? All I hear in the news are NY's subway problems and crumbling infrastructure across the nation while politicians do nothing. A whole lot of innovation in the public sector seems to be happening in Europe and Asia.
Times Square itself was mostly pedestrianized about a decade ago and a smattering of other cities have done similar things.
The problem is that the way postwar cities were built in North America has meant that the overwhelming number of people still need a car to get to the pedestrianized areas, so over the years most of them have failed.
I was going the comment that I wish American suburbs (even the inner-suburbs that are dense by US standards) were laid out in such a way that "Superblock" style redevelopment was possible.
The neighborhood in which I live (Reston, VA) was originally supposed to have several walkable "town centers", but all but two of them were built as standard strip malls, and one of the two that was built to original plan was demolished for a strip mall in 1994.
By happy coincidence, I can walk to work. But, grocery shopping is still a car ride away. And even if I could walk, I'd have to cross giant asphalt wastelands filled with distracted drivers.
Another case in point: Seattle has an outdoor mall called University Village. On a map, it looks like a walkable urban paradise but actually being there is a dramatically different story. There's a wildly-popular multi-use trail--the Burke-Gilman--that goes right next to the mall but direct access to UVillage from the Burke is not well-marked and involves crossing at least two roads. Access by bus is OK but you can tell that pedestrian access doesn't rank in the top five of priorities since one set of bus stops ends in three steps and the other set of bus stops accesses a pedestrian path that's almost always closed for one reason or another due to "construction."
Meanwhile, UVillage has an extensive set of interior streets with pretend stop signs for pedestrian crossings that drivers often ignore. And the mall owners keep building parking garages, closing off sidewalks for a year of construction in the process.
I have high hopes for the rebuild of Northgate Mall, on Seattle's north end next to a light rail station. The owners of Northgate filed their 129-page development plan with the city and they spend quite a few pages on how pedestrians will access the property, where people can congregate and play and exist without cars, and how the two additional interior streets will have calming and slowing measures to put pedestrians first. If the owners of Northgate Mall's written plans come to fruition as written, I hope UVillage's business will drop so they'll be forced to adapt in the same way.
I don't have substantial data to support my claim...but my feeling lately is that innovation to help humankind (and not only "corporate entities") seems to be happening more in Europe (and not U.S.) period. I feel like U.S. is this playground for companies to do stuff to us because they CAN, and not whether they SHOULD/SHOULD NOT. <sigh>
A really small town near me shut down their main street and built a parking garage in order to make it a more walkable area about a decade ago. Unfortunately, all of the shops there closed up over the years because of a lack of foot traffic and they just reopened the street to traffic this year.
I think this type of thing would require a ton of compact living area nearby (apartments, etc) where people almost use the area as their "yard". The small town I mentioned is mostly suburbs where everyone has a small slice of backyard.
Go west -- Jersey City closed off a few blocks of Newark Ave., just west of the Grove Street PATH station about a decade ago, and now that area is thriving. Hotels, new housing towers, restaurants, and shops have all opened up in the surrounding blocks, and during nice weather the PATH station plaza and pedestrian street are usually busy.
Superblocks again! Popular idea in 1930s-1950s public housing. Peter Cooper Village in NYC is laid out that way.[1] The units near the roads are more desirable and higher priced.
Superblocks in this iteration are different, because while the interior streets have car restrictions they follow the pattern of the existing street grids. This means that pedestrians and cyclists can continue using the interior paths to pass through the neighborhood as they did before, and their commutes are no longer via the superblock.
Corbusier-inspired superblocks have meandering, parklike paths, both to play up the similarity to a park and discourage through pedestrian or cyclist traffic. This was supposed to increase safety by limiting the amount of unknown strangers passing through, but in many cases decreased it as the available "eyes on the street" dropped dramatically and in some cases totally disappeared. Stuyvesant Town has been spared mostly because of its location and upmarket residents, but the public housing projects have fared less well.
There aren't a whole lot of businesses or transit stops inside Stuy Town and Peter Cooper Village [1]. Barcelona, in contrast, is apparently planning to encourage multi-use development.
[1] I considered moving there, but much of it is actually not convenient to the subway or Citibike. And my prospective roommate wanted to be closer to the East Village. So, anecdotally, lack of transit and businesses is what makes the interior less desirable, not lack of car access.
Stuy Town is great. Gets so much hate. But I actually miss walking my dog around Stuy Town and speaking with elderly locals who had lived in the same apartment for 50 years more than anything else in NYC. The inner walking loop and fountain are great and they added a cafe a few years ago. Only issue is the distance from the subway.
I note the opening says: "(Municipal elections today, May 26, will provide a crucial test for the plan.)"
Does anybody with familiarity with the area have a sense of how that test panned out? I can look up the basic results but wouldn't be familiar with how parties stood on the plan, and accordingly if people who backed it were successful or otherwise.
So so. Although the election result is worse than the previous elections for the mayor Ada Colau, the political deal game finally has given her the office again (in Spanish):
Ada Colau, which was the major behind the Superblocks proposal, was elected once again, although with some turmoil (basically she's from a left-wing party and got elected thanks to the votes of the previously France Prime Minister Manuel Valls who was running with a right-wing party). More info https://www.thelocal.es/20190616/barcelona-mayor-reelected-a...
How is Valls seen in Spain? His public image in France was not amazing when he left (he was a socialist but left the party to join macron, and now you're saying he joined the right wing? )
well, spain... keep in mind he's only involved in the politics of barcelona, which is the capital of catalonia, which is only a part of spain. and he didn't even get that many votes, despite pairing with a well-established party as "ciudadanos". which have already broken the deal with him anyway.
in general, I'd say the consensus is that he's an opportunist. he knows how to play politics, but he's an opportunist. we are aware of his image in france.
in my opinion, he only joined ciudadanos for convenience, so he could enter the game in a decent position, and now he will attempt a transition towards the socialist party (if they want him, and it's still way too early for this, we probably need to wait 4 years until he's free of his current responsibility in barcelona). this is highly speculative on my part, but it's the way I see it. enter the scene through ciudadanos, and then distance himself through his actions, not leaving ciudadanos himself, but rather being rejected by the party itself. first by criticising the idea of ciudadanos being part of an agreement in madrid to have the support of an extreme-right party (Vox) so the right-wing parties could have the city council, and later, just a few days ago, by giving Ada Colau the support to be named mayor in barcelona, in exchange for "nothing". he's good at navigating the waters, he has experience at that, but everyone knows he's just an opportunist. he's already in the middle of the first scandals regarding some businessmen paying him 20.000€ each month for his involvement in politics. anyway, there are bigger things at play in catalonia with the independence process and all that, so in general people doesn't even care much about him. he's lucky to have that.
For a few months he was a "hero" of sorts for the spanish right wing, since he was viscerally unionist (i.e., against catalan sovereignty), and this is a basic tenet of spanish right wing. Now that he has supported the current mayor of Barcelona to be re-elected, he has fallen out of favor (since the mayor is left wing and somewhat neutral on the independence question).
For left wingers and non-unionists, he's always been nuts.
after the elections, the mayor will continue being Ada Colau, despite ending in second place this time. the whole situation is much more complicated than that, but there's a clear majority by left-wing parties, so the plan will most likely continue
I would say the plan is unlikely to continue unless Ada really really really wants it and she's ok dropping something else instead (I was going to cheekily say she might drop her righteous crusade against CIEs, but she dropped it as soon as she won 4 years ago, sadly)
Right-wing parties, such as C's, that she needs to pass on anything, are against superblocks. Her left-wing rivals on the indy side would probably be against it too just for the sake of leverage.
The main difference I see is that most of Europe isn't built on grids. It strikes me they cause as many problems as they solve. Most road networks are essentially hierarchical - you have (more or less) arteries, collectors/feeders, and local roads. Local roads should be for local access, and collectors/feeders consolidate access between arteries and local roads.
In the grid, it feels like there is no local road - just arteries (eg Barcelona's diagonals) and .. roads. You can try to downgrade a feeder into a local road using "traffic calming" measures; speed bumps, speed limits, one way systems - but the moment there's any congestion on the intended feeders, people will try to route around it and bring the congestion to the unintended feeders.
The whole "superblock" concept appears simply to reintroduce local roads into a system that was built without them - which isn't actually an issue typical of most European cities.
It's a series of 5 articles, each article having at least ten pictures. Not sure if you missed those, or you're asking for even more pictures. Could probably dig out some from the city government if it's the latter.
I have lived in Barcelona for about four years, and have followed Superblock development closely. Last Friday, I visited the site in the St. Antoni area. It was awesome to see the former intersection filled with people. They were seated, standing, walking, talking, having a drink, playing. It is a stunning transformation and an awesome improvement in the city. It makes me want to move to that neighborhood - Superblocks won't reach my area for a couple of years.
I live right beside the St Antoni market and I'm loving it. Not that I use it that much myself, but others do and they are already doing it. Yesterday I walked around and it was filled with people enjoying it, and some streets just opened a few days ago. Although it looks very strange, different, kind of "industrial-like" (for the lack of better description) with all the yellow triangles, I'm liking it very much :)
Let's hope it works out, there are many people rallying against this initiative (Dey Turk Er Ckers!!1) I think it will prove to be for the best (of course this is my opinion).
Are there any US cities doing experiments similar to this? All I hear in the news are NY's subway problems and crumbling infrastructure across the nation while politicians do nothing. A whole lot of innovation in the public sector seems to be happening in Europe and Asia.
Times Square itself was mostly pedestrianized about a decade ago and a smattering of other cities have done similar things.
The problem is that the way postwar cities were built in North America has meant that the overwhelming number of people still need a car to get to the pedestrianized areas, so over the years most of them have failed.
I was going the comment that I wish American suburbs (even the inner-suburbs that are dense by US standards) were laid out in such a way that "Superblock" style redevelopment was possible.
The neighborhood in which I live (Reston, VA) was originally supposed to have several walkable "town centers", but all but two of them were built as standard strip malls, and one of the two that was built to original plan was demolished for a strip mall in 1994.
By happy coincidence, I can walk to work. But, grocery shopping is still a car ride away. And even if I could walk, I'd have to cross giant asphalt wastelands filled with distracted drivers.
Another case in point: Seattle has an outdoor mall called University Village. On a map, it looks like a walkable urban paradise but actually being there is a dramatically different story. There's a wildly-popular multi-use trail--the Burke-Gilman--that goes right next to the mall but direct access to UVillage from the Burke is not well-marked and involves crossing at least two roads. Access by bus is OK but you can tell that pedestrian access doesn't rank in the top five of priorities since one set of bus stops ends in three steps and the other set of bus stops accesses a pedestrian path that's almost always closed for one reason or another due to "construction."
Meanwhile, UVillage has an extensive set of interior streets with pretend stop signs for pedestrian crossings that drivers often ignore. And the mall owners keep building parking garages, closing off sidewalks for a year of construction in the process.
I have high hopes for the rebuild of Northgate Mall, on Seattle's north end next to a light rail station. The owners of Northgate filed their 129-page development plan with the city and they spend quite a few pages on how pedestrians will access the property, where people can congregate and play and exist without cars, and how the two additional interior streets will have calming and slowing measures to put pedestrians first. If the owners of Northgate Mall's written plans come to fruition as written, I hope UVillage's business will drop so they'll be forced to adapt in the same way.
I don't have substantial data to support my claim...but my feeling lately is that innovation to help humankind (and not only "corporate entities") seems to be happening more in Europe (and not U.S.) period. I feel like U.S. is this playground for companies to do stuff to us because they CAN, and not whether they SHOULD/SHOULD NOT. <sigh>
A really small town near me shut down their main street and built a parking garage in order to make it a more walkable area about a decade ago. Unfortunately, all of the shops there closed up over the years because of a lack of foot traffic and they just reopened the street to traffic this year.
I think this type of thing would require a ton of compact living area nearby (apartments, etc) where people almost use the area as their "yard". The small town I mentioned is mostly suburbs where everyone has a small slice of backyard.
Go west -- Jersey City closed off a few blocks of Newark Ave., just west of the Grove Street PATH station about a decade ago, and now that area is thriving. Hotels, new housing towers, restaurants, and shops have all opened up in the surrounding blocks, and during nice weather the PATH station plaza and pedestrian street are usually busy.
Could you share some good sources of info regarding the development plans/strategy? It's fine if they happen to be in Spanish/Catalan.
Best way I've found so far is http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/superilles/ca/noticies (which is from the Barcelona City Hall)
Ahh this is a new article from 2019. I remember the 2016 Vox video when they were putting in the first Superblocks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZORzsubQA_M Good to see Barcelona is going ahead with the Superblocks. Found a 2018 video by those great Streetfilms folks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq2yd4QgL5I
Superblocks again! Popular idea in 1930s-1950s public housing. Peter Cooper Village in NYC is laid out that way.[1] The units near the roads are more desirable and higher priced.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_Town%E2%80%93Peter_...
Superblocks in this iteration are different, because while the interior streets have car restrictions they follow the pattern of the existing street grids. This means that pedestrians and cyclists can continue using the interior paths to pass through the neighborhood as they did before, and their commutes are no longer via the superblock.
Corbusier-inspired superblocks have meandering, parklike paths, both to play up the similarity to a park and discourage through pedestrian or cyclist traffic. This was supposed to increase safety by limiting the amount of unknown strangers passing through, but in many cases decreased it as the available "eyes on the street" dropped dramatically and in some cases totally disappeared. Stuyvesant Town has been spared mostly because of its location and upmarket residents, but the public housing projects have fared less well.
There aren't a whole lot of businesses or transit stops inside Stuy Town and Peter Cooper Village [1]. Barcelona, in contrast, is apparently planning to encourage multi-use development.
[1] I considered moving there, but much of it is actually not convenient to the subway or Citibike. And my prospective roommate wanted to be closer to the East Village. So, anecdotally, lack of transit and businesses is what makes the interior less desirable, not lack of car access.
Stuy Town is great. Gets so much hate. But I actually miss walking my dog around Stuy Town and speaking with elderly locals who had lived in the same apartment for 50 years more than anything else in NYC. The inner walking loop and fountain are great and they added a cafe a few years ago. Only issue is the distance from the subway.
I note the opening says: "(Municipal elections today, May 26, will provide a crucial test for the plan.)"
Does anybody with familiarity with the area have a sense of how that test panned out? I can look up the basic results but wouldn't be familiar with how parties stood on the plan, and accordingly if people who backed it were successful or otherwise.
Ada Colau got elected again, and will most certainly continue with the same push for more green and active spaces for pedestrians.
So so. Although the election result is worse than the previous elections for the mayor Ada Colau, the political deal game finally has given her the office again (in Spanish):
https://elpais.com/ccaa/2019/06/18/catalunya/1560843562_1155...
She'll have a worse position but probably they'll get to move some of the plans.
Ada Colau, which was the major behind the Superblocks proposal, was elected once again, although with some turmoil (basically she's from a left-wing party and got elected thanks to the votes of the previously France Prime Minister Manuel Valls who was running with a right-wing party). More info https://www.thelocal.es/20190616/barcelona-mayor-reelected-a...
How is Valls seen in Spain? His public image in France was not amazing when he left (he was a socialist but left the party to join macron, and now you're saying he joined the right wing? )
well, spain... keep in mind he's only involved in the politics of barcelona, which is the capital of catalonia, which is only a part of spain. and he didn't even get that many votes, despite pairing with a well-established party as "ciudadanos". which have already broken the deal with him anyway.
in general, I'd say the consensus is that he's an opportunist. he knows how to play politics, but he's an opportunist. we are aware of his image in france.
in my opinion, he only joined ciudadanos for convenience, so he could enter the game in a decent position, and now he will attempt a transition towards the socialist party (if they want him, and it's still way too early for this, we probably need to wait 4 years until he's free of his current responsibility in barcelona). this is highly speculative on my part, but it's the way I see it. enter the scene through ciudadanos, and then distance himself through his actions, not leaving ciudadanos himself, but rather being rejected by the party itself. first by criticising the idea of ciudadanos being part of an agreement in madrid to have the support of an extreme-right party (Vox) so the right-wing parties could have the city council, and later, just a few days ago, by giving Ada Colau the support to be named mayor in barcelona, in exchange for "nothing". he's good at navigating the waters, he has experience at that, but everyone knows he's just an opportunist. he's already in the middle of the first scandals regarding some businessmen paying him 20.000€ each month for his involvement in politics. anyway, there are bigger things at play in catalonia with the independence process and all that, so in general people doesn't even care much about him. he's lucky to have that.
It depends who you ask, and when.
For a few months he was a "hero" of sorts for the spanish right wing, since he was viscerally unionist (i.e., against catalan sovereignty), and this is a basic tenet of spanish right wing. Now that he has supported the current mayor of Barcelona to be re-elected, he has fallen out of favor (since the mayor is left wing and somewhat neutral on the independence question).
For left wingers and non-unionists, he's always been nuts.
after the elections, the mayor will continue being Ada Colau, despite ending in second place this time. the whole situation is much more complicated than that, but there's a clear majority by left-wing parties, so the plan will most likely continue
I would say the plan is unlikely to continue unless Ada really really really wants it and she's ok dropping something else instead (I was going to cheekily say she might drop her righteous crusade against CIEs, but she dropped it as soon as she won 4 years ago, sadly)
Right-wing parties, such as C's, that she needs to pass on anything, are against superblocks. Her left-wing rivals on the indy side would probably be against it too just for the sake of leverage.
I was hoping for more pictures. I wonder how this is different than other shared roads around Europe.
The main difference I see is that most of Europe isn't built on grids. It strikes me they cause as many problems as they solve. Most road networks are essentially hierarchical - you have (more or less) arteries, collectors/feeders, and local roads. Local roads should be for local access, and collectors/feeders consolidate access between arteries and local roads.
In the grid, it feels like there is no local road - just arteries (eg Barcelona's diagonals) and .. roads. You can try to downgrade a feeder into a local road using "traffic calming" measures; speed bumps, speed limits, one way systems - but the moment there's any congestion on the intended feeders, people will try to route around it and bring the congestion to the unintended feeders.
The whole "superblock" concept appears simply to reintroduce local roads into a system that was built without them - which isn't actually an issue typical of most European cities.
It's a series of 5 articles, each article having at least ten pictures. Not sure if you missed those, or you're asking for even more pictures. Could probably dig out some from the city government if it's the latter.
I didn't even notice it linked out to stories. I read it as five slides.
The 2016 article fortunately gives some more clarity on it.
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12237966