Simon De Boeck. Barcelona's Superblocks. Iterations between concept and realisation.

BARCELONA’S SUPERBLOCKS ITERATIONS BETWEEN CONCEPT AND REALISATION Simon De Boeck Master of Human Settlements 2020 - 2021 Faculty of Engineering Science Department of Architecture Thesis under supervision of Prof. Dr. Kelly Shannon and Prof. Dr. Ir. Arch. Bruno De Meulder

© Copyright KU Leuven Without written permission of the thesis supervisors and the authors it is forbidden to reproduce or adapt in any form or by any means any part of this publication.

Requests for obtaining the right to reproduce or utilize parts of this publication should be addressed to Faculty of Engineering and Department of Architecture, Kasteelpark Arenberg 1 box 2431, B-3001 Heverlee.

A written permission of the thesis supervisors is also required to use the methods, products, schematics and programs described in this work for industrial or commercial use, and for submitting this publication in scientific contests.

Fig. 0.1. Transformed crossroad in the Sant Antoni Superblock. Del Rio Bani. Untitled. 2019. Barcelona. http://delriobani.com/projects/superilla-sant-antoni/

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to express my thankfulness to the people who made it possible to bring this piece of work to a successful conclusion. In the first place, to my supervisors, Kelly Shannon and Bruno De Meulder, for their trust, reading advice, constructive adjustments and broadening insights during the writing and research process.

Second, my sincere appreciation goes out to Raquel Colacios, Cecil Konijnendijk, Anna Gutierrez, Isabel Anguelowski and Johannes Langemeyer for the enlightening conversations, during walks in situ or online meetings and for bringing me in contact with new exciting conversation partners.

I thank Jonas to assist me with the layout of texts and photos in this beautiful edition.

Finally, I am very grateful to my family for their unwavering patience and support and to the intercontinental DT and Arenberg crew for the helpful, mind-altering, inspiring and fabulous moments together.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 7 Introduction..................................................................................................................................................................................................... 8 1. Methodology.......................................................................................................................................................................................... 10 2. Theoretical framework........................................................................................................................................................................... 12 3. The Superblocks in Barcelona’s track record of urban planning............................................................................................................ 16

The Superblock archetype..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................16 Tactical urbanism: branding the strategy.......................................................................................................................................................................................................21 The urban project in Barcelona.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................21 The Superblocks’ symbiosis with Cerdà’s Eixample.....................................................................................................................................................................................23

4. The Superblock’s implementation process: the path towards the myth............................................................................................... 28

El Born and Gràcia, emblematic Superblocks avant-la-lettre......................................................................................................................................................................28 Trial and error: a timeline of iterations between concept and realisations................................................................................................................................................28 Poblenou: the archetypal Superblock’s controversial take-off....................................................................................................................................................................29 Sant Antoni: agile concept shift to the Superblock 2.0................................................................................................................................................................................37 Eixample: systemic spread of ‘Green Axes and Squares’............................................................................................................................................................................45 Transformations under the Superblock label outside the grid................................................................................................................................................................... 51 Discussion: Factors determining the ambition level and progress.............................................................................................................................................................53 Discussion: Interacting stakeholders influencing the process.....................................................................................................................................................................56

5. Goal achievements towards the ‘sustainable’ city.................................................................................................................................63

Sustainable transformation goals...................................................................................................................................................................................................................63 Mobility effects.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................64 Social cohesion.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................66 Health & environment......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................68 Biodiversity, water management, climate change adaptation....................................................................................................................................................................70 Governance models and flexible solutions.................................................................................................................................................................................................... 74 Discussion on real vs potential achievement of the goals........................................................................................................................................................................... 74

6. Same myths, different strategies........................................................................................................................................................... 76

Reflections on London as a ‘National Park City’........................................................................................................................................................................................... 76 Reflections on Paris as a ‘15 minutes-city’......................................................................................................................................................................................................79

Conclusions................................................................................................................................................................................................... 89 Bibliography.................................................................................................................................................................................................. 90

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ABSTRACT With the Superblock concept, Barcelona is quickly transforming an impressive area of public space, dominated by car traffic, into polytechnic spaces for slow mobility, human encounters and green infrastructure. The archetypal aggregation of three by three building blocks, forming a car-free green island, evolves by trial-and-error into a systemic network of green axes and squares. Tactical urbanism interacts with highend realisations in a contested trajectory towards an equally spread city-wide intervention.

Recent studies reveal a positive impact on mobility, environment, health and social cohesion in the city, be it now or potentially in case of a city-wide rollout. Other experts point to the risks of green gentrification and the need for more thorough steps towards biodiversity promotion and climate change adaptation.

How and to what extent does the agile and iterative implementation process of the Superblocks allows to approach the myth of ‘the sustainable city’ in Barcelona? Which factors in the process influence the ambition level and qualitative outcomes of the strategy? How does the interaction between public opinion, politics, and experts lead to achieving sustainable transformation goals? An analysis by field observation, literature review, and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders reveals key defining mechanisms.

KEYWORDS Sustainable cities, public space, transformative urbanism, tactical urbanism, implementation process

Fig. 0.2. Human encounters in the city. N/a. Untitled. 2017. Barcelona. https://theplaidzebra.com/barcelona-is-giving-the-streets-back-to-pedestrians-one-superblock-at-a-time/

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0. INTRODUCTION Halfway through the 2000s, when studying in Barcelona, I lived for one year in the Sant Antoni neighbourhood of the Eixample district. The apartment on the 6th floor was located right on one of the typically chamfered edges of the Cerdà grid and the windows gave out on the noisy crossroads of Carrer de Floridablanca and Carrer de Calàbria. One block away, the Mistral Avenue, as an ancient relict of a medieval road, diagonally cuts a marvellous car-free breathing space out of the grid.

Since then, I regularly return to the city, avoiding the Ramblas and other tourist attraction poles, and looking for the scarce yet unknown places, to get a taste of the city. With each visit, I notice how new urban projects were realised, often acupunctural eye-catchers with a territorial effect, and which characteristics are still just the same, such as the tiny passages and the vibrant multiculturalism of El Raval, the still somewhat forced appropriation of the streamlined coastline around Port Olimpic, or the tranquil atmosphere in the uphill neighbourhoods overlooking the city.

Recently, more than 100,000 m² of what used to be streets were transformed into multifunctional spaces for human encounters by the city’s Superblock concept (Ajuntament 2021 c). In the entire metropolitan area of Barcelona, 60% of the public space is dedicated to motor vehicles and to function as a transit area. Barcelona has the ambition to realise a large-scale transformation to reinforce the city at a human scale, under the motto ‘We fill the streets with life’ (Ajuntament 2020 a).

The Superblocks are a different type of urban project from the previous ones, as they intrinsically aim to intervene below the radar in an effort to increase the quality of life for all residents equally. How ‘sustainable’ are they really, in the different meanings of the word? How ambitious, how cautious, how complex and how contested is the implementation of an impactful transformation of public space? I would be happy to take you on a journey through the intriguing mechanisms under the glossy shell of the propagated narrative.

Fig. 0.3. Transformed crossroad in the Sant Antoni Superblock. Del Rio Bani. Untitled. 2019. Barcelona. http://delriobani.com/projects/superilla-sant-antoni/

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NOTES ON TERMINOLOGY

Eixample is the name given to the district of Barcelona, characterised by Ildefons Cerdá’s iconic grid design (1859), connecting the old city centre to what were once surrounding small towns.

Pacificació in Catalan (or ‘pacificación’ in Spanish) is the commonly used term to indicate the car-freeing of an environment in favour of walking and biking. I feel free to use ‘pacification’ as a literal English translation to express the Catalan meaning of the word.

Superilla is the officially used term in Catalan by the City for Superblock. It is not clear why a literal translation to ‘Superisland’ was not retained, as it refers adequately to the archetypal car-free ‘island’ of three by three building blocks in Barcelona’s grid. In addition, ‘Superisland’ would avoid confusion with the earlier meaning of a Superblock in modernist urban planning, referring to a larger city block fringed by arterial roads and with internal roads, be it still mainly dominated by car traffic.

Eixos Civics, supercruïlla and placificació. After the controversy caused by the Superblock implementation in Poblenou, a shift in narrative was sought after. The term ‘Eixos Civics’ or ‘Civic Axes’ appeared when the archetypal concept of the ‘Superisland’ shifted into a grid of pedestrianised ‘Green Axes and Squares’, superposed on the Eixample (Boot 2018). Advocates of the Superblocks also distort the foregoing terms: Superilla turns into ‘supercruilla’, meaning upercrossroad. Pacificació turns into ‘placificació’, a contraction of plaça (square) and pacificació (car free-ing of public space), to emphasise how the human scale becomes central again.

Fig. 0.4. Narrative and terminology on Twitter. “Before and after the tactical action at the crossroads of Borrell and Parlament streets. #let’sfillthestreetswithlife #superillas #supercrosses #placification #lesscarsbestcities @LekuStudio”. VAIC mobility on Twitter, September 12, 2019. https://twitter.com/_vaic_/ status/1172159322211659776

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1. METHODOLOGY LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK How and to what extent does the agile and iterative implementation process of the Superblocks allows to approach the myth of ‘the sustainable city’ in Barcelona? Which factors in the process influence the ambition level and qualitative outcomes of the strategy? How does the interaction between public opinion, politics, and experts lead to achieving sustainable transformation goals?

In the first stage, an analytical framework is set up through a literature review to understand the position of the Superblocks relative to the ongoing crises in the city, a paradigm shift tackling the the sustainable city, and the specific track record of urban projects in Barcelona. A review of recent academic research results allows for the critical review of achievements of the initial objectives, including the effects on mobility, social cohesion, health and environment.

LIST AND MAP OF FIELD OBSERVATIONS In all of the interventions framed as Superblock projects by the city, field observations and photography provide insights beyond the project branding on the city’s official information channels, and beyond the coverage in fancy design magazines. Specific attention was paid to the level materialisation (high-end or temporary and its wear and tear), the degree of ecological value (and its maintenance), and the liveliness of the places.

Fig. 1.1. Transformed crossroad in the Sant Antoni Superblock. Del Rio Bani. Untitled. 2019. Barcelona. http://delriobani.com/projects/superilla-sant-antoni/

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LIST OF SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS Table 1. Fieldwork in the Superblocks during April 2021. Barcelona.

N°

Date

Function

1a

12-16/4/2021

Sant Antoni – Carrer del Comte Borrel, Tamarit, Parlament

2

12/4/2021

Poblenou – Carrer de Tanger, Pallars, Bedagoz, Llacuna

3

13/4/2021

Eixample – Carrer Consell de Cent, Germanetes, Girona,

4

13/4/2021

Eixample – Passeig Sant Joan

5

13/4/2021

Gràcia

6

14/4/2021

El Born

7

15/4/2021

Sants – Hostafrancs – Superblock intervention area and surroundings

8

15/4/2021

Les Corts – Superblock intervention area and surroundings

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16/4/2021

Horta – Superblock area and broader district area

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16/4/2021

Sant Martí – Carrer de Cristobal de Moura

As a last layer in the methodological approach, semi-structured interviews with different actors involved in the Superblock implementation process reveal more hidden layers and background information. The conversations, with a mix of domain experts (working or living in the city), independent urban planning professionals and local stakeholders, revealed other insights about the factors influencing the ambition level and outcomes, and the interactions between public opinion, politics and experts attempting to make their findings or beliefs maximally influential.

Table 2. Semi-structured interviews during April & May 2021.

N°

Date

Function

1

13/4/2021

Academic researcher (ecology, urban planning)

2

14/4/2021

Academic researcher (policy, urban planning, sociology)

3

14/4/2021

Green maintenance worker (city employee)

4

16/4/2021

Local Merchant in Sant Antoni

5

28/4/2021

Urban planner, academic researcher (urban planning, anthropology)

6

2/5/2021

Urban planner, design competition laureate

7

11/5/2021

Academic researcher (environment, urban planning)

Fig. 1.2 Map fieldwork in the Superblocks during April 2021. Barcelona. Map adapted by author. Base map: Ajuntament de Barcelona. Green streets. Road map for the city’s future transformation process. 2021.

Barcelona. https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/superilles/en/superilla/eixample

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2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK CRISES IN THE CITY

THE MYTH OF THE SUSTAINABLE CITY

Collective space in the city, as an indispensable and crucial part of the commons, is facing three major crises today. First of all, an acute scarcity, unequal accessibility and insufficient versatility of urban public space to meet the needs of a growing, lively, recreational, encountering and moving society (Low 2006, Garau 2014). Secondly, a wide discrepancy between the cultural and the natural landscape (Sauer 1925), growing apart for decades and provoking a lack of resilience to tackle the challenges of biodiversity loss, heat stress, floods and droughts, induced by the global climate crisis (Purdy 2015, EEA 2020). Finally, the current health crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic emphasising the shortage of liveable green public space, suitable for essential human encounters when taking into account social distancing rules, particularly for the socio-economically most vulnerable people in our cities (Honey-Roses et al. 2020, Solnit 2020, Moreno et al. 2021).

Rees (1997) concludes that the ‘sustainable city’ is fact an oxymoron. Besides challenging the conventional ‘sustainability-through-growth’ dogma, he detects a structural impossibility of balance in the concept of a circular urban metabolism, referring to studies on ecological footprint:

URGE FOR A PARADIGM SHIFT The modernist dream that the complexity of the city can be moulded into a working machine, with technological tools and complicated, up to futuristic infrastructure, collides with today’s complexities of the city, its quickly varying challenges, in particular environmental ones, and the search for a return to a minimal connection with the natural ecosystem.

Several illusions from the past, such as the computer (aided) city, cybernetics or virtual architecture, imagining a voluntaristic and sophisticated urban future reached their limits (Rouillard and Guiheux 2016). A contemporary version of the belief in technology, taking the form of the ‘smart city’, as a solution for current challenges, is still very much alive and even seen as an essential condition in the realisation of concepts as hyperproximity, a promising ingredient in the making of the ‘sustainable’ city (Moreno et al. 2021). However, the smart city concept is as much criticised for being an elitist utopia, lacking equal accessibility for every citizen, increasing socio-economic inequalities and correlating with gentrification (Sassen 2016, Badeau 2020, Moreno et al. 2021).

Because it is doubtful whether urban responses are still possible at all within the current economic and political system, a radical shift is needed for its very reconception to new visions, models, processes and tools. Various attempts to bring about a paradigm shift arise from these insights, expressed in new theoretical concepts, by times resulting in specific strategies towards a ‘sustainable’ future for the city.

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“First they show that as a result of enormous technology-induced increases in energy and material consumption per capita, and growing dependence on trade, the ecological locations of urban regions no longer coincide with their geographic locations. Without taking anything away from cities as economic engines and cultural hotbeds, we must recognise that they also resemble entropic black holes, sweeping up the output of areas of the ecosphere vastly larger than themselves. (…)

Perhaps the most important insight from this result is that no city or urban region can be sustainable on its own. ‘Sustainable city’—at least as we presently define cities—is an oxymoron” (Rees 1997, 307).

In an attempt to find a definition for the title of his book The Sustainable City, Cohen starts his quest little hopeful. “Because a city is a human settlement that is designed for human rather than ecological well-being, it may seem inconsistent to be defining a sustainable city” (Cohen 2017, 3). Nevertheless, Cohen summarizes valuable attempts by international organizations and great thinkers, who build the concept of sustainability out of an ever-expanding arsenal of terms – ranging from environmental to social, economic, cultural and even institutional goals. So broad that it is in danger of losing its meaning (Cohen 2017).

Therefore, in the transformative urban projects we analyse today, it will not be about measuring if the whole package is delivered, but about revealing which goals are considered primordial and which benefits survive at the end of the conceptualisation and implementation process. The sustainable city turns out to be paradoxical and intrinsically utopian, but no less ideal to strive for.

The road towards the platonic ideal is at least as important as the goal itself. In ‘Aspirations, guiding images and social transformations’, Chombart de Lauwe (1964) decomposes the citizen’s emotions in gradually transcending layers of – in French – désir, espoir and espérance. A translation could be desire – a short term or materialistic expectation; hope – a more complex but still personal aspiration; and hopefulness – a collective almost spiritual dream about a better future.

Another relevant triptych, by the same author, unfolds the concepts of symbols, values and myths, in which symbols are a perceptible expression of values, which refer to a future image; values are a construction of the mind, allowing a construction of intuitions to be expressed in a consistent and pictorial manner, when you do not have the means to grasp the realities; and myths are representations of those sets of images and symbols, with strong affective colouring which responds provisionally to deep aspirations that cannot be directly satisfied in action. Within this framework you could interpret Barcelona’s tactical urbanism, expressed by street paintings, playgrounds and tree boxes as symbols, and the social and environmental benefits of the Superblock concept as values. Ultimately, the implementation of tactical urbanism creating the first externals of Superblock entities, represents a stepping stone on Barcelona’s trial-and-error path to the myth of ‘the sustainable city’.

Nature-based solutions While many political powers stick to the smokescreen of an idealistic project, those who take effective action are commendable. The European Union supports cities that take the lead through knowledge exchange and funding (European Commission 2015). Experts indicate that, just as ‘sustainability’ in the past decades, ‘nature-based solutions’ is today the term that opens doors to resources (Informant 1, 7 2021). But what exactly does the term mean, and what is its value? The European Commission defines,

Fig. 2.1. Ecosystemic three level urbanism. BCNecología. Ecosystemic Urbanism’s section. 2021. Barcelona.

In Rueda 2019, 140.

“Nature-based solutions aim to help societies address a variety of environmental, social and economic challenges in sustainable ways. They are actions which are inspired by, supported by or copied from nature” (EC 2015, 5).

The concept intensively relies on the broad scope of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and SDG-11 on Sustainable Cities and Communities in particular. The urge for a systemic change is stressed by The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES): “Goals for conserving and sustainably using nature and achieving sustainability cannot be met by current trajectories, and goals for 2030 and beyond may only be achieved through transformative changes across economic, social, political and technological factors” (IPBES 2019, 6).

Fig. 2.2. The three interrelations in nature-based thinking. N/a. The three interrelations in NBT. Redeveloped from Jansson et al. (2018). 2020. In Randrup et al. 2020, 923.

Randrup et al. (2020) plead for moving beyond the nature-based solutions discourse and introduces ‘nature-based thinking’. Inspiration is sought from nature to develop more sustainable and inclusive cities, whereby anthropocentric and eco-centric values are better weighed with attention to the social and governance dimension from a balanced socio-ecological perspective. The study discusses the rethinking of crucial

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interactions considering the three possible nexuses between community, governance and ecology. In the different interpretations of the concept of nature-based solutions, and in particular concerning the community – governance nexus, he outlines the importance of an interdisciplinary approach: “We call for a new, cross-cutting, and interdisciplinary approach to planning, design, construction, and long-term maintenance of urban nature. We suggest that design, construction, and maintenance should be aligned, driven by a design-and management vision that encompasses more than a definitive layout” (Randrup et al. 2020, 921).

planning must finally work on three dimensions, in height, on the surface and in the subsurface, to use all variables needed in an ecosystemic approach (Rueda 2019).

The struggle for the street The battleground for the Superblock’s transformations is the streets of Barcelona. A fight for changing space for movement into place for multiple uses. No less than 60 percent of the public space in Barcelona dominated by motorized traffic and by individualistic car use in particular (Ajuntament 2015). Barcelona wants to return these surfaces to the human scale, to the pedestrian and the cyclist, or even apart from movement, to fill the streets with life.

Ecosystemic urbanism A reinterpretation of the paradigmatic urban project (de Solà Morales 1987) of the earlier two decades, towards a more multidisciplinary approach, is exactly what urban planning critics called for at the beginning of the 2010s (Berrini and Colonetti 2010, Busquets 2011).

A subsequent generation of urban thinkers in Barcelona aspired to be on the cusp of this need for change. Guallart (2008) criticized how economic growth inevitably entails physical growth and how the global habitat is pushed towards a collapse from exhaustion by the machineries of consumption and appropriation of the environment and its scarce resources. As Barcelona’s city architect from 2011 to 2015, he propelled the Superblock concept from a concept to its first realization. Although it must be noted that, in addition to raising awareness about the need for a more balanced urban metabolism, he also surfed the wave of ‘smart city’ solutions. The first (unexecuted) version of the Poblenou Superblock was built on technology as one of the foundations of the concept.

Rueda, founder and director of Barcelona’s Ecology Agency until 2019 – a multidisciplinary city consortium of mobility, ecology and planning experts – advocates the need for ‘ecosystemic urbanism’ as a new paradigm, considering the city as “a complex ecosystem, the most complex humanity has created” (Rueda 2019, 136).

The challenge is to increase our capacity of resilience and preparedness by changing the rules of the game, obliged by the uncertainties of the future. Ecosystemic urbanism aspires to implement new tools for a new urban model, from a city scale to a neighbourhood scale. The concept is based on: one, a change of strategy of competition among cities, based on information and knowledge which involves, at the same time, the dematerialisation of the economy; two, a change of metabolic regime based on entropy instead of on excessive consumption of fossil energy and technology; and three, an accommodation of the laws of nature, where the exploitation of supporting systems does not exceed its carrying capacity and regeneration. Therefore, urban

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We could set up an extensive discourse about the polluting and unhealthy aspect of the car by emitting NOx and CO2, about the number of road casualties, or about excessive noise levels. But, Gössling made it clear that planners should be attentive to the affective dimension of car ownership and that “interventions against the car represent personal threats because they interfere with psychological needs, such as to feel safe and secure” (Gössling 2020, 445). He points out that it is more desirable to emphasise the health benefits of walking and cycling.

In many cities, reducing car traffic is done by making parking spaces immensely expensive, demarcating low-emission zones, or penalising car use through tax measures (Gössling 2020). However, these pejorative measures risk unequally affecting the more vulnerable in possession of older, polluting cars, or just exercising jobs that require car ownership.

In Barcelona, the battle is not about impacting habits, but effectively about converting space, from hard to soft use, from space for motorized traffic to space for slow mobility and liveability. Multiple examples of ad hoc created temporary measures taken during the corona crisis want to make you believe that it is not that difficult – just a matter of street paint and political guts. That is unfortunately contradicted by significant polarisations where the proof of the pudding has been in the eating.

To inspire engineers and designers, NACTO developed an ‘Urban Street Design Guide’, “with the explicit goal of creating a roadmap to proactively make streets safer, more multimodal, and supportive of dense, mixed-use urban development” (NACTO 2013, 38). The guide contains carefully conceived transformative sections, taking into account context, not exaggerated intensities and specific traffic flows, but always with a view to reducing individual car traffic, and promoting collective transport and slow mobility, cautiously combined with de-sealing of hard surfaces and adding urban vegetation.

Those insights are very much in agreement with Rouillard and Guiheux (2016), who

criticise how attractive door-to-door transport was given an unparalleled advantage in favour of car use in the 1960s and 1970s. In ‘Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism’, NACTO (2017) points out that eventual voluntaristic references to autonomous vehicles as a miracle solution will not help. Instead, it is equally important to strive for collective transport as a space-saving solution. The baseline is, therefore, ‘move people, not cars’. Another important principle is that technology is a tool, not the solution itself. For example, data-driven decision making, possibly in a collaboration between government and private companies, can be used to nudge private citizen’s operations towards the public good.

Fig. 2.3. Temporary mobility measures during the lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Balogh, Zoltán /EPA. Budapest has introduced 12 miles of temporary bike lanes that may be made permanent. 2020. Budapest. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/18/cleaner-and-greener-covid19-prompts-worlds-cities-to-free-public-space-of-cars Fig. 2.4. Temporary mobility measures during the lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Belga. De werken aan het fietspad in de Wetstraat startten vannacht. 2020. Brussels. https://www.demorgen.be/nieuws/francken-nadat-brussel-rijstrook-wetstraat-schrapt-voor-fietspad-kloofmet-vlaanderen-wordt-alsmaar-groter~bb650e0e/ Fig. 2.5. Street section design by NACTO. NACTO. The street illustrated below depicts a 116-foot roadway within a 164-foot right-of-way. 2020. https://nacto.org/wp-content/themes/sink_nacto/views/design-guides/retrofit/urban-street-design-guide/ images/boulevard/boulevard-1.jpg

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3. THE SUPERBLOCKS IN BARCELONA’S TRACK RECORD OF URBAN PLANNING THE SUPERBLOCK ARCHETYPE The Superblock archetype consists of an aggregation of three by three building blocks, forming a 400 by 400 meters car-free ‘island’ in the grid. The peripheral roads fringing the block stay open for motorised traffic. In contrast, the interior roads turn into a network of multimodal lanes and crossroads become squares, as places for human encounter. Nevertheless, access by car is not entirely excluded – every front door remains accessible by car – but the traffic flow is organised in such loops that it is only efficient for those who need to be on-site to drive into the Superblock. The classical street sections, with two or three road lanes are reduced to one narrow car lane, to the benefit of a multifunctional space stimulating slow mobility.

Fig. 3.1. The Superblock archetype: from car dominance to multiple transport modes. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Superblocks model. 2015. In Urban Mobility Plan of Barcelona 2013-2018. Barcelona: Agència d’Ecología Urbana de Barcelona.

The mobility aspect is prominent since the concept was first perpetuated in Barcelona’s Urban Mobility Plan (Ajuntament 2015), although that is only the most superficial layer of the idea. The concept was developed within the BCNEcología public consortium working on ecology, urban planning and mobility in a multidisciplinary way.

The goals go beyond mobility alone and include to revitalise streets and public spaces; to preserve biodiversity; to encourage social cohesion; to introduce new models of governance; to promote renewable energy; to reduce noise, air pollution and carbon footprint; and to adopt flexible solutions (UNDP 2016).

“Currently, 60% of the public space in the city is dedicated only to motor vehicles and to function as a transit area. With the Superblock program, ‘We fill the streets with life’. The implementation of superblocks in Barcelona proposes a transition in the way of managing, understanding, moving and experiencing the public space of Barcelona” (Ajuntament 2021 c).

The archetypal concept is grafted on the systemic grid structure of the ‘Eixample Cerdà’, offering rewarding advantages such as a highly rational basic structure, obvious chances of reproducibility, and symbiosis with the iconic span of the urban plan.

However, the city’s ambition explicitly goes beyond the Eixample alone. More incremental neighbourhoods such as Gràcia and El Born are considered forerunners, while suburbs such as Horta, Les Corts, and Sants are recently also being tackled. Anyhow, the city is fully aware that the roll-out of an archetype, bringing tangible changes in the daily experience of the residents, is not easy. The Superblocks will have to be strongly contextualized, both morphologically and in the implementation process, tailored to the place and context in the city (Rueda 2021).

Fig. 3.2. The Superblock archetype: initial principle of systemic spread. Ajuntament de Barcelona.

Superblocks model: multiple uses and functions. 2015. In Urban Mobility Plan of Barcelona 2013-2018.

Barcelona: Agència d’Ecología Urbana de Barcelona.

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Fig. 3.3 - 3.5. Tactical urbanism in the Poblenou Superblock. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Superilla del Poblenou. N.d. Barcelona. https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/superilles/en/node/121

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Fig. 3.6. Superblock crossroad design. Santiago, Jokin and Marta Sola, Leku Studio. Untitled. 2019. https:// www.archdaily.com/938244/superblock-of-sant-antoni-leku-studio Fig. 3.7. Sant Antoni Superblock crossroad and axes design. Santiago, Jokin and Marta Sola, Leku Studio.

Untitled. 2019. https://landscape.coac.net/superilla-sant-antoni Fig. 3.8. The Sant Antoni Superblock design language. Santiago, Jokin and Marta Sola, Leku Studio.

Untitled. 2019. https://landscape.coac.net/superilla-sant-antoni Fig. 3.9. An area of 23,709 m2 of public space for pedestrians. Dias, Maria. Untitled. 2019. https://www. escofet.com/en/projects/streetscape/superilla-sant-antoni

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Fig. 3.10 - 3.14. Tactical urbanism transforming the Sant Antoni neighbourhood. Del Rio Bani. Untitled. 2019. Barcelona. http://delriobani.com/projects/superilla-sant-antoni/

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TACTICAL URBANISM: BRANDING THE STRATEGY A conscious and promoted part of the city’s strategy In contrast to cities meticulously seeking broad support for their sustainable urban projects, Barcelona has the ambition to turn the dream into action in the short term, with fast and concrete realisations. The city consciously opts for ‘tactical urbanism’ as a branded strategy (Ajuntament 2021 c). Albeit, the first achievements show how the city alternates tactical interventions in a seducing dance with more high-end realisations. With quick-win interventions at little cost, combined with glimpses of the end-phase design, the city aims to make people imagine already today about what the future might look like. City experts, as Rueda (2021) insist restively that ‘tactical urbanism’ is the only approach capable of tackling challenges such as air quality, noise pollution, health and heat stress due to global warming, with the necessary sense of urgency and at a sufficiently large scale.

Low-tech urbanism, ephemerality and reversibility Street painting in bright colours, provisional street furniture constructions and tree-boxes do the job. The first tactical realisations in Poblenou and Sant Antoni show how the interventions do not require any investment in large infrastructure. Neither is the demolition of buildings or massive development needed. In that sense, the Superblocks consist of ‘low-tech urbanism’ (López 2020). The Sant Antoni Superblock designer Leku Studio speaks of “a flexible and adaptive design capable of assimilating modifications and variations derived from testing and experimentation of the implemented solutions” (Leku Studio 2019, 1).

The city indicates the reversibility of the measures as its interpretation of ‘testing new governance models’ and ‘adopting flexible solutions’. The condition of ephemerality is stated to be an explicit aim of the Superblocks: “At any time, superblocks can simply be opened for car traffic or returned to the previous state of the area” (UNDP 2016).

That is, however, a very ambiguous statement. A return to the past situation in any of the Superblocks would be astonishing. The city seems to be convinced about the added value of the concept and is preparing to extend it over the entire city (De Boeck 2021 a).

International exposure Barcelona sees tactical urbanism as an opportunity to once again take up a pioneering role in innovative urbanism, in the tradition of its glorious successes of the last

decades, with the Olympic waterfront renewal as a spearhead. Meanwhile, tactical urbanism is applied in various cities worldwide and even got a massive boost since the Covid-19 pandemic invites cities to provide extra breathing space by cutting off lanes, entire streets, and even whole neighbourhoods.

Yet, Barcelona’s Superblocks go around the world as an example. Various interviewees indicate international exposure as one of the essential motives for a conscious branding of the strategy. Paris makes a similar move as a ’15 minutes-city’, and London as a ‘National Park City’. “It’s about being the first with a concept. For the second and the third, the return on investment is much lower”, states an attentive observer (Informant 2021 2). Barcelona wants to continue on the momentum and not disappoint, as the attention attracts investments and resources. People want to be part of the inspirational success story. Like a boomerang effect, the argument starts to count locally for residents to participate in the narrative: “If the whole world looks at us with admiration, who are we to act against it?” (Informant 2021 4).

Nevertheless, ‘tactical urbanism’ is not the anchor point making the Superblock stand or fall. It is a part of the strategy, which grew out of proportion due to the branding and consequently large exposure. Tactical urbanism is part of the façade, with nevertheless a defining impact on the implementation process and its resulting perception, for a city heading towards the myth of the sustainable city.

THE URBAN PROJECT IN BARCELONA From acupunctural urbanism to strategical conversions of urban zones in decay To situate the relationship of the Superblocks with the Eixample, and more broadly throughout the city, I aim to place the project in the city’s track record of urban development. In recent writing for a study assignment on ‘Theory and practice of Urbanism since 1945’, I summarized the framework in which the Superblocks arose, “Franco’s dictatorship and its absolute focus on Madrid as Spain’s monocentric capital ended in 1976. Berrini and Colonetti (2010) explain how Barcelona’s urban transformation began with the advent of democracy. In the previous decades, the typical large-scaled modernist urban approach did never really breakthrough in Barcelona, as it did in so many other European cities. In the aftermath of modernism, when Barcelona just appeared on the scene, Paris had already built its notorious cultural projects, making use of substantial amounts of statal resources. London, in its turn, had started to cooperate intensely with the private sector to, as an example, turn the Docklands into a worldwide leading financial capital. Thus, a rich but relatively recent history of urban transformations precedes the Superblocks concept. However, during this period, the city went through several nuanced stages within the paradigm of the urban project. After the acupunctural but successful interventions in public

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Fig. 3.11. Barcelona’s industrialised coastline before the 1992 Olympic Games. Aeroleoblog. Cuesta imaginar que antes, los terrenos de la Vila Olímpica eran así. N.d. Source: http://aeroleoblog.blogspot. com/2016/07/24-transformaciones-de-barcelona-en-1992.html Fig. 3.12. The Olympic port area. Barcelona’s coastline after the 1992 Olympic Games. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Untitled. N.d. Source: https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/santmarti/es/el-distrito-y-sus-barrios/ el-distrito-y-sus-barrios Fig. 3.13. Moll de Fusta, after the transformation designed by de Solà Morales. Summoning. Untitled. N.d. https://summoning.ru/images/notes/barcelona/83.jpg Fig. 3.14. Moll de Fusta, before its transformation. Aeroleoblog. Unas décadas antes, la misma plaza. N.d. http://aeroleoblog.blogspot.com/2016/07/24-transformaciones-de-barcelona-en-1992.html

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space during the 1980s, the city discovered its brownfields and areas in decay as well-located potential new places of centrality. The Moll de la Fusta, designed by de Solà Morales, is an early example of how projects move from structural to civic instruments. Along the coast, the former highway became a square, a walking and meeting place, a balcony of the city, a polytechnic instrument, as meant by Mumford (1934). The projects along the coastline, on the Montjuïc hill and at the Diagonal’s end, in favour of the 1992 Olympic Games, put Barcelona firmly on the European map of urbanism” (De Boeck 2021 a, 9).

A producer of the recognisable and omnipresent street furniture in the city, growing in symbiosis with Barcelona’s upgrading of public space, proclaims how the event caused the big turnaround: “1992, the year that changed everything. The value of the past. Fundició Dúctil Benito was created in 1992, the same year that the city of Barcelona hosted its Olympic Games, forever remembered as the spearhead of economic growth that marked an era” (Benito 2021).

In the 2000s, subsequent upgrades of the Fórum area, the River Besos and the Sagrera station continued the strategy of urban projects at the northeast end of the coastline.

The series of sensational projects frequently kept the city in the spotlight of urban planning critics. The ambition to continue surfing on this international recognition and the associated market value and funding, will also prove to be a driving factor for the Superblocks (Informant 2, 4 2021).

The urban conversions of the 1990s and 2000s responded to de Solà Morales’ (1987) five criteria of the ‘urban project’: a complex interaction and multifunctionality, an intermediate scale, the investment in collective use, territorial effects outside the area of intervention and the commitment to host urban architecture.

The Superblocks, as an urban transformation, fit surprisingly well in the row, with characteristics as multifunctionality, collective use and territorial effects. However, the commitment to host urban architecture is explicitly not a goal. At least in the long term, the scale might be intermediate for now but aims to expand from ‘low-tech’ interventions to nothing less than a city-wide impact.

measure and thus it is not just a matter of applying architecture and urban design measures but also of unravelling the multifaceted nature of the unbundled city’ (Berrini and Colonetti 2010, 143).

They state that the approach should include four key issues: complexity, intensity, urbanity and urban metabolism. With the Superblocks, Barcelona aims to deploy an urban project which interacts more intensely with the complex, compact and densifying city. Busquets (2011) explains in a parallel narrative the need to move beyond the existing paradigm and beyond the old debate of the ‘Plan’ versus the ‘Project’. He advocates rethinking practices: contextual, identifying complexities, committing to emerging trends, and a bottom-up approach depending on multiple actors. In this zeitgeist within urban planning theory, the Superblocks are conceived, breaking into Barcelona’s Urban Mobility Plan as from 2015 (Ajuntament 2015). The concept integrates multiple strategies as proposed by Busquets: a mixed-use of functions, modulating mobility and restructuring the city with new centralities” (De Boeck 2021 a, 10).

THE SUPERBLOCKS’ SYMBIOSIS WITH CERDÀ’S EIXAMPLE Polycentrality “The Superblocks mean further refining the city’s street plan, not hierarchising on the principal axes’ level such as the Diagonal or the Gran Vía, but concentrating on the finest branches in the tree. Due to its nature as a homogenous and expandable tissue, there are relatively few exceptional anchor points as places of centrality. The search for centrality remains an ambiguous issue in Barcelona’s Superblocks concept. While the Olympic twin towers, the Fórum, and Nouvel’s Gloriès tower are prominent attraction poles, the Superblocks have a different aim. Instead, the goal is a low-profile conception of centralities, at the scale and the immediate neighbourhood’s benefit. The touristic tsunami proved to be choking the city’s identity and the residents’ daily life, besides sharply increasing housing prices. Creating another popular and crowded square is the least of intentions. The alternative view on a modest centrality offers a complementary layer on Barcelona’s grid in accordance with Cerdá’s initial purposes” (De Boeck 2021 a, 10).

The call for a new generation of urban projects “When in the 2010s, after 20 years of intense investments, all the opportunities for brownfield conversions seemed to be exploited, urban planning theorists call for the creation of a new generation of urban models: ‘The city of today depends on a much broader array of multidisciplinary

Equality and monoculture “As a child of the 1848 revolution, Cerdà became an urban planner with socialist ideas, convinced that his uniform grid would lead to more equality in the city. The plan for the grid aims for uniformity and expandability. There

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are relatively few remarkable anchor points as places of centrality, which aim to be an absolute attraction point, in the style of Robert Moses’ Central Park in New York or Hausmann’s Boulevard nodes in Paris. Instead, the grid aims for a mosaic of modest knots, creating a fluid patchwork ‘tissue’ from a bird’s-eye view (Sennet 2019).

But even when Cerdà used equality and health arguments in its design, Sennet (2019) argues that the Cerdà grid is vulnerable in its monocultural nature and a potential source of social epidemics, poverty or mental and physical disease.

The Superblocks aim to provide more biodiversity, not only in ecologic terms, but in moving and staying, in grey and green, in slow and speedy tempos, in different functions for space and place. Answering a question about the trend of ‘sustainable’ urban projects, Low (2020) warns of the elitist and sometimes not even sustainable nature of those projects. She refers, among other projects, to the prestigious river conversion in the neighbouring city of Valencia. Sustainability as a driver has occasionally proven to be reducing the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1968) and the unrestricted access to public space (Low 2006). However, there are reasons to believe that a higher degree of distributional fairness is involved in Barcelona’s intentions, as will be argued not that much by considering the implementation process or the level of citizen’s participation, but instead by the intrinsic purpose of equality in the Cerdà plan. The Superblocks aim to take advantage of the systemic opportunities of the grid as a carrier for an evenly spread intervention” (De Boeck 2021 a, 11).

From monotechnic to polytechnic places and spaces “Due to the complete domination of public space by car traffic and an overtime closing up of the inner courtyards, initially intended as an alternative vehiclefree network, the grid has become a monotechnic space. For Mumford (1934), technics does not refer merely to technology. Within the broader definition of the Greek tekhne, the term also includes art, skill, and ingenuity. With Sennet’s (2019) terminology, the nature of technics depends on the interaction of the physical ville – the built urban environment, and the mental cité – the community in all its complexity.

The grid’s tissue has been demoted to a monotechnic space, almost exclusively dominated by the constant flux of cars, going up on one street and down again in the next one, and so on. The bevelled corners are rare multifunctional places for social encounter, popular spots for a bakery or a typical coffee bar, although simultaneously used for parking space and garbage storage. The Superblock concept is once again striving for a more polytechnic space. The car is not entirely banned, but reduced to one mode of transport next to many and space is shared as a polyfunctional meeting space.

Fig. 3.15. The 1859 Cerdà plan. Cerdà i Sunyer, Ildefons. Plano de los alrededores de la ciudad de Barcelona.

1859. Museu d’Historia de la Ciutat, Barcelona. https://barcelonarchitecturewalks.com/barcelona-inventsurbanisation/ Fig. 3.16. Contemporary aerial view on the Eixample, the historical centre and the coastal zone. Ceria, Claudio. Barcelona Cerdà Grid. N.d. http://2030palette.org/street-networks/ Fig. 3.17 - 3.18. Two major axes through the Eixample: Avinguda Diagonal and Gran Vía de Les Corts Catalanes. Pictures by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 3.19. Evolution of the Eixample building block from 1859 to 1972. Author unknown. The infilling of Cerdà’s Manzana. 1972. Construcción de la Ciudad, N° 9, 1972. In (Wynn 1979).

Fig. 3.20. Building block in the Eixample district in 2016. Alija, Orbon. Barcelona aerial photo. 2016. https:// www.istockphoto.com/fr/photo/photo-a%C3%A9rienne-de-barcelone-gm611763818-105271157

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Fig. 3.21 - 3.23. Jardins de Càndida Pérez - passage and inner courtyard in Sant Antoni. Picture by Author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 3.24 - 3.25. Jardins de Tete Montoliu - passage and inner courtyard in Sant Antoni. Picture by Author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 3.26 - 3.27. Jardins de Maria Matilde Almendros - passage and inner courtyard in Sant Antoni. Picture by Author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 3.28. Interior d’illa - accessible through a supermarket on Comte Borell street, Sant Antoni. Picture by Author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 3.29 - 3.32. Green inner courtyard in new housing project, connected to the Poblenou Superblock. Picture by Author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

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Building on Mumford’s (1938) notions, the street mutates from a grey space of flux and movement into a green place worth staying in for a while. Ideally, the Superblocks transform the city into a biotechnic symbiosis between human nature and the built space. However, even when the intervention does increase liveability as an incipient notion of biotechnics, the Cerdà grid will never fully incorporate the intimacy of a medieval city centre. Nor are the tactical Superblock interventions bringing back any significant proportion of natural values within the cultural cityscape” (De Boeck 2021 a, 7).

Scarce green inner courtyards - public and semi-public gradients “In the Sant Antoni case, as much as 23,709 m² of extra public space is now dedicated to pedestrians, without using any m² of valuable developable building area. Is the Superblock concept the recipe to avoid monoculture and to bring polytechnics? Can the Superblock concept be seen as a curative answer to the historical mistreatment of Cerdà’s original idea of open blocks with semipublic inner courtyards? Aibar describes the unfortunate evolution: ‘In 1872, 90 percent of the buildings in the Eixample (about 1,000) were violating the building bylaws. Already in 1890, buildings occupied 70 percent of the block surface on the average-instead of the original 50 percent. The situation was worsened by successive building bylaws, and in 1958 the building volume of the block, that according to Cerda’s bylaws should not exceed 67,200 m3, reached 294,771.63 m³’ (Aibar 1997).

Fig. 3.33. Accessible inner courtyards in the Eixample. Marc Nadal Agustí. Interiors d’illa oberts a l’actualitat al districte de l’Eixample. 2016. In Projectes resilients en un entorn urbà : Accions a les Superilles de l’Eixample. Thesis by Marc Nadal Agustí. June 2016.

Fig. 3.34. Potential of Barcelona’s inner courtyards in the Eixample. N/a. Van Superilla naar Supercruïlla.

2018. Barcelona. https://metropool.jimdofree.com/2018/08/02/van-superilla-naar-supercruïlla/

In opposition to the thesis that Superblocks are a perfect cure, de Solà Morales (1992) advocates not to value public space on its quantity, size or symbolic meaning. Collective space is at its best when it comes to succeeding the dichotomy between private and public space. The magic of the hidden passages in the Raval part of the old centre evokes what could be possible. A walk among the orange trees in the Hospital Sant Creu’s inner gardens, which connects Carrer de l’Hopital with Carrer del Carme, inspires new kinds of semi-public space in the city. The Superblocks are surgical interventions that cannot literally bring back the initially intended qualities. The real deal of intervening in Cerdà’s grid would be to gradually attack the closeness and evolve back to the initial plans of open blocks and semi-public accessible courtyards, an intermediary network of connections and squares, as an independent tissue across the grid” (De Boeck 2021 a, 7-8).

The high and increasing value of private real estate makes the assignment difficult, but not without a chance. The city is paying increasing attention to the added value of typical small ‘passages’ (Ville en Mouvement 2021) and the preservation of the remaining green inner courtyards in the Eixample. The opportunities for more nature and biodiversity in the network are substantial, with a virtually available surface area of 1,500 m² per building block (Rueda 2019).

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4. THE SUPERBLOCK’S IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS: THE PATH TOWARDS THE MYTH. EL BORN AND GRÀCIA, EMBLEMATIC SUPERBLOCKS AVANT-LA-LETTRE. El Born When it comes to making car-free public space in Barcelona, El Born is commonly mentioned as its earliest iconic reference (Ajuntament 2015, Boot 2018, López 2020).

The neighbourhood forms the transition between the medieval town and the Barceloneta harbour area. After its pacification as from 1993, the district quickly developed into a hip area, particularly popular with young people and tourists (Hu 2016).

A mechanism that, as will be shown later in this thesis, will repeatedly occur after similar projects in the urban fabric of Barcelona. The car-free zone was partly redeveloped and further expanded in 2018 to include the renovated Mercat del Born, one of Barcelona’s emblematic Mediterranean market buildings. Anyhow, across Europe and beyond, the freeing parts of historical city centres of cars is nothing exceptional in the last decades.

Gràcia The case of the Gràcia neighbourhood, on the other hand, is situated well outside the historic city walls. Before the exponential growth of Barcelona in the 19th century, Gràcia was still an independent and morphologically separate municipality. The implementation of the Eixample, on Barcelona’s plain between the coast and the hills, formally and definitively annexed Gràcia to the city of Barcelona. Nevertheless, the neighbourhood’s character has stubbornly remained very particular ever since. The intricate structure of small streets and squares is evidently appealing to residents and visitors alike. Due to its morphology, the city district has always been relatively traffic-calm.

An additional effort was made between 2003 and 2006 to upgrade the asphalt squares and streets to high-quality pavements and more robust green infrastructure. Traffic was banned in an ever-growing car-free area of the district. As in many pacification processes, there was initially quite a bit of protest against the lack of direct car access and parking, but the car-free zone quickly evolved into a highly appreciated place with flourishing businesses. High housing prices indicate both the quality of life in the neighbourhood and the strong gentrification effects that many such transformation projects entail.

Today, Gràcia is framed as an antagonistic component to the Superblock concept. Al-

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though the most recent Superblock interventions focus on a re-thinking of the Eixample, Gràcia proves that the idea does not have to be limited to the grid. Similarly, pacification projects in the Hortà and Les Corts districts emphasise the ambition to roll out a broadly distributed, city-wide concept.

A critical note should be made on the ecological value of Gràcia’s transformation of public space. The amount of green space in the area was already limited to 3.5 m² per inhabitant, well below the minimum of 9 m² set by the WHO (Ajuntament 2013, Bausells 2016). Field observation shows that after the transformation, a low percentage of the paved squares and streets were made permeable and the addition of vegetation is only sporadic and relatively sparse. In the chapter on the achievement of nature and biodiversity goals, I go deeper into to the general poor completion of planting areas and its causes, such as the harsh urban conditions, but also inadequate planting quality and unstructured maintenance.

TRIAL AND ERROR: A TIMELINE OF ITERATIONS BETWEEN CONCEPT AND REALISATIONS El Born and certainly Gràcia are widely perceived as successful, even award-winning pacification projects (Hu 2016, Boot 2018). On the other hand, they are also notorious for the paradoxical side effects of ‘touristification’ and rent increases after becoming more qualityful neighbourhoods. What if we could spread the qualities of liveable streets more equally throughout the city? The Superblocks embody the idea of giving benefit to every citizen at short notice, no matter if they live in an exclusive, or forgotten, area of the city.

The archetypal concept is straightforward. But how exactly can it be spread across the city? How fast and at what rhythm? How temporary or permanent are interventions to achieve this? Are predetermined goals finally being achieved? And how can nullifying compromises be avoided during the roll-out?

This chapter analyses how the archetypal model has evolved into Barcelona’s contemporary application of the trajectory toward the sustainable city, composing a mix of tactical interventions, realisations with a definitive character, acupunctural and more systemically dispersed ambitions. A timeline charts the evolution of the concept and its systematic implementation.

Furthermore, the answers to the previous questions are determined by a permanently balanced interplay between three actors: one, public opinion, who as ultimate bene-

ficiaries support or protest the project; two, the politicians that not only merely represent, but can also inspire and direct the public; and three, the experts, linked to the city or universities, who, regardless of the issues of the day, try to formulate a vision for the future and monitor and evaluate the effects of the implementation. I will elaborate on the role of these actors in each of the interventions and ultimately estimate how the level of ambition and the qualitative results of this trajectory is influenced by the interacting interplay between public opinion, political mechanisms and expert findings.

POBLENOU: THE ARCHETYPAL SUPERBLOCK’S CONTROVERSIAL TAKE-OFF Context

Fig. 4.1. Sequence of Superblock interventions. Foroll, Eduard. Els Superilles que venen.

2017. Barcelona. https://metropool.jimdofree.com/2018/08/02/van-superilla-naarsupercruïlla/

The Superblock in Poblenou was the first, and until today remarkably also the last realisation in the purest archetypal form of the concept: an aggregation of three by three building blocks, forming a 400 by 400 meters car-free ‘island’ in the grid. The project zone is located in the Sant Martí part of the Eixample, a former industrial area forming a second belt behind the coastline. The area was redeveloped since the 1990s, in the slipstream of the ‘Olympic’ conversion, providing a large share of low-income housing and mixed with office buildings for technology companies (Hu 2016).

The transformation unfolds in a seemingly randomly choice of nine blocks, enclosed between Tànger and Pallars streets north and south, and between Badagoz and Llacuna streets on the east and west side of the Superblock.

Decision making: the politics of the implementation process What few sources mention is that Superblock’s final location was not the first option. Under Mayor Xavier Trias and city architect Vicente Guallart, all preparations were made to implement the first Superblock in the nine blocks located right next to the current Superblock. Also, the narrative behind the concept differed significantly. The policy of Trias’ centre-right party Convergencia i Unió (CiU) saw an opportunity to upgrade the commercial appearance of the lively commercial area around the Rambla del Poblenou. Trias was seen as a supporter of the numerous “plazas duras” or “hard squares” in Barcelona, loved by shopowners, and hated by ecologists (Informant 2 2021).

Although that contradiction dates back to when people saw wild greenery in the city as an expression of disorder, with high maintenance costs or neglect. In the meantime, that idea has become obsolete for more and more people, as described by Randrup et al. in their analysis of the nexus ecology community: “In general, cultural diversity in people’s preferences for natural areas is underdeveloped

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2017: 87% voting against the Poble Nou Superblock in a referendum (26% turnout)

TIMELINE OF BARCELONA’S FIRST SUPERBLOCK IMPLEMENTATIONS

2015 Elections Mayor Colau - BEC

2015 POBLE NOU

STUDY PHASE archetypal Superblock

2018

2017

2016

CONCEPT DESIGN BCNecología (PMU 2013-18)

2019 Elections Mayor Colau - BEC

October 2017 Catalan Independency Referendum

STUDY tactical phase

REALISATION tactical phase

STUDY RE-LOCATION end phase archetypal Superblock

STUDY end phase

STUDY end phase

Political protests against the Consell de Cent intervention

STUDY tactical phase

CONSELL DE CENT tactical phase Participation process

FOUR SQUARES end phase

Public consortium BCN Ecología - Director Salvador Rueda

EIXAMPLE scale jump?

Next term of office

Mayor Ada COLAU City Architect Xavier MATILLA

Mayor Ada COLAU City Architect Ton SALVADÓ

Foundation BCN Ecología // Public ‘Superblock office’ + experts

2018 Sant Antoni

2021 Eixample

2019 Sant Antoni COVID-19

2017 Poble Nou

SANT ANTONI end phase ?

Publication winners Design Competition

DESIGN COMPETITION

2015 Archetype

2023 - 27

EXPANSION tactical phase

REALISATION tactical phase

Participatory process tactical phase

EIXAMPLE

Mayor Xavier TRIAS City Architect Vicente GUALLART

2022

2021

POBLE NOU end phase ?

STUDY tactical phase REALISATION end phase market area

2020 Replacement City architect and discontinuation BCN Ecología

RENOVATION Sant Antoni Market

SANT ANTONI

2019

2013

LONDON NATIONAL PARK CITY

2019

2016 What if we made London a National Park City?

(Raven-Ellison 2013)

All of the leading candidates to become Mayor of London announce their support for London to become a National Park City.

Launch of the National Park City on July 22, 2019

delay elections

Mayor Sadiq Kahn 2016-2020/21

Election of Anne Hidalogo’s ‘Paris En Commun’ 5 percent of the city budget will be dedicated to participatory projects

How to refine goals, strategies and actions, building upon the realisation of societal and political appropriation?

Mayor Sadiq Kahn 2021-2025

2020

2014

PARIS 15 MINUTES CITY

2021 worldwide ‘temporary’ tactical transformations of public space

Upgrade to 25% of the city’s investments, 2751 realisations in the period 2014 - 2021.

Droit de cité, de la “ville-monde” à la ville du quart d’heure”.

(Moreno 2020)

increasing importance attached to proximity to the detriment of mobility

Mayor Anne Hidalgo 2014-2020

How to coordinate governmental and participatory projects into a coherent spatio-temporal translation of ‘hyperproximity’?

Mayor Anne Hidalgo 2020-2026

Graph. 4.1. Timeline produced by author. Included images: Second and final location choice of the Poblenou Superblock (2016). Ajuntament de Barcelona. Untitled. 2017. https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/superilles/en/node/121 Anecdotal variety of tactical interventions in the Poblenou Superblock. Picture by author. 2021. Barcelona.

‘Tactical phase’ design in front of the Sant Antoni market. Del Rio Bani. Superilla Sant Antoni. 2019. Barcelona. https://landscape.coac.net/superilla-sant-antoni ‘End phase’ design at Comte Borell street. Ravetllat Arquitectura. Mercat de Sant Antoni. 2018. Barcelona. https://ravetllatarquitectura.com/Mercat-de-Sant-Antoni Winning design for the Consell de Cent / Girona Square. UTE Under Project Lab, S.C.P. + BOPBA Arquitectura, S.L.P. Superescocell [Super Tree Pit]. March 2021. In Ajuntament de Barcelona 2021 (d).

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(Kloek et al. 2017), but Kowarik (2013, 2018) described the need for diversity of ecological and aesthetic characteristics of urban nature, ranging from pristine wilderness to spontaneously emerged wilderness. Such studies show that biodiverse urban nature tends to be aesthetically pleasing in a broader sense than ‘cultured’ managed nature (Fischer et al. 2018)” (In Randrup et al. 2020, 923).

In addition, the concept received a ‘smart city’ touch, and the name ‘intelligent superblock’ saw the light with attention to energy production, better lighting and traffic lights controlled by sensors. The ecologists in the city council disagreed and stated that, without a primary focus on mobility and environment, the project was no longer worthy of the name ‘Superblock’ (Márquez 2014). Although the ‘smart city’ story is no longer explicitly present in the recent framing of the Superblock, it still has a certain impact today. The city decided recently that the Superblock in Poblenou will be the first place in the city where a 5G mobile network is to be tested. The technology will ‘host projects based on new technologies to become a research, entrepreneurship and 5G industry development facility in our city’ (Ajuntament 2019 a, 1).

We will never know what the project would have looked like as conceived under Xavier Trias because the new Mayor Ada Colau radically changed course in 2015 and adjusted both the location and the project’s narrative. In an article about the ‘struggle for authority’ in implementing urban transformational adaptation, Zografos writes: Colau’s election marked the first time in the city’s history since the transition to democracy in 1978 that municipal elections were won by a non-traditional, grassroots-based political party, headed by a female leader who questioned real estate speculation, business-centered decisions, and the city’s orientation toward a commercial, growth-oriented model of urban development (Zografos et al. 2020, 7).

The focus once again shifted entirely to the original values, such as less car traffic, a better living environment and more social cohesion. To the surprise of friend and foe, the location was shifted from the trading area to a more anonymous site at the last minute, aiming to serve the liveability of a typical resident.

Especially in Poblenou, the political game was played hard. At least four political parties actively surfed on the resistance of a large part of the residents against the intervention.

“The political groups of PDeCat, ERC, Cs and PP, in the opposition of the Barcelona City Council, have coincided this Monday in demanding that the government of Mayor Ada Colau ‘listens’ to the neighbours who reject the Poblenou superblock project, according to the results of the neighbourhood consultation” (originally in Spanish, La Vanguardia 2017, 1).

It did not help that Ada Colau’s minority cabinet lost the support of the left-independentist party Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) in turmoil created by the referendum on Catalan independence. While ERC still voted for precarious tolerance to a left bloc in the designation of Colau, the Mayor now suddenly became politically isolated.

Fig. 4.2. Relocation of the Poblenou Superblock between 2015 and 2016. Processed by author. May 2021.

Fig. 4.3. First location choice of the Poblenou Superblock (2015). Author unknown. In September 2016 the superblock controversy of Poblenou began. 2016. https://www.oirealtor.com/noticias-inmobiliarias/theunstoppable-superblock-model-will-transform-all-barcelona/ Fig. 4.4. Second and final location choice of the Poblenou Superblock (2016). Ajuntament de Barcelona.

Untitled. 2017. https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/superilles/en/node/121

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Fig. 4.5. design visualizations for the Poblenou Superblock. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Untitled. 2017. Barcelona. https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/superilles/en/node/121

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The controversy that followed the decision, fueled by both public outcry and political opposition, was enormous, to the extent that the polarisation would determine the entire follow-up trajectory of the Barcelona Superblocks.

Public protest, support and participation While the importance of participation was extensively described in the city’s decision to implement the Superblocks, the public’s involvement was very limited in the case of Poblenou. In February 2015, shortly before the elections, the city presented the Superblock at the ‘Bilbao’ site. In September 2016, the adjacent ‘Badajoz’ location suddenly appeared. After a public presentation and two work sessions with a so-called ‘follow-up committee’, the new mobility process was pushed through in January 2017, after merely four months, materialised by street paintings and tree boxes as “tactical interventions” (Ajuntament 2021 c). According to an informal conversation with a researcher, the new administration pushed the project at the new location, in a topdown decision, before residents properly realised what was going on (Informant 2).

In a referendum on the Superblock, promoted shortly after the realisation, by the ‘Plataforma d’Afectats of the Superilla de Poblenou’, 87 percent of the 1,739 participants voted against the concept (La Vanguardia 2017, Caiati 2019). Despite this, since the turnout of the referendum was limited to only 26 percent, and knowing that supporters of the Superblock had called for a boycott, the result of the referendum was pushed aside, and the project continued.

In an assessment entitled ‘five models of social innovation’ (Caiati 2019), the reasons for the protest are detected as diverse and related to insufficient consultation, changes in social life, and the thwarting of car use: “Citizens and their associations denounce the lack of security in the nocturnal hours (it becomes a desert area only frequented by young people who drink on the streets) and mobility problems, as well as a hasty and little consensual application of the pilot test. Moreover, the project has caused a sharp drop in merchants’ turnover. Finally, the resistance is due to the concentration of traffic, unchanged in quantity and nature by the unchanged habits of people who continue to use the car (using now the perimeter streets) and the lack of places for the sacred rite of parking” (Caiati 2019, 55).

As in many cities, reclaiming the streets to the detriment of car use, the car lobby plays a significant role in opposition to the plans. The ‘Royal Automobile Club of Catalonia’, an organisation relying on one million members, is critical. The president welcomes the city’s decision to test in a relatively less-trafficked area and draws attention to the less positive effects:

“Superblocks, if applied across the city, would significantly limit road capacity for vehicles without reducing the actual number of vehicles to the same extent.

“There would be a considerable increase of congestion, which is the situation that produces more pollution,” he said. “It is true that there are areas that will lose vehicular traffic, but it is also true that this traffic would eventually move to other roads and other districts, leading to a strong division between winning roads and losing roads” (Hu 2016).

However, it is certainly not true that the people of Poblenou were unanimously against the project. On the contrary, pointing out public support for the project, testimonials speak of a reasonably broad and structural appropriation by the actual residents (Informant 2 2021). The ‘Col·lectiu Superilla Poblenou’, active on Facebook since October 2016, has over 1,000 supporters and claims to ‘live, believe and support a sustainable, cultural and social urbanistic reality’ (Facebook.com/SuperillaP9, September 17, 2020). Until recently (May 2021), photos of vivid and well-attended activities are still voluntaristically shared.

To conclude this part, the result of the radical and rapid transformation created a fierce controversy and polarisation between proponents and opponents, which still weighs on the broader project. Before the realisation of Poblenou, Rueda was still convinced that a lesson learned from earlier superblocks was that initial opposition gave way to acceptance, in part because of a growing consensus about the benefits. No one has sued the city to remove a superblock. “Now we know that the main problem is the resistance to change that occurs at the beginning of the implementation of the superblocks.” (Hu 2016, 1) Roberts (2019) assembled a few testimonies of observers doubting if the Superblocks will ever have a chance to succeed: “For José Mansilla, an urban anthropologist at the University of Barcelona, the problem with the plan is that it’s too prescriptive and top-down. Spaces should be created from the bottom up, by the people, he says, not simply presented to them. They will rebel. When I ask him about the larger plan, he breaks into English for the first time in our conversation. ‘Never is gonna happen. I say never? Never. 500 [superblocks]? Out of your mind.’

‘It’s impossible,’ says Jordi Campins, the citizen crusader against superblocks.

‘You can’t do this, even if you have consensus.’” (Roberts 2019, §33-34).

Nevertheless, Colau was re-elected shortly after these statements, and the Superblocks are steadily continuing their momentum. However, it is clear that, since the problematic start at Poblenou, the controversy undoubtedly will have an impact on the speed, nature and thoroughness of the latter implementation process.

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Fig. 4.6. Transformation of a former crossroad in the Poblenou Superblock. Picture by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

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Observations and resulting spatial characteristics and social interactions Materialisation An observation of the Poblenou Superblock reveals a typical ephemeral externalisation of tactical urbanism, in an - you could critically call it ‘anecdotic’ - composition of creative interventions. An experimenting collection of playgrounds, sports tracks, benches and terraces fill the voids created by the sudden absence of the previously ever-present car flows. Somehow, the frequent repetition of identical tree tubs and benches forms a simple but quite recognisable visual language, branding a feeling of ‘place’ (Mumford 1938) throughout the Superblock space.

Overall, the whole remains a mainly paved impression, except the black round tree tubs, adding strikingly little value of greening, permeability or biodiversity in the city. A limited number of side-streets give an impression of the future picture with high-quality pavements and somewhat larger planting areas. However, in the city’s communication, no mention is made of a complete definitive layout of the zone for the time being. Who knows, the Superblock will remain the iconic first birthplace of the concept for a long time to come?

Social interactions Three crossroads have been transformed more extensively into fully-fledged squares.

It is remarkable how these places, more centrally in the island, with the most impactful design, are also the most crowded ones, with a strikingly lively result, even on regular weekdays. The more remote elongated facilities along the ends of the Superblock just as well return the space to the residents, with similar technical interventions, but evolve much less into really consumed meeting space.

Especially in the central crossroads, the new dynamics involve rather fancy food and bar terraces. Despite some families with playing children, in my observations, the street life does not particularly radiate a very local, popular or diverse atmosphere.

However, Honey-Rosés (2019) did not uncover clear evidence for gentrification effects.

One of the observations he could make is, that the commercial Rambla street, in the adjacent block where the Superblock was initially planned by the previous government, still remains the place with the most vital social interactions.

Viewed from the larger scale of the city, or the Eixample, or even from the perspective of Poblenou as a small city district, the 400 by 400 meters Superblock remains an acupunctural intervention. Nevertheless, it is a highly symbolic project. The city council realises the first step of its bigger plan, imagining what becomes possible when intervening at the scale of the citizen, to the disadvantage of motorised traffic. Therefore, the precedent value is high, making Poblenou’s Superblock the war front of a larger battle for the future of the city’s public space.

Fig. 4.7. Signs in opposition to the Poblenou Superblock. David Roberts. Across from the Poblenou superblock, signs in opposition. N.d. Barcelona. https://www.vox.com/energy-andenvironment/2019/4/11/18273896/barcelona-spain-politics-superblocks Fig. 4.8. Event in support of the Poblenou Superblock. Col·lectiu Superilla Poblenou. 4 years Poblenou Superblock. September 22, 2020. https://www.facebook.com/SuperillaP9/ photos/a.269351580128333/1091087207954762/

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Fig. 4.9 - 4.13. Anecdotal variety of sport facilities, playgrounds and spaces for human encounters in the Poblenou Superblock. Picture by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 4.14. Impression of ‘end phase’ materialisation in the Poblenou Superblock. Picture by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

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SANT ANTONI: AGILE CONCEPT SHIFT TO THE SUPERBLOCK 2.0 Context As a next phase in the process, the Sant Antoni Superblock is located on the opposite side of the old centre, in the Eixample Esquerra, the grid on the left side of Passeig de Gràcia. Although the Cerdà grid is formally identical, this area has a different sociological profile (Grealls-Garrido 2021). Sant Antoni allows the city to experiment in a different environment. While Poblenou is less dense, less busy and has a younger population, Sant Antoni can generally be characterised as a relatively lively and diverse neighbourhood, with a socio-economically strange mix of the somewhat impoverished old city core and the generally highly-priced Eixample.

The anchor point of the neighbourhood is the Mercat Sant Antoni, one of Barcelona’s beautiful Mediterranean markets in modernista style . The market is the pivotal point on the border with the ‘El Raval’ district, a part of Barcelona’s multicultural medieval city core. It is no coincidence that the project zone is grafted onto the recently completed renovation of the market building, where the new shops appear to be operating quite well as locally integrated commerces (Informant 2 2021).

Decision making: the politics of the implementation process The vigorous opposition and protests in Poblenou admonished the city to reflect on three major shortcomings related to the concept as well as to the implementation process of the Superblock: a strong dichotomy between the inside and the outside of the Superblocks; a lack of involvement of the inhabitants; and a lack of understanding for the temporary ephemerality of tactical urbanism.

Concerning the first issue, city experts acknowledge – in internal meetings – that the criticism of the archetypal concept causes a substantial inequality between the inside and outside. (Hu 2016, Informant 7 2021). In Sant Antoni, the ‘three by three blocks’ archetype is abandoned and reworked to an axis-based rather than a zoned approach.

This new appearance aims to mitigate the mentioned disadvantage of residents on the surrounding streets, feeling like the funnel to which all car traffic is channelled. By limiting the car-free zone to a pair of mutually perpendicular axes, the effect of the unattractive Superblock edges is reduced.

Yet, an enormous contrast remains between the affected and non-affected street parallel to the Superblock. Even though Viladomat is basically unchanged since the intervention, the contrast turns the street into a busy, noisy, grey backside of Comte Borrel. However, more than the archetypal island in Poblenou, the interventions in Sant Antoni have an overall veining effect on the neighbourhood. For now, the realised perpendicular axes are still limited in proportion to the entire district. The planned Fig. 4.15. The Sant Antoni market is a pivoting point between the Eixample and the Old City. N/a. Mercat de Sant Antoni, Barcelona. N.d. Barcelona. https://arquitecturaviva.com/works/mercat-de-sant-antoni

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Fig. 4.17. ‘End phase’ design in front of the Sant Antoni market, renovated by Ravetllat Ribas arquitectes.

García, Simón/Goula, Adrià. Mercat de Sant Antoni, Barcelona. 2019. Barcelona. https://arquitecturaviva. com/works/mercat-de-sant-antoni Fig. 4.18. ‘Tactical phase’ design in front of the Sant Antoni market. Del Rio Bani. Superilla Sant Antoni.

2019. Barcelona. https://landscape.coac.net/superilla-sant-antoni

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expansion of the concept on the Rocafort axis will gradually evolve towards a more extensive impact over the entire Sant Antoni part of the Eixample.

Public opinion: protest, support and participation Regarding the second problem in Poblenou – the lack of citizen’s involvement – the city demonstrated significant efforts to increase the level of participation: “The Superblocks website reports nine workshops and information sessions between the start of the process in February 2017 and the consented action plan in December 2017. Three more sessions in 2018 and four in 2019 were organised during the implementation phase, and specific sessions served to target merchants and civic organisations. Detailed reports show the evolution after each session before a final materialisation was designed by a professional design studio” (De Boeck 2021 a, 5).

The participatory trajectory was primarily indirect and focused on schools, services, businesses and a so-called ‘Impuls Group’, with representatives from eleven local organisations assembling merchants, elderly people, property owners or the, in Sant Antoni located, LGBTI organisation (Ajuntament 2021 a). However, after all, the strategy left a relatively low perception of participation among the broader public. A local merchant, running his business for years in Comte Borell, declares never to have heard about any participation initiative and feels the project like a top-down initiative. Anyway, he is an enthusiast about the benefits for his business and the neighbourhood’s general liveability (Informant 2, 4, 5 2021).

A recent survey by the city confirms the improved appropriation of the Superblock in the case of Sant Antoni. According to a public presentation of the results, 76 percent is happy about the noise reduction, and 73 percent of the respondents would prefer to live in this kind of street. A smaller share is satisfied with the amount of green (52 percent), the maintenance of the area (55 percent) and the protection of pedestrians from car traffic (58 percent) (Ajuntament 2021 b).

Observations of the resulting spatial characteristics and social interactions Materialisation The third problem in Poblenou was that residents don’t always seem to understand the intrinsically temporary nature of the tactical interventions. They wonder whether this is what the future of the city is supposed to be? The shadowy mix of different customs in the same space creates new conflicts between different transport modes or between Fig. 4.19 - 4.21. ‘Tactical phase’ design on street hubs in Sant Antoni. Picture by author.

April, 2021. Barcelona.

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claims on space for playgrounds, terraces and mobility flows. As a result of tactical urbanism, the created ‘in between’ state leaves quite some questions unanswered, for an indefinite period of time (Informant 5 2021).

In an attempt to remediate, the city is committed to a simultaneous deployment of tactical interventions (the temporary measures) and more high-quality replacement of tarmac by high-quality paving (the ultimate image for the entire area). In addition, a local designer was appointed for upgrading the tactical urbanism to a more attractive branding worthy of the status of Barcelona as a capital of design.

The Comte Borell changes from a high-end into a tactical design language, precisely where the street skims past the market building. On one side, the high-end pavements evocate the end-phase reconversion, with trees and larger planting boxes. On the other side, the street is decorated with the new iconic visual language of yellow street paint and temporary assemblies of street furniture, simultaneously serving as bench, planter or sports equipment. The result with the typical bright yellow triangle patterns travels around the world in architecture magazines and is relatively well appreciated by the residents. ‘If the whole world is looking at us, who are we to argue with that?’ says a local merchant. When asked when the permanent establishment would replace the temporary establishment, he does not know the answer. Neither is he looking forward to the works, as they will that will probably take more than a year in the case of a complete conversion, while the tactical transformation did hardly cause any nuisance (Informant 4 2021).

For the design, the city contracted Leku Studio, residing on the Gran Vía, right at the neighbourhood’s edge. In addition to the search for local anchoring, the project provides another unique opportunity to expose some Escofet and Benito products. The Catalan factories’ recognisable furniture for public space is already present all over the city’s squares and avenues.

Social interactions The area around the market, in particular, is undeniably busy, day in day out. Unlike in Poblenou, the audience is older and more diverse. Ongoing studies evidence for the impression that the neighbourhood is gentrifying, or at least be suffering from ‘food gentrification’. The Superblock concept is a clear pole of attraction for anyone looking for an afternoon lunch or a newspaper and coffee. An increase in the high number of restaurants and bars with terraces on the car-free streets is noticeable, although the success of the renovated market might also contribute to that. Another research project finds a correlation with an increasing number of Airbnb transactions in the area. The Sant Antoni Superblock was very quickly well used, also by tourists. Still, the sudden collapse of tourism due to the Covid-19 pandemic recently allowed residents to take the space back (Informant 2, 7 2021).

Fig. 4.22 - 4.24. Superblock Sant Antoni : ‘end phase’ materialisation near the Sant Antoni market / Superblock core. Picture by author. April, 2021. Barcel

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Fig. 4.25. ‘End phase’ design around the Sant Antoni market. Ravetllat Arquitectura. Mercat de Sant Antoni. 2018. Barcelona. https://ravetllatarquitectura.com/Mercat-de-Sant-Antoni

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Fig. 4.26 - 4.27. Mistral Avenue, until recently the only green space in Sant Antoni, ancient relict of a medieval road, diagonally cuts a car-free space out of the grid. Picture by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 4.28. ‘End phase’ design at Comte Borell street. Ravetllat Arquitectura. Mercat de Sant Antoni. 2018. Barcelona. https://ravetllatarquitectura.com/Mercat-de-Sant-Antoni

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Fig. 4.29. Converted crossroad near the Sant Antoni market. Picture by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

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EIXAMPLE: SYSTEMIC SPREAD OF ‘GREEN AXES AND SQUARES’ Context At first glance, the archetypal Superblock in Poblenou, and the new Green Axes concept started in Sant Antoni, seem to be inherently linked to the typology of the Eixample. From a morphological perspective, the axis structure and the spacious octagonal intersections provide opportunities for large qualitative public space and a systemic roll-out. In addition, the iconic hosting grid reinforces the international exposure of the project.

According to the city, the choice to focus on the Cerdà grid is based on an objective analysis of disproportionate mobility flows, high population density and lack of green space. No less than 350,000 cars cross the city every day longitudinally through the Cerdà grid. That is more than the southern and northern ring road combined. The population density is high, with 332 inhabitants per ha, with an average density of 157 inhabitants per ha in Barcelona. At 1.85 m² per inhabitant, the green space is very low compared to an average of 6.6 m² in Barcelona and certainly compared to the 9 m² recommended by the WHO (Ajuntament 2015, 2020 b, Bausells 2016)

Decision making and public opinion The city speaks about a ‘scale jump’ as a next step (Ajuntament 2020 b). With the tactical interventions along Consell de Cent street, traversing the whole length of the grid, the ‘systemic’ transformation of the Eixample really takes off. Street painting in bright yellow colours emphasises that a lane of the Carrer de Consell de Cent is no longer meant for car use. In a later phase, the adding of oversized massive concrete benches enhances the physical integrity of the pedestrian next to the busy remaining lane for car traffic.

same in their streets. The president of the employers association ‘Foment de Treball’ states that city is putting 50,000 jobs at stake in commerce, restaurants, tourism and mobility. He claims to speak for a large number of employers going from the Chambre of Commerce to the automobile associations and even the powerful Spanish car producer Seat (Metropoliabierta 2020).

Changes to the current setup are, considering the intrinsic reversibility of tactical urbanism, still possible. At least theoretically, not perpetuating the proposed situation and returning to the original state is an option. However, that is not going to happen under the tenure of the current city government. On the contrary, a budget of 37.8 million euros is reserved to start with the translation in permanent high-end realisations.

The realisation of the design competition drawings is planned as soon as in the next two years, before the end of this tenure (Ajuntament 2020 b).

Observations of the resulting spatial characteristics and social interactions It must be noted that the linear tactical interventions along Consell de Cent street, merely taking away one long car lane next to a still-functioning busy lane, does not create the same spatial qualities as in the previous realisations. The yellow colour refers to the recognisable design language that gives identity to the Superblock axes in Sant Antoni. Still, the paint and street furniture do not yet evoke the qualities of an attractive future atmosphere.

Nevertheless, the contrast is significant with the parts of the long Consell de Cent street that are not affected yet, and where original car lanes are still entirely used. Although the intervention is still highly ephemeral for the time being, the mere reversal of the auto-dominance is already impactful for how space is perceived.

The story inspired by health in the city, ecology and social cohesion does not yet win over all the hearts. Right-wing groups take up the defence of comfortable door-todoor comfort of car traffic and recently carried out a protest campaign. Especially the huge concrete blocks, making swerving and parking on the pedestrian lanes impossible, are contested but remain firmly present (Informant 1 2021).

On Twitter, critics have called the newest interventions ‘painting and colouring’ by Ada Colau, referring to the frequent yellow and blue marks demarcating changed situations. Motorcycle collectives protest against the concrete blocks, calling them deadly dangerous for vehicles on two wheels in case of a collision. Deputy Mayor Janet Sanz felt the need to intervene on Twitter, defending the tactical measures as cheap and quick to execute in response to urgent problems, such as those provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic. She refers to Paris, Milan, Chicago and Santiago de Chile, doing the

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Design competition for the next ‘Green Axes and Squares’ In the meantime, a design competition has been launched for the final materialisation of four ‘squares and hubs’ to be realised in the next two years, under the title ‘To the Superblock Barcelona’: “The new stage will allow the transformation of Sant Antoni to be extended to the whole of the Eixample, a priority area for action as it has a very high potential impact on the rest of the city due to population density and high levels of traffic and pollution, and the need more green and comfortable spaces” (Ajuntament 2020 b).

The City chose four design proposals out of 86 submissions, each for a different layout for one of the intersections that will be tackled during this legislature. Participants in the design competition were asked to form a team in order to give young designers a chance. Also, a multidisciplinary collaboration with a number of experts, including a sustainability engineer, was mandatory. Despite the participation of some international participants, such as the Japanese architect Toyo Ito and different Italian architecture offices, finally four Catalan design consortiums were chosen by the jury.

One of the laureates of the competition (Informant 6 2021) emphasises the striving for customisation and contextualisation of the Superblock project. Despite the systemic opportunities of the grid, the city does not opt for a generic interpretation of all avenues and new squares. On the contrary, the aim is to test four different designs with four different identities. Each participating design office could only subscribe to one location. The designer explains how they perceived the very different identities of each square:

The first one, at Rocafort, might be the most prototypical one. A design for this square could seemingly be applied in every similar crossroad. For the second one, at Comte Borell, the social context is vital. The neighbourhood is characterised by a few activist organisations and a school, who actively interact by appropriating the new public space with bottom-up greening interventions. The third square, at Enric Granados, has a more territorial exposure with important mobility connections and is regularly the scenery for powerful civic movements. At Girona, the fourth and final square hosts the impactful metro station on Line 4, inducing regular and large flows of commuters. The square is once a year occupied by the famous Festival of Catalan Modernism during the Festival Mayor.

The design proposals for the squares can roughly be divided into two types: two designs that classically position the green living space in the middle of the square and two that opt for a more asymmetric approach. The design for Girona, in particular, is based explicitly on a south-oriented orientation for the green structure. The presence of the metro also strengthened this division of paved and water-permeable space.

Natural and biodiversity value was a point for improvement in the previously realised Superblocks. A minimum of 20 percent unpaved surface and 80 percent canopy is now required in the competition prescriptions. Anyway, according to the designer, much more than 30 percent of unpaved surface is not feasible due to the many requirements of accessibility and services. Nevertheless, the winning simulations radiate more opportunities for a wilder form of nature than in previous realisations. In consultation with the city experts, intensive consideration is currently being given to a type of interpretation of the planting areas that can withstand the harsh city conditions.

Fig. 4.30. Competition for the design of 21 additional green squares. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Mapa concurs dels eixos verds. November 2020. In Ajuntament de Barcelona 2020 (b).

Fig. 4.31. Winning design for the Green Hubs between the Squares. UTE b67 Palomeras Arquitectes, SLP + Cierto Estudio, SCCLP. Caminar des del centre [Walking from the Centre]. March, 2021. In Ajuntament de Barcelona 2021 (d).

Fig. 4.32. Winning design for the Consell de Cent / Rocafort Square. Estudi08014. Arquitectura, ciutat, territori, S.C.P.P. El parlament de les espècies [The Parliament of Species]. March 2021. In Ajuntament de Barcelona 2021 (d).

Fig. 4.33. Winning design for the Consell de Cent / Comte Borrell Square. UTE Clara Solà-Morales + Albert Casas Álvarez + Frederic Villagrasa Álvarez. L’illa de les illes [The Block of Blocks]. March 2021. In Ajuntament de Barcelona 2021 (d).

Fig. 4.34. Winning design for the Consell de Cent / Enric Granados Square. UTE GPO Ingeniería y Arquitectura, S.L.U. + LAND LAB, laboratorio de paisajes, S.L. Jardín ILLA [BLOCK Garden]. March 2021.

In Ajuntament de Barcelona 2021 (d).

Fig. 4.35. Winning design for the Consell de Cent / Girona Square. UTE Under Project Lab, S.C.P. + BOPBA Arquitectura, S.L.P. Superescocell [Super Tree Pit]. March 2021. In Ajuntament de Barcelona 2021 (d).

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Fig. 4.36. Tactical intervention reducing one car lane on Consell de Cent street. Prudêncio Thiago/SOPA. Pedestrian-first areas have proliferated around Barcelona since 2016. But the latest “superblock” plan involves a bigger part of the city. 2020. Barcelona. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-11/ barcelona-s-new-car-free-superblock-will-be-big Fig. 4.37. First stage tactical design in Consell de Cent. Picture by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 4.38. Contrasting unaffected part of Consell de Cent. Picture by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

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Fig. 4.39. Consell de Cent : acupunctural community gardens. Picture by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 4.40. Passeig Sant Joan pre-Superblock intervention (2014). Picture by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 4.40. Temporality of tactical urbanism. ‘In between’ state, vandalism, fading street painting. Picture by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 4.41. Passeig Sant Joan pre-Superblock intervention. Escofet. Sant Joan Promenade. N/d. Barcelona. https://www.escofet.com/index.php/en/projects/streetscape/sant-joanpromenade Fig. 4.42 - 4.45. Tactical urbanism throughout the city: Ronda Universitat, Via Laietana, Consell de Cent. Pictures by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 4.46 - 4.48. Interventions framed as Superblock in Les Corts. Picture by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

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Fig. 4.49. Interventions framed as Superblock in Sants. Picture by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 4.50 - 4.51. Pacification project at Carrer de Cristóbal de Moura. Picture by author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 4.52 - 4.54. Interventions framed as Superblock in Horta. Picture by author. ‘Let’s save the Bugaderes d’Horta Superblock. A different urbanism is possible’. April, 2021. Barcelona

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that the idea transcends the archetype. It is about returning public space to the human scale and about transforming ‘space’ for cars into ‘place’ for people. Such is perfectly possible outside the Eixample as a host and is part of a broader ambition of re-commoning the public space.

The Sants - Hostafrancs district connects directly to the western side of the Eixample and, more specifically, to the Superblock that arises around the Consell de Cent. The redevelopment mainly involves replacing asphalt with more high-end tiles and adding rows of trees, both in the narrower streets and in the squares throughout the neighbourhood. On the scale of the entire zone, the impact remains relatively limited and the degree of pavement high. The share of urban nature, let alone in a wild form, with real potential for biodiversity, remains very low. Tactical urbanism is nowhere to be found here. The final establishments are high-end renovated squares, mainly paved surfaces, however, mottled and surrounded by green infrastructure.

Fig. 4.55. Interventions framed as Superblock in Horta. Picture by author. 2021. Barcelona

In this way, an opportunity is somehow missed to compensate for the lack of ecological value of parks created in the past. The Parc d’Espanya Industrial still does show some diversity in a game with trees, water features and enormous stands for the spectators of the cultural-natural landscape. The Parc Joan Miró, on the other hand, is entirely covered by a hard dolomite subsoil. The park replaces a potential building block, creating a unique unbuilt zone in the city. However, the planting consists almost exclusively of numerous palm trees, referring to the coastal urban projects of the 1990s. The square in front of the highly dynamic Sants train station is another example of underutilised potential. One hundred percent of the surface is paved, hosting a traffic-dense space in the city.

Similar observations can be made for the Les Corts district, located between Sants and Barcelona’s football stadium, at the end of Diagonal Avenue. The Superblocks will undoubtedly increase the quality of life in the streets concerned. The step to a city that aims to become an innovative, ambitious, and ecologically valuable urban fabric will still require efforts on a different scale. Especially in the larger parks, there are opportunities to improve biodiversity, water management, and reduction of heat stress.

TRANSFORMATIONS UNDER THE SUPERBLOCK LABEL OUTSIDE THE GRID

The Horta district is located in the hilly area between the Eixample and the Serra de Collserola, a belt of afforested hills around the city. At the foot of the neighbourhood, the pacified zone is thriving in attracting residents to the renewed public space. The car-free streets and squares are lively used by children playing, older people resting on benches and shopping residents.

Since the take-off in 2015, the city has been using the Superblock label for various operations across the territory, in and outside the grid. Also, earlier realisations as Gràcia or Passeig Sant Joan are re-framed under the Superblock brand. The pacification of Sants-Hostafrancs, Les Corts or Horta has no connection whatsoever with the archetypal aggregation and car-freeing of three by three blocks in the Eixample. Nor is it an expression of the ‘Green Axes’ concept. Nevertheless, it allows the city to prove

A recognisable link between the Superblock realisations in the Eixample, and these interventions, can be noted in the returning of recognisable materialisation: the typical street furniture in short and long variants, the high-end tile pavements replacing asphalt, sporadically interrupted by additional trees and their shading crowns, besides the more traffic-technical signage indicating a speed limit of 10 km/h, and bollards keeping cars away from the squares.

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Scheme. 4.1. Barcelona’s Superblocks: iterative implementation process 2015 - 2019. Scheme produced by author. 2021

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DISCUSSION: FACTORS DETERMINING THE AMBITION LEVEL AND PROGRESS

the city, 4.9 million euros would suffice (Rueda 2020). But what is the cost of a follow-up through definitive materialisation? For the end-phase reconversion of four intersections at Consell de Cent alone, the cost is estimated at 37.8 million euros (Ajuntament 2020 b).

Determining factors During the past five years of Superblock implementations, the city allowed itself to work in an iterative process of trial and error: from the Superblock archetype to green axes, from street paintings to fancy branding of tactical urbanism, from tactical urbanism to high-end walkable streets, and from top-down decisions to increased participation.

The path to the image of a ‘sustainable’ city does not run according to a predetermined roadmap. To discuss which factors are determining and how they influence the speed, the choice of materialisation and the ambition level, I focus on two axes (Scheme 1): The first axis is the evolution of materialisation: from ephemeral and anecdotal interventions to a recognisable language of high-end pavements. The second axis is the method and speed of systemic spread. The combination of them defines a matrix for the possible paths towards the image of the transformed city.

City experts and academic researchers emphasise the benefits of rather quick and tactical systemic spread. One extreme option would be such sprint to an immediate citywide spread of pure tactical interventions with the available budget, creating a huge, probably contested, in-between state. Public protest and lobby groups push politics towards more acupunctural and high-end materialisations.

The city, for now, rather sticks to a balance with a focus on a cautious systemic spread of high-end realisations. I would argue that today Barcelona has even - de facto - left the path of tactical urbanism, at least for the next two years of this tenure. No new temporary interventions are being installed due to insufficient public support and relative political instability. All this despite experts advocating for quick, low-cost responses to climate change adaptation and new governance models responding to the rapidly evolving conditions of the dense and complex city (Het Andere Atelier 2021).

The speed of systemic spread However, the idea of rolling out the flexible measures quickly and cheaply radically across the entire city runs up against four limits.

First, a hasty roll-out goes against the intrinsic trial-and-error principle of ‘tactical urbanism’. The need for a minimum of time and space to make adjustments along the way is essential.

Second, on the other hand, there is an expiry date on the temporality of the measures.

After a few years, the paint fades, and the pilot setups wear out. Once the intervention has been approved for continuation, the pace and budget of the final finishes should be able to follow up in a realistic period. For a ‘tactical’ roll-out, in one single move across

Third, the transformation requires a dramatic shift in the mindset of the inhabitants to a different way of experiencing the city. The current pace of interim measures, followed by sporadic definitive establishments, is already generating considerable controversy.

People have little faith in the in-between character of the interventions, being neither car lane nor living space and wonder, “Is this it?”.

Fourth, some environmental benefits have been severely underused in the preliminary setups. Spacious and ecologically valuable landscape architecture, depaving surfaces and conversion to permeable pavements are only possible in the end-phase transformation of public space.

Mapping the ambition level The trajectory and the speed of roll-out thus depend on available budgets, formal integration into the urban fabric, support from public opinion, and the level of ambition of the political administration.

An analysis of the systemic spread, as projected on maps across the different policy documents, shows that the shift from the Poblenou to the Sant Antoni model already induced a significant decrease in ambitions.

In 2013, before the first realisation of any Superblock, the ambition was to up-scale the archetypal Superblock concept over the entire Eixample and beyond in the whole metropolitan area. A pretty detailed plan in the Urban Mobility Plan 2013-2018 projects which zones will be alleviated and which axes would remain open for car traffic. On average, two out of three axes will be car-free in this vision.

Plans have changed significantly between the up-scaling in the Mobility Plan (2015) and the proposal to the Girona neighbourhood (2017). Instead of the archetypal car-free islands, car-freeing two out of three lanes, the intervention is reduced to the realisation of a limited number of green axes in the grid. The ambition has dropped to only one out of three, or even one out of four axes, depending on the location in the grid.

By the end of 2020, plans seem scaled back once more, and a decision is taken on prioritisation. The number of axes is reduced and purified to a tight grid in the grid. Four of the twenty-one planned intersections will be tackled for this legislature. Salvador Rueda points out that, compared to the first drawings in the Mobility Plan, only one on four of the initially planned 79 crossroads will be converted in the following years. To the question why his answer is very concise: ‘That’s a matter of politics.’ (Het Andere Atelier 2021).

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Scheme. 4.2. Barcelona’s Superblocks: iterative implementation process 2015 - 2023. Scheme produced by author. 2021 Fig. 4.55. 2015. The Superblock’s archetypal concept. Agència d’Ecología Urbana de Barcelona. Current Model. Superblocks Model. Pla de Mobilitat Urbana de Barcelona. PMU 2013-2018. Version January, 2015.

Fig. 4.56. 2015. Pedestrian zones in the ultimate phase of the application of the Superblocks. Agència d’Ecología Urbana de Barcelona. Zones de vianants en la darrera fase d’aplicació de les superilles. Pla de Mobilitat Urbana de Barcelona. PMU 2013-2018. Version January, 2015.

Fig. 4.57. 2015. Map of new interiors crossroads, created in the grid by the implementation of the Superblocks. Agència d’Ecología Urbana de Barcelona. Noves cruïlles interiors de trama ‘Eixample’ que se’n generen amb la implantació de les superilles a la ciutat de Barcelona. Pla de Mobilitat Urbana de Barcelona. PMU 2013-2018. Version January, 2015.

Fig. 4.58. 2017. Proposal for Civic Axes in the Eixample. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Proposta: Eixos Civics à l’Eixample. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Réunio de treball amb el Grup Impulsor de l’àmbit de superilles de la Dret de l’Eixample (entorn del carrer de Girona). December, 2017.

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a de

de

Fig. 4.59. 2020. Competition for the design of 21 additional green squares. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Mapa concurs dels eixos verds. November, 2020.

Fig. 4.60. 2020. Horizon 2023: the four squares and green hubs to be realised during the ongoing term of office. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Mapa concurs dels eixos verds. November, 2020.

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DISCUSSION: INTERACTING STAKEHOLDERS INFLUENCING THE PROCESS PUBLIC SUPPORT, PROTEST AND PARTICIPATION Public opinion and politics as resonating forces The tangle of opinions held by the people of Barcelona is a key factor driving decision-makers towards quick, tactical interventions or to slow, more expensive high-end transformations. Public protest or support, closely related to the participatory trajectory, heavily influences the power of politics to go hard or delay the implementation of the Superblocks as a ‘guiding image’. Remember how Chombart de Lauwe (1964) defined the transcending notions of aspiration, hope, and hopefulness – a collective almost spiritual dream about a better future. Thus, the interaction between the people and their representatives works in two directions. Politicians live by the grace of the people’s assessment of their projects, debouching in the quadrennial vote for the city government. On the other hand, the success of the path toward a sustainable city depends on the leaders’ capability to make people dream and envision a future beyond the delusion of the everyday.

polemic in the press, all culminating in a contested referendum condemning the outcomes. In Sant Antoni, an adapted concept, more intensive branding and a slower implementation process with an increased level of participation caused less fuss, but certainly didn’t pass silently. The ongoing transformation of the Eixample scales-up the impact zone and consequently triggers more extensive interference of lobby groups, (politically supported) civil protest and related press coverage.

On the other hand, the city’s transformation is certainly also supported by part of the population. Poblenou actively works on the appropriation of space by organising activities and on positive communication. A referendum by the opponents of the ‘Plataforma d’Afectats of the Superilla de Poblenou’ was successfully boycotted, with an ultimately low turnout as a result. When the local Sant Martí district council yet decided to revoke the Superblock, a group of advocates organised a petition that resulted in more than 2,000 signatures in favour of the Superblock, with the message: “Last 08/06/2017 the plenary of the Sant Martí District of Barcelona, approved with the votes in favor of the group Demòcrata, Cs, ERC, and PP the request of the WITHDRAWAL OF THE SUPERILLA DEL POBLENOU Barcelona. And votes against BComú, PSC, and CUP. If you are in favor of the SUPERILLA DEL POBLENOU, public spaces for people, the use of bicycles in the city, limit the use of cars in your neighborhood, make healthier spaces. VOTE !!”

(Change.org 2017, 1)

Public protest and support In almost every conversation on Barcelona’s Superblocks, actors mention how controversial the implementation process was, and still is (Informant 1, 2, 4-7 2021). Especially the neighbourhoods with more tactical interventions are highly polarised, namely in Poblenou, with explicit negative testimonies and window posters, a fierce

In Horta, outside the Eixample grid, the Superblock intervention roughly divides the neighbourhood, provoking a polarisation between believers and non-believers.

A neighbourhood association’s large banner on a facade shows support for the progressive wing: “Let’s save the Bugaderes d’Horta Superblock. A different urbanism is possible”.

Fig. 4.61. Participation process in the St. Antoni neighbourhood. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Untitled. 2019. Barcelona. https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/superilles/sites/default/files/Presentacio%CC%81_CdB_Superilla_St.Antoni. pdf

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The resistance of certain segments of the population to the transformations should come as no surprise. Rouillard and Guiheux (2016) already underlined the comfort (and criticised the effects) of the door-to-door transport of the individual car.

Gössling (2020) adds a deeper psychological meaning to car use, which designers and policymakers should be deeply aware of: “All too often, traffic planners overlook the symbolic and affective dimensions of car use (Steg 2005). The car has important symbolic value in communicating social status. It has affective functions in dealing with fears, anxieties and phobias; in expressing power, dominance, control, anger and contempt; or in taking revenge, rebelling or escaping. The automobile is a means of socialising with family and friends, or finding community in car cultures. Cars constitute highly personalised spaces, and they have functions related to feeling protected and safe” (Gossling 2020, 445).

Gössling (2013) warned that reducing car traffic by rationally arguing for restrictions is not an easy task. Copenhagen’s successful journey to cycling city status has always been the result of a positive story about the benefits of cycling, never about the harmful effects of car use. Such insight also reinforces the importance of an empathetic, sufficiently bottom-up, multidisciplinary, and above all, integrated approach to an impactful transformation amid the complexity of the city (Busquets 2011, Rueda in Het Andere Atelier 2021).

Participation Before concluding on the intensity and credibility of the participatory trajectory, it is valuable to see how participation in urbanistic processes, including in Barcelona, came a long way. “Cerdà, as a child of the 1848 revolution, was known as an urban planner with socialist ideas, convinced that his uniform grid would lead to more equality in the city. Despite a strong social engagement, there was no such thing as participation involved in the design process for his famous grid. That was neither the habit for his 19th-century contemporaries Haussman, nor Olmsted, when designing their grand plans for Paris and New York. Only in the early 1960s, under the impulse of thinkers like Jane Jacobs, there was a turnaround. She advocates that urban forms should emerge slowly and learn from the experience of their use, responding to Robert Moses’s work who wanted to recreate New York in precisely the opposite way: fast, large-scale, and in line with his convictions (Sennet 2019).” (De Boeck 2021 a, 5). Note how the same debate about speed and momentum versus support and appropriation is more current than ever today in Barcelona.

powers and is still the capital for Catalan left-wing based nationalism (even when the metropole has the least Catalan speakers in Catalonia). A city government dealing with the complexity of a metropolitan city as Barcelona must by nature be open to civic energy and involve popular input in the governmental process” (De Boeck 2021 a).

However, at least the implementation of the Poblenou Superblock was described as a fast and top-down process. In the case of the Superblock in the Sant Antoni neighbourhood, the city claims to invest more thoroughly in a bottom-up approach. Still, despite the efforts, participation was perceived as limited and indirect (Informant 2,4,5,7).

“The effectivity of participation cannot be evaluated based on its organisation per se, but rather on the timing, intensity and genuine intention for co-creation.

Sennet (2019) describes examples of planners, including insignificant details in plans, to allow a fake impression of negotiation about those details. The importance of thorough participation to ensure equal access to public space is also emphasised by Low (2020). She argues that (the perception of) fairness during the design process is perhaps more important for the public’s support than the outcome of the final solution itself” (De Boeck 2020 a, 4): “Psychologists have found that distributional outcomes are not the only relevant issue when determining people’s perception of fairness. Psychological research has shown that the favorability of an outcome is less crucial when the underlying allocation process is seen as fair” (Cropanzano and Randall 1993).

Things also seem to have been turned around in the recent design competition. At first, the winning designs are chosen by a jury of experts. Only afterwards, a short period of participation is provided in the further process of refinement. After the lessons learned in Poblenou, it is striking that the city again opts for a relatively meagre form of participation, very late in the process. Probably, a tight schedule is the only option to be able to achieve realisations before the end of the tenure. The city chooses thus to rely on its expert’s abilities to deliver a top-down imposed but convincing realisation.

With the Superblocks in Barcelona, politics show the ambition to radiate a vision and to bring the city ‘hope’ and ‘hopefulness’ by mirroring itself to a ‘guiding image’ (Chombart de Lauwe 1964) about a sustainable city. However, considering the psychological dimensions of car use (Gössling 2020) and the need for at least a perception of involvement (Low 2020), it is a big gamble, and against the nature of the civic tradition, not to bet higher on a more genuine conversation with the people. Today, quite a controversy is putting a significant brake on the use of new experimental tactical interventions and the speed of the systemic spread towards realising the image of the sustainable city.

In its official communication on the project, “Barcelona claims to rely on a robust participative trajectory to implement its radical transformations. The city has a long history of being a centre of resistance, aiming for maximal independence of central

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POLITICS Political climate and mechanisms during the Superblock’s implementation process In an interview for Catalan TV, Salvador Rueda (2020) is asked why Barcelona abandoned the archetypal Superblock plan? The ‘inventor’ of the Superblocks answers the question very concisely: “That’s a matter of politics!”

The emergence of the Superblock as a political project A premature Superblock idea was born back at the end of the 1980s, when noise measurements indicated far too high decibel levels in Barcelona (Alsina 1988). The first successful neighbourhood pacifications took place in El Born in the 1990s and in Gràcia since 2003 (Hu 2016, Boot 2018). The archetypal concept of the Superblock only comes to actual ratification at the political level in the January 2015 update of the Urban Mobility Plan 2013-18, under the rule of Mayor Xavier Trias. Subsequently, an archetypal future Superblock of three by three building blocks was selected to be implemented in Poblenou, in the right half of the Eixample Cerdà. In the chapter on the implementation process is described how finally the first Superblock was installed in a different adjacent area, and after the election of a new mayor, Ada Colau.

Urban transformations and the role of political (in)stability Implementing an impactful transformation of urban public space requires a good dose of political strength, stability and persistence. The Eixample’s avenues have been dominated by cars for decades, serving the door-to-door convenience that the means of transport offers. (Rouillard 2016, Gössling 2020). Intervening in this area moves public opinions, and consequently press, organisations, lobby groups and political parties, each responding to the polemic based on their specific ideology. However, the necessary stable political climate was hardly present, due to a number of unexpected crises impacting politics and a relatively unstable minority government.

Although Mayor Ada Colau profiled herself politically with socially and environmentally inspired programs, during her tenure, three completely different consecutive crises dominated the mood of the city: first, a series of terrorist attacks claimed by the Islamic State, including one on the central Ramblas and a failed bombing of the Sagrada Familia in 2017; later that same year, the political deadlock over the ‘illegal’ referendum on Catalan independence and the subsequent months of protracted lawsuits and widespread protests; and finally, from March 2020, the ongoing health crisis

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caused by the Covid-19 pandemic with a dramatic impact on Spanish healthcare and daily life in the city. Not exactly what you can call a quiet period from a social point of view, with mental space for fundamental changes (Informant 2 2021).

Mayor Ada Colau structurally governs the city with a minority government and varying coalitions for each theme, implying that her party sometimes stands alone against a broad scale opposition for controversial plans. The mayor’s party Barcelona En Commú (BEC) party won 11 seats out of 43 in her first election (Ajuntament 2019 b). She became mayor through the support of a left bloc of Catalan socialists (PSC) and the left-wing independentists of Esquerra Republicana (ERC) and Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (CUP). However, the four executive Deputy-Mayors on the board were exclusively from Colau’s party in 2015. A temporary alliance with the Socialists was signed a year later and broken again in 2017 due to the frictions caused by the turmoil of the independence referendum, which left Colau and her team on their own again. Colau refused to speak out explicitly, nor in favour, nor against Catalan independence, which moreover troubled the relations with the ERC independentists. Zografos et al. (2020) point out how all these frictions resulted in feeble political support, specifically during the implementation of the Poblenou Superblock. However, amid these turbulences, the archetypal version in Poblenou, the axes around the Sant Antoni market and the pacification of the Consell de Cent was imperturbably introduced.

Election results in impacted neighbourhoods The only test that really counts for the survival of a city government, besides referendums and polls, is the actual election day. An analysis of local diversification in Colau’s party’s results in the May 2019 elections provides striking observations.

The relevance of this exercise is obvious: the political team behind Ada Colau will undoubtedly also have made this analysis and have drew conclusions for the next phase of the Superblock implementation in her second tenure. However steep ambitions may be, no realisations are possible without political survival: “We also highlight how civic and political contestation over the authority of ‘climate champions’ can jeopardize not only transformational adaptation achievements, but also the political survival of champions themselves” (Zografos et al. 2020, 1).

A detailed report of election results (Ajuntament 2019 b) issued by the city provides a wealth of information. Interestingly, Barcelona communicates results not only at the city or district level but also on the tiny scale of neighbourhoods, sometimes barely the size of a few Eixample building blocks with less than 1,000 voters.

At the city level, Barcelona En Commú (BEC) lost -4.5% of its votes compared to the

2015 elections. Obviously, no direct conclusions can be drawn about the success of the Superblocks, as several other issues influence the polls, and the theme of Catalan independence in particular. However, when zooming in on the level of the specific neighbourhoods where the Superblocks have been introduced, dropped, or planned shortly, significant trends seem to emerge.

In Barri 66 and 68 of the Poblenou district, which hosts the first and most controversial Superblock, Colau loses -3.5% and -5.6% respectively. That is on itself not significantly different from the general result. In Barri 10, where the popular version of the Sant Antoni Superblock is located, the loss of -1.9% is quite better than the general result. A similar better-than-average result is generally visible in the Eixample, where the next Superblocks interventions are widely announced. In a map showing the differences in results of BEC between 2015 and 2019, a positive evolution can be detected along the specific axes that were recently implemented or that are planned in this same term of office. Further and more deep research will be required to confirm, but there are indications that the announcement effect of the up-scaling of the Superblocks in the Eixample is electorally rewarded.

An extreme zoom on the level of the smallest entities yields three more striking results. In Poblenou, where Colau decided to move the Superblock away, from the Rambla de Poblenou to the adjacent building blocks, her party wins +1%. In the adjacent zone where the Superblock was introduced, the result is declining by -7.1%. Another striking example occurs where an urban renewal project is planned around the Carrer de Cristobal de Moura. The first works are currently in progress, but in 2019 Colau’s results deteriorated sharply with a loss of -6.6% to -18% (Ajuntament 2019 b).

A second tenure and continuity in the process Despite a general slight loss of her party, Colau managed to secure a second term of office. In a campaign dominated by the struggle for independence, the centre-right Junts party, the successor of the previous Mayor’s Convergencia i Unió (CiU), lost half of its ten seats. The left independentists of ERC doubled their number of seats to ten and claimed the leadership of the left bloc. Therefore, it was a surprise to many that Colau’s BEC, which lost one seat but remained the same size as ERC, was nevertheless able to regain the mayoral office, with the support of the socialist party and three councillors of Manuel Valls’ small BCN Canvi in the city council (Alcàzar 2019). However, also in her second term, Colau will continue to lead the city with a minority board of only Deputy Mayors from its own BEC and a majority must be found in the city council for any formal decision.

In short, the implementation of an impactful transformation of the Superblocks took place neither under a socially stable climate, nor under a comfortable majority in the city council.

Anyhow, the Superblock project took off, and the first realisations on the site, in a few years, are considerable. Nevertheless, an observation of the process and future plans unfolds that political turbulence has a large impact on the level of ambition, the pace of realisation, the spatial design and the strategic choice of location of the up-scaling of the Superblock concept to the entire city.

A hard conclusion that the immediate residents would not appreciate the intervention cannot be drawn from these observations alone, but the very local fluctuations do at least point out that the polarisation around the theme leads to electoral volatility on micro-scale in the affected neighbourhoods.

In Sant Antoni, a dichotomy between the lively car-free axes and more greyish parallel unpacified streets is inevitably present, and denounced by inhabitants (Informant 4, 7 2021). In the blocks surrounding the car-free Comte Borell, the results are relatively better than in less affected parts of the neighbourhood. A more pronounced situation occurs at the Superblock in the Horta district. In the car-free parts of the district, Colau scores reasonably well with an evolution of + 1.4% to -4.0%. In the somewhat gloomy neighbouring building block unaffected by the Superblock, counting 949 voters, the mayor loses no less than -27.6% of her votes (Ajuntament 2019 b). A neighbourhood association’s large banner on a facade, on the edge of both neighbourhoods, gives expression to the polarisation between believers and non-believers: “Let’s save the Bugaderes d’Horta Superblock. A different urbanism is possible”.

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Fig. 4.62. Comparison of the city council composition after the 2015 and the 2019 elections. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Resultats proclamats per la Junta Electoral Central. 2019. In Ajuntament de Barcelona. 2019 (b).

Fig. 4.63. Comparison of the election results from 2007 to 2019. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Evolució de resultats a Barcelona. 2007-2019. 2019. In Ajuntament de Barcelona. 2019 (b).

Fig. 4.64. First and second political party per district. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Partit més votat. Segon partit més votat. 2007-2019. 2019. In Ajuntament de Barcelona.

2019 (b).

Fig. 4.65. Results for Ada Colau’s Barcelona En Commú (BEC) in 2019 compared to 2015 per electoral section. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Percentage sobre votants: BEC-ECG. 2019. In Ajuntament de Barcelona. 2019 (b).

Fig. 4.64. Zoom on Poblenou. Results for Ada Colau’s Barcelona En Commú (BEC) in 2019 compared to 2015 per electoral section. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Percentage sobre votants: BEC-ECG. 2019. In Ajuntament de Barcelona. 2019 (b).

Fig. 4.65. Signs in opposition to the Poblenou Superblock. David Roberts. Across from the Poblenou superblock, signs in opposition. N.d. Barcelona. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/11/18273896/ barcelona-spain-politics-superblocks Fig. 4.66. Zoom on the Eixample. Results for Ada Colau’s Barcelona En Commú (BEC) in 2019 compared to 2015 per electoral section. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Percentage sobre votants: BEC-ECG. 2019. In Ajuntament de Barcelona. 2019 (b).

Fig. 4.67. First stage tactical design in Consell de Cent. Picture by author. 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 4.68. Zoom on Horta. Results for Ada Colau’s Barcelona En Commú (BEC) in 2019 compared to 2015 per electoral section. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Percentage sobre votants: BEC-ECG. 2019. In Ajuntament de Barcelona.

2019 (b).

Fig. 4.69. Support for the Horta Superblock. Picture by author. ‘Let’s save the Bugaderes d’Horta Superblock. A different urbanism is possible’. 2021. Barcelona.

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CITY EXPERTS In the interplay with public opinion and political power, the role of experts in a multitude of involved disciplines has been decisive for the development of the Superblocks.

Their involvement extends from the first archetypal conception, to the further development and adjustment within the city administration, the assessment of outcomes and recommendations by academics, and the contribution of urban designers on the fiels in Sant Antoni and the recent design competition.

Many of them work in the shadows, but a few experts appear on the front scene, trying to propagate a societal engagement, sometimes on the edge of being political. Salvador Rueda is considered the creator of the archetypal concept and travels the world to propagate the idea in other cities (Informant 5 2021). In Barcelona itself, however, the website of the multidisciplinary vehicle BCNecología, where he was director since 2001, was taken offline for a few months, and now states: “Last December 2019, the Barcelona Urban Ecology Agency began a transfer process of personnel and assets to Barcelona Regional, Urban Development Agency. This process has been completed on October 1, 2020. With this process, an existing organization with which we shared objectives and methodologies is reinforced” (BCNecología 2021).

Rueda meanwhile set up a new non-governmental ‘Foundation BCNecología’ and cautiously but clearly expresses serious doubts about the most recent change of course.

He acknowledges that tactical urbanism in Barcelona is a learning process and has not yet been finalised. Still, contrary to current policy, he advocates spreading the concept throughout the city, with limited resources and as quickly as possible, almost as a moral duty to protect residents from the harmful health effects of car dominance (Betevé 2021, Rueda 2021).

Besides the city administration, Barcelona has a tradition of eminent city architects recruited from among the top architects in the city. We primarily situate Vicente Guallart, whose term of office coincides with the first appearance of the concept at the political level under Mayor Xavier Trias. Subsequently, with the new Mayor Ada Colau, city architect Ton Salvadó occupies the office. However, he leaves the office earlier than expected, in the same period of the reform of BCNecología, at the time of the concept switch from the archetypal Poblenou to the axes-based Sant Antoni realisations. Xavier Matilla takes over, shortly before the start of Colau’s second term as the ‘architect of the renewed tactical urbanism’ (Esteve 2020). Thus, as described in the chapter on the implementation process, the influence of the different personalities can be correlated with various episodes in the Superblock narrative.

Recently, the management of the Superblocks was taken over by a new, more informal and somewhat shady ‘Superblock office’, consisting of city experts and talented Catalan architects. One of the recent design competition winners comments how the

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city attempts to re-unite experts, architects and politicians together behind one project. However, today, stakeholders still report that visions converge and clash more fundamentally when nostalgically comparing to more joined forces at the time of the notorious urban projects in the 1990s (Informant 6 2021).

In the next chapter, I elaborate on the outcomes of the Superblocks in relation to the initially set objectives. Results are assessed by academics specialised in mobility, ecology, health, political and sociological sciences, and their subfields of knowledge, such as social justice, air pollution, heat stress, or biodiversity. The several actors in the implementation process – citizens, press, lobby groups, politicians, experts – consequently put forward their selection of results and recommendations to steer the future implementations in a specific direction.

5. GOAL ACHIEVEMENTS TOWARDS THE ‘SUSTAINABLE’ CITY SUSTAINABLE TRANSFORMATION GOALS The initial set of goals (2015) The goals towards the ‘sustainable’ city are going beyond merely ecologic issues such as biodiversity, water or air quality, and include broader aspects such as health or the reduction of poverty and inequalities, thus responding to the extensive scope of the UN’s seventeen sustainable development goals (UN 2015).

Throughout Barcelona’s communications on the Superblock, the explicit aims are: “to improve sustainable urban mobility (1); to revitalise streets and public spaces (2); to preserve biodiversity within the city (3); to encourage social cohesion and collaboration (4); to introduce participation and new models of governance (5); to promote sustainable energy production and consumption (6); to reduce noise, air pollution and carbon footprint (7); and to adopt flexible solutions (8) (UNDP 2016)” (De Boeck 2021 a, 7).

With these goals, the bar is set high. Can the Superblocks be powerful enough to solve such a wide arsenal of challenges? In the theoretical reflections on the concept of a sustainable city, I already described that the summary of goals could be so broad that their value becomes diluted (Cohen 2017). Therefore, it is more interesting to detect which accents the city places, which not, and for which goals the city effectively pushes through to achieve them.

In the reflections in the next chapter, it appears that the London National Park City is particularly committed to the surface of green space, its biodiversity value, and cooperation between partners. The ‘15 minutes-city’ in Paris emphasises on spatio-temporal ‘proximity’ and also prominently mentions culture and sport as traditional values in the city. If there is one thing that can be picked out for Barcelona, it is the emphasis on space for meeting and social cohesion, in addition to innovative policy methods.

The extent to which achieving the multitude of goals is feasible, and which factors influence success, is discussed further in this chapter.

Fig. 5.1 - 5.6. Chamfered edges, different uses: Fence-protected school playground, parking space, garbage collection, space for human encounters, green infrastructure.

Pictures by author. 2021. Barcelona.

Evolving focus points (2020) Since the first implementation of the Superblocks, lessons have been drawn from the critics on the concept and changing social circumstances, not least the Covid-19 pan-

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demic. More specifically, in the recent design competition for the first stage of the Green Axes and Squares project, some evolutions in the goal-setting are noticeable, five years after the Superblocks realisation’s take-off. Just as in the Parisian idea of the ‘15-minute city’, the value of proximity gained importance, emphasising space for human encounters and local shopping. Also, the need for more extensive vegetation and water collection is highlighted, albeit competing with the detailed technical requirements of accessibility and services.

The criteria that will be envisaged to assess the 2020 design competition are: giving full priority to pedestrians (1); streets that ensure accessibility for everyone (2); no more tarmac (3); an explosion of greenery (4); a space that encourages community life (5); a street that encourages shopping locally (6); a new sustainable street model, using rainwater and installing solar energy systems (7) (Ajuntament 2020 b).

How and to what extent is the agile and iterative implementation process of the Superblock able to achieve a large and diverse set of goals? Several recent academic studies, field observations and interviews with experts reveal a broad range of quality outcomes in the transformed areas.

MOBILITY EFFECTS Antecedents The mobility effects of the new Superblocks are in line with the outcomes of previous ‘pacification’ experiments in Barcelona. By the 1990s, El Born had become so congested and plagued cars parked on the sidewalks that pedestrians avoided the neighbourhood. Today it is one of the most popular and hippest pedestrianised places in the city.

In the Gràcia district, where two-thirds of the streets became car-free, concrete figures are available. Car traffic fell, not so spectacular after all, from 95,889 annual trips to 81,514 rides, while pedestrian movements increased by 10 percent. More noticeable was the increase in bike rides by as much as 30 percent (Hu 2016). In the framing of the city, the entire Gràcia district is today labelled as the earliest Superblock and included in the list of realisations.

From car dominance to a shared public space

Fig. 5.7. Mobility flows in the archetypal Superblock. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Road hierarchy in a Superblock model. 2015. In Ajuntament 2015.

Fig. 5.8. Longitudinal car traffic through the Eixample. Ajuntament de Barcelona.

Untitled. 2015. In Ajuntament 2020 b.

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The Superblock idea was, in its earliest theoretical conception process, based on a transformation of mobility flows. The city calculated that a disproportionately high share of 60 percent of public space is reserved for car use and 40 percent for mixed-use, and set the goal to reverse the ratio favouring space for slow mobility. In principle, the newly created space is a sriking example of Mumford’s (1934) notion of ‘polytechnic’ spaces. In fact, the measures do not exclude any transport mode, not even the car, but

argues for an organic coexistence of cyclists, motorised traffic and public transport, nevertheless with a firm priority for the pedestrian (Het Andere Atelier 2021).

However, in relatively unprecise segregation of flows, conflicts inevitably arise. Pedestrians criticise how the city smoothly hands out licenses for bar terraces, to the detriment of the pedestrian zone and parking space, in an effort to measure the interests of more centre-right inspired movements. (Remember in this context the earlier ideological tensions about the preference for ‘hard squares’, opposed to ecologically more interesting de-sealed squares, or the Superblock’s framing as a smart city tool instead of a focus on social cohesion.) Fast cyclists wonder why there are no separate routes through the Superblock, questioning the – even for bikers – low general speed limit of 10 km/h. (Het Andere Atelier, informant 7 2021) The reason for setting the speed limit that low is imminent since the incidence of a fatal accident with pedestrians is reduced to 5 percent, while still being 10 percent at 30 km/h and even 85 percent at 50 km/h (GRSP 2008).

Het kan ook anders. Rouillard and Guiheux (2016) beschrijven de optie van een strikte scheiding van flows in het concept van the ‘two-tier’ city, waarin een netwerk bestaat voor traditioneel autoverkeer en een voor zacht verkeer. In Barcelona, fast and functional bicycle connections are primarily not meant to go through the Superblock but along the functional fringing axes. The electric bicycle is seen as the most promising transport mode, knowing that the actual average speed for a distance of 10.5 km by electric cycling is 30 percent above the real average car speed of barely 20km/h in Barcelona (Rueda 2019).

New trajectories are rolled out on a multitude of avenues to facilitate fast bicycle traffic, with an increase in km or 35 percent in 3 years (Ajuntament 2018). However, in field observations, I could notice that not all new pragmatical biking lanes creations necessarily comply with European standards regarding widths and platforms elevated from motorised traffic. Indeed, the city compiled its own design guide, enhancing progress through a defined but pragmatical approach (Ajuntament 2016 b).

Public transport

Fig. 5.9. Map of Barcelona’s bicycle network considering the future Superblock roll-out. Ajuntament de Barcelona. La red de carril bici en Barcelona. N/d. https://barcelonando.com/biking/ Fig. 5.10. Reformed bus network in ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ lines. TMB. Plànol nova xarxa de bus. N/d. https://barcelonando.com/biking/

An essential condition to reduce space for car traffic is a well-developed public transport network. If not, car-freeing operations will only induce negative and emotionally charged responses (Gössling 2020). A strong network is very much the case in Barcelona, as the train, metro and bus networks are well developed and complementary.

Even more, the metropolitan bus network is strongly enhanced in its performance by a restriction of stops to every 400 meters, anticipating the rhythm of the archetypal Superblock. Until recently, 84 bus lines zigzagged through the Eixample, at a historically low average speed of 12 km/h (Boot 2018). With a reform to only 28 lines, running either longitudinally or transversally through the grid, the bus lines gained

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15 percent of passengers within five months. In the last few years, car use was reduced by 15 percent, aiming for an ultimate reduction of 21 percent in the short term (TMB 2019, Rueda 2021).

Mobility of the future The city interacts cautiously with the ongoing debate on the mobility modes of the future. It is true that emerging trends as electric or autonomous vehicles, when not organised collectively, still cause a similar amount of cars after all (Rouillard and Guiheux 2016). On the other hand, with the rise of shared vehicle concepts and a combination of transport modes reinforced by mobility as a service (MAAS) – rather than individual car ownership – a reduction of needed parking space can be expected (Rueda 2021). Studies worldwide, including notably in Spain, point out that a car on average remains parked for 97 percent of the time (Xataka 2016).

In the Eixample, the space created by the typically chamfered edges, historically needed for hore trams to make the turn, is now often reserved for car parking. The reduction in the number of cars in the city offers opportunities for a more creative use of these unique spaces. With the Superblock interventions, these surfaces are being transformed to bar terraces, tiny school playgrounds and space for pedestrians.

This point touches on the essence of the door-to-door comfort of the private car (Rouillard and Guiheux 2016) as an extremely space-consuming factor in the city (Nacto 2017, Gössling 2020). NACTO (2017) points out that the baseline should be ‘move people, not cars’. Only by striving for collective transport, autonomous or not, as a space-saving solution, space can be saved for multifunctional purposes and for human interaction in the first place.

SOCIAL COHESION From space for pedestrians to space for citizens The city’s ambition goes further than pure pedestrianisation. As the City council (2016) declares in its first official decision to install the Superblocks, the aim is to fill the streets with life, or as Rueda (2021) expresses it, to transform space for pedestrians into space for citizens. Therefore, city experts and contributing designers are encouraged to cooperate towards an integrated and multidisciplinary approach when envisioning space for human encounters and greater social cohesion (Berrini and Colonetti 2010, Randrup et al. 2020, Rueda 2021).

Fig. 5.11. Converted crossroad in Sant Antoni. Picture Picture by author. 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 5.12. Unaffected parallel Viladomat Street. Picture by author. 2021. Barcelona.

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There is no doubt that the converted streets do turn into lively places. Both observations and testimonies confirm that the terraces, playgrounds, or benches become intensively used as places for human encounters. Both at peak times and during regular

weekdays, people spent time in areas where cars were still raging until recently.

to 1300 euros per month. The trader in question chose to move to Viladomat street to rent a larger space for less money.

New dichotomies and centralities Social justice: green gentrification, including ‘touristification’ and ‘sushification’ When observing daily life, one can notice that the deeper inside the Superblock, the more vivid and intense the social interaction is. Further away from the central intersections, at the ends of the car-free streets, where the tactical interventions also become a bit thinner and poorer, a lot less activity is noticeable. This touches on the soul of a dominant critique on the archetypal three by three blocks model, which causes a strong dichotomy between the inside and outside of the Superblock. Those who live outside show envy towards the oasis of peace a little further away. Anyone who lives along the streets receiving all condensed car traffic on the edges of the Superblock feels victimised by the operation (Informant 4, 7 2021) City experts are self-critical of the first tryout at Poblenou. The network of Green Squares and Axes in Sant Antoni gives a better spread of benefits throughout the district and avoids the emergence of favouring centralities (Infomant 7 2021). Every district resident has access to a pedestrianised area at a distance of up to 200m. Yet also in Sant Antoni, a strong contrast remains between almost two different worlds - for example, the untouched Viladomat street and the widely praised Comte Borrel street.

A shop owner describes how the rent of the neighbouring business increased from 700

In all Superblocks, a marked increase in the number of bars and restaurants, with accompanying terraces, is noticeable. The businesses are not always of the popular type: especially in Horta and Cristobal de Moura, there is a tendency for a ‘sushification’ of the neighbourhood. The popping up of a kind of expensive and fancy restaurants stands far from the typically Spanish two-course lunch menus at 10.95 euros. The city is trying to steer by not granting new licenses for hospitality in specific environments, although that goes against the proximity policy that should stimulate local trade.

Connolly and Anguelovski (2017) already pointed out that gentrification is not only about displacement, but also about people losing social control assets, losing connection to the neighbourhood, or not going to ‘green’ places because they don’t feel like being for them. Gentrification based on diploma, age, nationality and income arose in upgraded boroughs, with a strong effect in the Sant Martí belt along the coast, the area of the Poblenou Superblock.

A green gentrification effect could be mitigated by accompanying social infrastructure: housing regulations, funding for social housing, rent subsidies, support for new forms of accommodation (co-housing, community land trust), increased taxes on development profit, or taxes on tourism, to provide a few examples. Recently, a new rule is imposing that 30 percent of new housing developments should be ‘affordable’, to increase the merely 1.5 to 3 percent of social housing in the city. Probably, the type of housing surrounding the greening initiative has the largest influence. Some types of housing are more sensitive to gentrification than others. Franco’s mass housing buildings in the north of the city, are more difficult to convert into high-end residences.

They are not well connected to the city centre and the commercial fabric is less stronger. In such neighbourhoods gentrification effects are smaller than in places allowing for more easy housing mobility and quick changes (Informant 2 2021).

It is interesting to reflect on the idea that an instant city-wide implementation of the Superblocks, based solely on relatively cheap tactical measures, would plausibly not provoke the same gentrification effect of today’s rather acupunctural interventions.

More recent research of 120,000 Airbnb touristic rental transactions shows a sharp increase in the Superblock zones and, even more, an ‘announcement effect’ in the parts of the Eixample where new interventions are planned. It is important to note that tourism is one of the driving forces behind gentrification in Barcelona, with extreme forms in Barceloneta and the Old City part (Informant 7 2021). Ook Honey-Rosés (2019) wijst op de risico’s van gentrificatie gelinkt aan toerisme, in zijn sociologisch onderzoek in Poblenou na de Superblock interventie:

Fig. 5.13. Construction of 68 public housing apartments in the Poblenou Superblock. Picture by author.

2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 5.14. Housing at Vallcarca, the ‘backside’ of the Horta neighbourhood. Picture by author. 2021.

Barcelona.

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“At the same time, our results confirm that Poblenou exemplifies Barcelona’s contrasting personalities—one serving as a mainstream tourist destination, but simultaneously being the home for a cohesive neighbourhood. It is unclear if Poblenou will be able to continue to integrate new industries and investments while also retaining the local feel and community. There is a risk that gentrification, displacement and tourism may break the strong social fabric and history of community organization” (Honey- Rosés 2019, 11).

However, the influence of tourism is not unequivocal. The presence of an excess of tourists can just as well cause real estate prices to fall. It is probably the closeness to sights that drives the popularity and prices up (Graells-Garrido 2021).

In Barcelona, no new permits for tourist operations were issued for a year. Measures have also been taken against mass tourism in Amsterdam, Venice and Rome to avoid an overdose for the quality of life and guide visitors more to other places of interest in the area (Schwering 2019). However, the current Covid-19 crisis has paradoxically changed the story. In Barcelona, the city can breathe again and locals find their way back to places that were previously avoided, on the Ramblas but also in the Sant Antoni Superblock. On the other hand, since the number of tourists dropped steepl, the economic sector is now begging for a revival to save income and jobs (Informant 5, 7 2021).

HEALTH & ENVIRONMENT Diagnosis The first seed for the Superblock idea arose when a study at the end of the 1980s charged the exceedance of noise standards by car traffic in Barcelona (Alsina 1988). Research by the ISGlobal institute on environmental effects in 65 Catalan municipalities, including Barcelona, revealed that air pollution would cause 1,800 hospitalisations per year, 5,100 cases of chronic bronchitis among adults, 31,100 cases among children, 54,000 asthma attacks among children and adults, and 3,500 premature deaths (Künzli and Pérez 2007 in Nieuwenhuijsen 2019).

Superblock effects The health impact of the Superblocks is strongly linked to its environmental effects. Potential results are described as impressive in several studies. The most striking conclusion is that, only in Barcelona, as many as 667 premature deaths can be avoided annually by reducing NO2 (291), noise pollution (163), heat (117), and by developing more green space (60). Better health due to a shift from car use to more active modes of transport could prevent a further 36 cases. More generally, life expectancy can be increased by 200 days, and an annual positive economic impact of 1.7 million euros can be generated

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Fig. 5.15. Baseline and Superblocks environmental exposure levels. Mueller. NO2. Road Noise.2017. In Mueller et al. 2017.

Fig. 5.16. Map of Barcelona before Cerdà’s grid. 1808. N/a. Carta dei contorni di Barcelona. 1808. In Ajuntament 2013, 11 Fig. 5.17. Aerial view on Barcelona. Picture by author. 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 5.18. Green space in current situation and with superblocks. BCNecologia. Green space in current situation and with superblocks. 2017. Barcelona. In Rueda 2018.

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(Mueller et al. 2019). The study gives a powerfully symbolic ethical argument to the proponents of a fast and tactical city-wide roll-out of the Superblock concept, at an estimated cost of 4.9 million euros, thus paid back by its benefits in only three years (Rueda 2021).

The city’s multidisciplinary consortium BCNecología created a number of maps that simulate how, due to less car use, the percentage of people exposed to levels below the guidelines for air pollution will increase from 56 to 94 percent, and for noise from 54 to 73.5 percent (Rueda 2019, 145). The power of mapping (Harley 2001) can be used as a persuasive instrument to convey certain political messages. Rueda does not shy away from it with an extensive set of very expressive maps, which also appeal to health as one of man’s deepest desires, to argue his preference for a quick tactical roll-out of the Superblocks, from the role of an expert (Rueda 2019, 2021).

tackle the challenges of biodiversity loss, heat stress, floods and droughts, induced by the global climate crisis (EEA 2020).

In een Emergency Declaration, geeft Barcelona de specifieke uitdagingen weer voor de stad. Zelfs wanneer de doelstellingen in het Paris Agreement gehaald worden, harsh effects are forecast: such as eight times more heat waves at the end of the century; reduction in accumulated rainfall in the city of between 14 percent and 26 percent by the end of the century; extreme rain (which means that what used to happen every 50 years is forecast to happen every 35 years); loss of up to 46 percent of useful sand area on most beaches (Sant Sebastià beach could practically disappear); increased fire risk in Collserola; loss of biodiversity; worsening air quality; and an effect on critical infrastructure (Ajuntament 2020 c).

Covid-19 pandemic Barcelona’s first Superblocks were achieved just before the Covid-19 pandemic completely changed the living experience of the city. Solnit (2020) states that the clearances after the corona storm will be leading to new insights. Meanwhile, Barcelona seems to have delivered some prophetic realisations as seen from today’s crisis perspective, probably causing a lasting change in the perception of public space in the city.

More recently, cities worldwide are closing lanes to car traffic at a rapid pace favouring pedestrians, cyclists and urban dwellers searching for peace and meeting (Honey-Rosès et al. 2020). Also today, after more than one year of various degrees of lockdown, Barcelona keeps experimenting with temporary speed reductions and car-free zones, sometimes merely installing traffic signs. Experts and residents assume that the city department conducts tests in this way with a view to future Superblock interventions (Informant 7 2021).

BIODIVERSITY, WATER MANAGEMENT, CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION The city drifting away from the natural landscape Before Cerdà’s grid expanded the city from the old centre to Gràcia, the area was an undeveloped plain between the coastal town and the Collserola hills. Today, in the terminology of Sauer (1925), a connection with the natural landscape is barely felt when experiencing the cultural landscape of the human-made city. Almost a hundred years after Sauer, Purdy (2015) describes the Anthropocene Age and sees, among other aspects, climate change driving democratic flows in re-imagining a renewed mutual respect between human and biosphere. The discrepancy between the cultural and the natural environment is growing apart for decades and provokes a lack of resilience to

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Climate change adaptation and mitigation, biodiversity and permeability Concerning climate change adaptation and mitigation, efforts can be detected transversally over the different goals of the Superblock realisations. A reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is achieved by the significant reduction of car traffic by 15 percent, increase of collective bus transport by the same amount and, even being on a tiny scale for now, by the production of renewable energy in the public area as planned in the designs for the next phase of transformations. The city’s resilience to the effects of climate change is progressing with the Superblocks, however, at a slow pace.

Ungrateful of the high need, an observation of the realised Superblocks turns out to be a missed opportunity to bet heavily on the presence of abundant and wild nature, leading to more biodiversity in the city. Especially in tactical interventions, the water permeability is almost nil, and the adding of vegetation is limited to mobile tree and planting boxes. But even in the recognisable end-phase design, with a sequence of larger planting compartments, most surfaces remain paved. In addition, the final natural value in the planting areas strongly suffers from bad implementation by the contractors and under the harsh conditions of the city, such as vandalism, damage by dogs and drought. To obtain more significant and observable effects in terms of increasing biodiversity, avoiding exceptional flooding and heat stress, more radical and impactful approaches will be needed.

Some improvement is noticeable in the entries for the recent design competition for four new Green Axes and Squares along with Consell de Cent street; as far as nature and biodiversity überhaupt have a chance to flourish in a system of squares and axes.

The images proposed by the laureates go a step further than the current realisations in response to the ‘explosion of greenery’ that the city aims for. However, the technical

requirements required only a modest area of at least 20 percent of green space. One of the competition winners explains that a larger share than 30 percent would be difficult to achieve, given the competing requirements for minimum accessibility of services and car traffic up to every front door.

Trees in the city When introducing the 3-30-300 rule, Konijnendijk van den Bosch (2021) refers to a wide range of studies that highlight the importance of trees for human health. Underpinned by scientific work, he advocates the visibility of 3 trees from each dwelling, a 30 percent tree canopy for each city (and preferably every neighbourhood) and a maximum distance of 300 meters to green public space.

“Studies have shown an association between urban forest canopy and, for example, cooling, better microclimates, mental and physical health, and possibly also reducing air pollution and noise. By creating more leafy neighbourhoods, we also encourage people to spend more time outdoors and to interact with their neighbourhoods (which in turn promotes social health)” (Konijnendijk van den Bosch 2021, 1).

Barcelona is mentioned as one of the cities aiming to progress from 25.2 to 30 percent tree canopy in the city. The city formulated the goal in its Tree Plan 2017-2023. However, the percentage counts for the entire city, including the Serra de Collserola Natural Park forest, occupying almost one-fifth of the city area (Ajuntament 2017). More valuable would be a percentage per neighbourhood or city part. Besides the number of trees, Barcelona’s Tree Plan calls justly for higher diversity in tree species. In the urban projects of the 1990s, the city overused non-native palm trees along the coast and in numerous parks realised at the time. The trees in the Eixample are somehow more diverse, still dominated by platans, making the streets benefit from its extensive shadow provision and heat stress mitigation.

“One of the final objectives of the Tree Plan is to ‘Achieve a biodiverse tree heritage in which no single tree species accounts for more than 15% of the total population within the urban area’ and ‘Ensuring that within urban areas, 40% of tree species are adapted to climate change, as opposed to the current 30%” (Ajuntament 2017, 25).

The concept of the Superblocks perfectly meets the aim of the proximity of public ‘green space’ within 300 meters. In the zones that work with a more equal and systemic spread through the Eixample, such as Sant Antoni or soon around Consell de Cent and Passeig Sant Joan, structural proximity of green is already being achieved.

Fig. 5.19. Levels of materialisation: tactical phase in Poblenou. Picture by author. 2021.

Barcelona.

Fig. 5.20. Levels of materialisation: end-phase design in Sant Antoni. Picture by author.

2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 5.21. Levels of materialisation: winning design for the Consell de Cent / Rocafort Square. Estudi08014. Arquitectura, ciutat, territori, S.C.P.P. El parlament de les espècies [The Parliament of Species]. March 2021. In Ajuntament de Barcelona 2021 (d).

An increase in green space is much needed, as its presence in the Eixample strands on an unenviable 1.85 m² per inhabitant. Also, in Gràcia, the existing green space is only 3.15 m² per inhabitant, lower than the average of 6.6 m² per inhabitant in Barcelona.

That’s still a long way below the 9 m² recommended by the WHO and well below the 27m² in London (Ajuntament 2013, Bausells 2016).

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Fig. 5.22. Parc Joan Miró. Picture by author. 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 5.24. Sealed square in front of the Sants station. Picture by author. 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 5.23. Parc d’Espanya Industrial. Picture by author. 2021. Barcelona.

Fig. 5.25. Sealed square in front of the MACBA Museum. Picture by author. 2021. Barcelona.

Quality of green space and (the lack of) structural maintenance

The difficult integration of exuberant vegetation is reflected in almost all interventions visited. A city worker from the landscaping department confirms the complexity and the margin for improvement. In Sant Antoni, the contractor delivered insufficient quality work due to an insufficient amount of good soil and compaction. It is difficult to fall back on the warranty, because it is difficult to prove afterwards whether the damage was caused by poor planting or by harsh urban conditions. Moreover, there

Trees in the squares and along the roads thrive in small planters but suffer greatly from the harsh influences of the city. Due to the risk of damage from dogs or vandalism, new trees are usually planted at a certain age, making proper rooting difficult, further enhanced by the region’s relatively dry climate (Informant 1, 3 2021).

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Fig. 5.26 - 5.30. Poor biodiversity, harsh conditions, difficult maintenance, drought. Picture by Author. April, 2021. Barcelona.

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is not really a structural maintenance plan, but there is sometimes discussion about which policy level is responsible: the region, the city or the district. However, an automatic tubal system for the entire Carrer del Comte Borrell has been made, which can serve all plant sections in a continuous loop. At present, action is mainly taken if the immediate neighborhood repeatedly complains about the poor quality of a certain plant section (Informant 3 2021).

GOVERNANCE MODELS AND FLEXIBLE SOLUTIONS The implementation of a new generation of urban projects requires new approaches and new governance models. The city communicates explicitly to apply tactical urbanism, systemic spread instead of acupuntural interventions, and experiments with various forms of participation, direct and indirect, and structurally via an online overarching online platform leaning on the city’s administrations on district level.

With a smart but fragile strategy of flexibility and – at least theoretical – reversibility, Barcelona wants to respond to a rapidly evolving urban reality. As described in the corresponding chapter, the iterative process has known its victories and defeats. However, trial-and-error may be inherent to the proposed strategies, which means that the goal of starting new models as such is achieved. The first measures on the field, resulting from the new models, have been implemented and may provide learning material for elaborating the subsequent phases. On the other hand, the level of participation was lower than the expectations, despite also being provided as an explicit goal (UNDP 2016), or at least a recommended method (Ajuntament 2015),

DISCUSSION ON REAL VS POTENTIAL ACHIEVEMENT OF THE GOALS Some of the achieved results are already visible today within the perimeter of the realisations: an increased social activity, a reduction in car traffic, more pedestrians and cyclists, a significantly reduced noise level, and a limited increase in green infrastructure.

Some outcomes even apply across the city: a stop on car traffic growth, an increase in bus users at the 400-metre rhythm of the Superblocks, strong growth in the number of cyclists, and experimenting with new governance models and the adoption of flexible solutions.

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Other results may be spectacular but very theoretical in the case of a roll-out of the Superblocks all over the city. These are mainly the health effects such as preventing premature death and a higher life expectancy on a large scale due to better air quality, less noise and more green space.

Therefore, it is meaningful to distinguish if results are achieved now or whether they are potential benefits of an entirely transformed city and how they differ according to the stage of materialisation. An assessment of the achievement of the initial goals according to the level of materialisation and the level of systemic spread is summarised in the corresponding table. Public protests and political instability push towards more acupunctural and high-end materialisations. At the same time, city experts and academic researchers emphasised the benefits of rather quick and tactical systemic spread.

Today, by focusing on the end-phase design of a particular zone of the Eixample, Barcelona seems to have left the path of tactical urbanism, at least for the next two years of this political tenure. No new temporary interventions are being installed, despite experts advocating for quick and low-cost responses to climate change adaptation and new governance models responding to the rapidly evolving conditions of the dense and complex city. The reaction of the public opinion on the upcoming realisations and the 2023 election results will be crucial to define the subsequent trajectory towards the ‘sustainable’ city.

Table. 5.1. Differentiation of outcomes according to their real or potential value: acupunctural vs city-wide Superblocks; tactical vs end phase design.

Scheme by author. 2021.

(Colour coding: green = positive effect; yellow = limited effect; orange = no or insufficient effect). Sources: Künzli and Pérez 2007, Anguelowski 2017, Ajuntament de Barcelona 2018, Mueller et al. 2019, Nieuwenhuijsen 2019, BCNEcología 2019, TMB 2019, Konijnendijk van den Bosch 2021, field observations and interviews conducted for this paper.

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6. SAME MYTHS, DIFFERENT STRATEGIES REFLECTIONS ON LONDON AS A ‘NATIONAL PARK CITY’ From a guerrilla idea to broad political support How should a visionary ‘sustainable’ urban project be implemented? And more specifically, how do you place such a project on the political agenda? While Barcelona is consciously betting on tactical urbanism as a branded strategy, London writes a different story. In 2019, London put itself on the map of innovative sustainable capitals by marketing the city as the first entire metropolis being a National Park.

Similarly to Barcelona, the idea matured in the minds of visionary thinkers for several years before being picked up as an urban project. However, more than in explicitly political projects like Anne Hidalgo’s ‘15 minutes city’ in Paris, or Ada Colau’s Superblocks, the National Park in London is the intellectual property of a non-politically bound movement. It is said to be Daniel Raven-Ellison, according to his Twitter profile Guerrilla Geographer and London NationalParkCity Founder, who first challenged the community with his question: “What if we made London a National Park City?”

(NPC.London a 2021, 1).

In a first step, a simple co-created website called for a Greater London National Park – ‘Officially only a notional park’. Many events followed, seeking public and political support for the project. In 2017, the movement condensed into the National Park City Foundation, actively rallying the support of more than 1,000 local representatives from each party and ultimately every candidate for mayor in the city, ensuring political support for the project, whoever took the lead. Finally, the project was officially launched under the rule of Mayor Sadiq Khan, together with Daniel Raven-Ellison for the Foundation, two Deputy Mayors, the Chair of Natural England and the Director of ICLEI Cities Biodiversity Center (NPC.London b 2021).

In 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the London elections were postponed for a year until May 2021. In a tweet ahead of the election, Raven-Ellison claims that whoever wins the Mayoral elections should be aware of a majority of Londoners supporting National Park City: “88% of Londoners agree politicians should promote the #London National Park City to make our capital greener, healthier & wilder. 8 in 10 also agree they should create a #NationalParkCity strategy linking transport, health, education and the environment” (Raven-Ellison on Twitter, May 1, 2021).

On the movement’s website, a list indicates precisely, name by name, which 18 of the 25 London councillors support the project, across party lines, and which 7 councillors do not. In any case, a large majority pledges support. That is far different from Ada

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Colau’s situation, governing with a minority cabinet of 10 out of 42 councillors in Barcelona, over time losing support for the Superblocks when relations get troubled by parallel politic disputes.

The notion of the National Park City The definition of a national park has various interpretations, depending on the culture, continent or country where it is defined. Recurring notions are the preservation of the natural environment, including landscapes, geology, plants and animal life, in addition to more holistic purposes as historical, cultural or scientific interest. The concept arose in the mid-19th century with the protection of, from a Western point of view, vast unexplored interiors of the United States. While in the US and Canada, both land and wildlife are considered, the African parks mainly focus on wildlife, and notably Brazil, Japan, India, and Australia now also have very extensive parks (Roe 2018, Britannica 2020).

In the UK, the term was introduced in the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, to protect high-value landscapes. Since then, the concept has undergone constant evolution and broadening. The 1995 Environment Act added a remarkable inclusion of the socio-economic wellbeing of local communities. Roe et al. (2018, 262) comment that, in the UK, “National Parks contain significant human settlements and infrastructure, are managed and cultivated cultural landscapes, and are mostly privately owned land.”

Contrary to claims, London is not the very first urban National Park. In the Stockholm Archipelago, the Ulriksdal-Haga-Brunnsviken-Djurgården National Urban Park, comprising 27 square kilometres of islands and water, has existed since 1995 to disprove the idea that this yet-to-be-developed land is a wasteland. A similar objective was the foundation for the 73 square kilometres of Jamaica Bay next to the skyscrapers in New York City. Neither can be compared to the scale nor to the voluntarism of London’s move. The entire London metropolis was declared a National Park in 2019, with divergent emphasis on increasing green space, health, promoting cleaner energy, and reducing waste and pollution (Roe 2018).

Fig. 6.1 - 6.2. Mapping of ‘green’ areas in London National Park City. National Park City. London National Park City Map. 2019. https://www.nationalparkcity.london/map Fig. 6.3. Raven-Ellison tweets about public support for the London Park in the run-up to the elections. Raven-Ellison, Daniel. 88% of Londoners agree politicians should promote the #London National Park City. Twitter, May 1, 2021.

Fig. 6.4. List of councellors supporting the National Park City. National Park City. London assembly support. 2021. https://www.nationalparkcity.london/london-assembly-support

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The transformative potential of the London Park Critics wonder what the National Park’s transformative potential is beyond the shiny layer of the international and internal innovative appearance. The Charter of the London National Park City is primarily a statement of fact rather than an intention or plan for radical transformation. It brings together hundreds of companies, political forces, local communities and citizens in one partnership. But what exactly is the schedule for the future? How should the city and its inhabitants ultimately benefit from this?

(Miciukiewicz 2020).

The National Park City may have to be seen as the ‘gloss coat’ over the already existing ‘All London Green Grid’, an actionable strategy. But what is the added value? How might the Urban National Park influence ongoing formal planning processes, and in what direction? Another suggestion is that the concept might function as a vertical policy integration tool to integrate health and well-being at every policy level (Roe 2018). However, shortly after launch, the debate is still open, and experts intend to formulate recommendations for a more tangible outcome.

While Barcelona focuses specifically on transforming the city’s grey public space dominated by motorised traffic, with relatively limited achievements in de-sealing and biodiversity, London places full emphasis on nature. The metropolis, in addition to its nine million human inhabitants, has “nearly 15,000 species, including eight species of bats, the largest population of stag beetles in England, and hundreds of bird species.”

(Leahy 2019, 1).

The opportunities of ecologic value in symbiosis with the multifunctionality of urban nature have been emphasized for some time in the innovatively evolving notion of the ‘urban forest’ (Konijnendijk 2018). In his research focusing on Berlin’s urban ruderal areas, Kowarik (2019) highlights the quality of non-indigenous biodiversity, discovering a richness of native and alien plants and invertebrates (carabid beetles and spiders) in emerging forests. In London, the emphasis of biodiversity is even more on diversity: “The metropolitan nature – from robins in back gardens, through foxes roaming the streets at night, to exotic spiders crawling around Heathrow and scorpions living in hot tunnels of Victoria Line – is a key constituent of the socio-naturaltechnical ecosystem of the post-imperial London” (Miciukiewicz 2020, 425).

Randrup et al. agree on the potential of wild nature in the city as part of nature-based thinking and refer to London when incorporating the insight in their discussion of the ecology-community nexus: “In developing and creating room for nature, natural growing conditions are emphasised, and green spaces become wilder – i.e. more biodiverse and ecologically complex. We see this already in wildlife gardens, people’s interests in e.g., urban gardening, and in the wave of ‘urban nature parks’, and London

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being recently declared a ‘National Park City’ (London.gov 2019)” (In Randrup et al. 2020, 924) By organizing ‘festivals’, workshops, podcasts and publications with inspiring practical examples, it seems that the Foundation wants to use the power of enthusing private actors for action. Just as crowdfunding in economic terms has proved capable of acquiring enormous sums, with Barack Obama’s election campaign being the bestknown example (Tran 2008), it seems as if London wants to apply the technique to nature creation through the sum of countless small interventions. An example is a project that encourages residents to tackle their front yards. London has 3.8 million gardens, covering 24 percent of the capital. No less than 6 percent of London is made up of front gardens. About half of them have been paved over (NPC Foundation 2021).

Re-naturalising would not only help as stepstones for biodiversity in the city, but also has an effect on the well-being of citizens, especially in times of health crisis and lockdown: “During the planning stages the RHS [Royal Horticultural Society] conducted a survey on gardening’s ability to combat loneliness, which found that it was the young who were suffering most, with 68% of 18 to 24-year-olds surveyed having felt lonely compared to 41% of over-55s. This semi-public space, the RHS argued, could help enormously. (…)

Front gardens provide a common interest, a starting point for talking. But it also gives you the chance to be in the presence of people even if you don’t want to talk – just seeing someone is good for you” (Coulson 2020, p.5).

However, the platform ‘frontgardens.nationalparkcity.org’ seems to get stuck somehow at an intellectual level. References are made to several studies that emphasise the health benefits, but candidate owners cannot count on hands-on support or subsidies from the non-governmental National Park Foundation, nor are references made to opportunities via the government.

Concerning governmental action, at the launch of the project, the City is committed to increasing the tree canopy by 10 percent by 2050, being today at 19%. Specifically, the planting of 250,000 trees was specifically provided for in the budget (London.gov 2021). London is already doing well in terms of share of green space. The figures range from 27 m² (Bausells 2016) to 68.3 m² of green space per inhabitant (Hugsi 2021). Although it is very difficult to make an objective comparison for this kind of numbers among cities. The figures differ greatly depending on how you define the surface: per built environment, per metropolitan area, with or without the green belt, considering public and/or private property. A fairer comparison about green and liveability in Barcelona, rated at 6.6 m² of green space per inhabitant (Ajuntament 2013), should ultimately be carried out per neighbourhood and within the built environment.

Sterile support creation vs arduous take-off London’s strategy implies that, until today, the focus has mainly been on National Park marketing and enthusing by mapping the already enormous green spaces in the metropolitan area and by launching events and inspiring projects, allowing people to contribute and encouraging nature-crowdfunding.

Meanwhile, in Barcelona, making use of ‘trial and error’ urbanism, substantial areas of public space have been effectively transformed. In a time frame of five years, within the Eixample alone, 128 ha of space for cars will be converted into multifunctional space, be it by tactical or high-end materialisations. In the final stage of the project, a transformation of up to 700 ha would be reached.

Nevertheless, in Barcelona, pertinent questions arise about the social acceptance of the project, the slightly decreasing level of ambition during the process and the intrinsic value in terms of biodiversity and climate adaptation. Also, the Superblocks’ political controversy carries a certain risk, that a new government will one day put the project in the freezer, as a political statement to symbolise a break with previous policies. The reversibility of tactical urbanism could thus become more a reality than intended. Concerning London, on the other hand, it is yet to be seen how and to what extent the marketing and carefully built social and political support in the city will effectively lead to an impactful transformation of the city.

REFLECTIONS ON PARIS AS A ‘15 MINUTES-CITY’ An international movement of progressive leaders As a broad overarching umbrella for the transformation towards a ‘sustainable’ city, the 15 minutes-neighbourhood is for Paris, what the Superblocks are for Barcelona.

Both are politically exploited projects designed to give a face to the progressive ideas of progressive mayoral candidates. An array of citizen’s movements growing in major European cities can be seen as a broader international movement, influencing and sometimes stimulating each other in competitive bidding.

Ada Colau’s political movement ‘Barcelona En Commún’, resulting from the Indignados street protests, won elections at its first appearance in 2015 with a progressive spatial program and was re-elected for another four-year term in 2019. ‘Paris En Commun’ led Anne Hidalgo to the mayor’s office in 2014. It is significant for the implementation process that the mayor in Paris was re-elected for a six-year term in 2020 and can continue until 2026. In Barcelona, Colau will have to prove herself before 2023, gambling on a well-aimed intervention at four intersections along one axis in the Eixample. On the other hand, Hidalgo takes her time to quietly launch a public inquiry this year about a space Limited Traffic Zone, in the entire city center, where priority will be given to cyclists and pedestrians (Reid 2021; Ville de Paris 2021).

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Fig. 6.5. Potential of green gardens in London. Greenpeace. Greater London’s gardens City. 2021. https://frontgardens.nationalparkcity.org/article/how-green-are-our-front-gardens/ Fig. 6.6 - 6.7. Sealed front gardens in London. National Park City. Untitled. N/d. London. https://frontgardens.nationalparkcity.org/article/how-green-are-our-front-gardens/ Fig. 6.8. Green front gardens in London. Parkinson, Arthur. Gardener and writer Arthur Parkinson. N/d. London. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/07/doorstep-delights-why-front-gardens-matter Fig. 6.9. Green front gardens in London. Hansen, Pål /The Observer. Jane at the Railway Cottages in north London. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/07/doorstep-delights-why-front-gardens-matter

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Fig. 6.10. The Champs-Elysées in 2013. N/a. Untitled. 2013. Paris. https://www.nyhabitat.com/blog/2013/07/29/visit-champs-elysees-arc-triomphe-paris/ Fig. 6.11. Vision for the Champs-Elysées in 2030. Philippe Chiambaretta Architects. Untitled. 2020. Paris. http://parisfutur.com/projets/les-champs-elysees-en-2030/ Fig. 6.12. Arc de Triomphe in 2018. N/a. Untitled. 2018. Paris. https://www.bvjhostelparis.com/champs-elysees-hostel-in-paris/ Fig. 6.13. Vision for the Arc de Triomphe in 2030. Philippe Chiambaretta Architects. Untitled. 2020. Paris. http://parisfutur.com/projets/les-champs-elysees-en-2030/ Fig. 6.14. Call : imagine the Champs-Elysées tomorrow. N/a. Untitled. 2021. Paris. https://www.pavillon-arsenal.com/fr/architecture-a-la-maison/imagine-les-champs-elysees-de-demain/

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Chrono-urbanism However, in London, Paris and Barcelona, the concepts did not originate at the party headquarters. Behind every concept hides a theoretical framework conceived or initiated by expressive thinkers. In London, ‘Guerrilla Geographer’ Raven-Ellison is seen as the instigator of the city as ‘National Park’. In Barcelona, city experts as Guallart and Rueda conceived the Superblocks, promoting tactical urbanism as a unique strategy. In Paris, Sorbonne academic Moreno adopted the image of mastermind behind ‘chrono-urbanism’ and quite explicitly enters into a tandem with the Mayor (Moreno 2021). However, also these experts compiled their narratives from theoretical concepts that had existed for some time in literature and from practical experiences in other protagonist cities.

The concept of chrono-urbanism was theorized in, for example, ‘a chronotopic approach to urban timespace’ (Mulicek 2014) and launched previously in different variations in other places. Paris increased the ambitions of the earlier 20 minutes-neighbourhoods in Melbourne to 15 minutes, although with similar main objectives. He also responds to previous criticisms that disabled people miss out on the concept of ‘walkability’ and ‘hyperproximity’. The focus on a ‘walkable’ 15 minutes distance gets abandoned because “the social needs of different demographic groups were not sufficiently provided, and at any given time, one or more group was left disadvantaged in provision of basic amenities” (Moreno 2021, 97).

Paris identifies six social functions to be present within reach of 15 minutes: to live and work worthily, to have access to healthcare, to shop, learn and relax. An opportunity is to bet on ‘multiservices’, such as schools, which also serve as gardens for walking neighbours at the weekend, or streets equipped with sports tracks, in so far as this can make a sports hall superfluous.

Finally, a firm focus is set on the power of digitalisation to assist urban planning policies in decisions and actions towards hyperproximity. This should be achieved by data gathering through the ‘Internet of Things’ – people’s electronic devices, estimated at 75 billion devices by 2025. The believed capability of steering future spatial planning frames the 15 minutes-city ultimately as an advanced ‘smart city’ concept.

“The achievement of Smart City concept in the current epoch is tied to availability of a rich interconnected array of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that have the capacity to collect, and send data to a centralized network, where this data is then computed, analyzed and distributed, in real-time to respective urban department for actions [48]. The availability of IoT devices, which Alam [49] note will be in excess of over 75 billion devices by 2025 and Crowd Computing and others is expected to actualize the proposed 15-Minute City concept” (Moreno 2021, 98).

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Critical notes In a striking passage, even the capacity to create ‘place identity’ is attributed to the power of digitisation, through targeted branding, after processing and analyzing vast amounts of data. It is a highly doubtful idea whether a ‘genius loci’ can be detected by the means of technology. In addition to that, the conceivers of the concept are self-critical and acknowledge a number of disadvantages of the smart city concept, which, when based too heavily on an economic agenda, can amplify exclusion and social inequalities. Both previous remarks are in a certain contrast with referring to Jane Jacobs as a source of inspiration for ‘proximity’ in the 15 minutes-city. In her fight for the preservation of place and identity in Lower-Manhattan, Jacobs argued for the preservation of wat she called ‘the Village’, as a counterbalance to a focus on economic interests, globalisation, or technology as sufficient solutions.

“She [Jacobs] helped us re-emphasise dimensions that were usually excluded – no, expelled – from general analyses of the urban economy. Indeed, I can imagine she would have affirmed without a quiver of doubt that, no matter how electronic and global the city might one day become, it still has to be “made” – and therein lies the importance of place” (Sassen 2016, 3).

Even though the 15-minute-city concept had been around for some time, it got a considerable boost when the lockdown, resulting from the Covid-19 crisis, made proximity an interesting concept, in a world where ‘movement’ has lost its status as a symbol of progress. In the contrary, being able to survive without the need to move for working, or for access to basic necessities, is seen as a new luxury. As a result, some critics see hyper-proximity as a sustainable mantra for liveability in the post-Covid-19 city (Mardones 2020). Critics call the 15-minute city as the solution for a post-Covid-19 city a ‘phantasme bobo’ – bobo being a French onomatopoeia derived from ‘bohemian bourgeois’. Another urban utopia, far from reality. Teleworking, in particular, is not appreciated as a miracle solution, due to unfortunately being only destined for wellpaid jobs in the tertiary sector, not for shop assistants or metro drivers. The 15-minute city seems to want the advantages of a village in the city, without the drawbacks.

Regaining a village feeling – with proposed benefits such as the proximity of nature, a concentration of minimal services nearby, a small-scaled community feeling – may just be what the fan of the concept is looking for today. However, it’s not possible to have it all – the butter, the money for the butter, and the smile of the girl making the butter – says a pointed French proverb (Badeau 2020).

The transformation of the Champs-Elysées An overview of current and planned projects in Paris reveals contrasts. On the one hand, there is an extensive arsenal of enthusiastic classic urban projects, to even a series of futuristic architectural eyecatchers. Another trajectory involves the implemen-

tation of thousands of participatory, small to microscopic, bottom-up interventions.

The renewal of the iconic Champs-Elysées, an eight-kilometre-long boulevard between the Louvre and La Défense, will be argued to belong to the first urban projects category. A first look at the visuals imagining the transformation of the ChampsElysées evokes numerous similarities with the green axes and squares in Barcelona.

The simulations radiate a new form of public space, from an eight-lane wide tarmac plain, dominated by car traffic, to a multifunctional space for cars, cyclists and pedestrians and high-quality pavements. An evolution from space for movement to space for human interactions. However, there are major differences in the conceptualisation, narrative, and political incorporation of the project.

Architect Philippe Chiambaretta designed his proposal at the request of the ChampsElysées Committee, a non-profit association which, since 1916, has represented the interests of owners and traders by promoting and developing the international image of the avenue (Comité Champs-Elysées 2021). In addition to striving for international appeal, stakeholders feel a growing disconnection between the inhabitants of the city and the boulevard, mainly driven by the conquest of the place by mass tourism and commercial affairs. A similar analysis is valuable for the Ramblas in Barcelona, hijacked for some time by mass tourism and gadget shops to the detriment of the residents. Studies on the Parisian Champs-Elysées found that more than two thirds (68 percent) of all pedestrians are tourists, of which 85 percent are from abroad. Only 5 percent of the hundreds of thousands of daily passers-by live in Paris (Informant 5 2021, PCA 2021).

In a next step, between February and June 2020, the Committee launched a number of images on an online participation platform, asking ‘What would you like to change to improve the Champs-Elysées’ (Make.org 2021). A total of 96,762 participants took part in the survey and submitted 2,000 proposals. An algorithm allowed to detect participant’s preference for each other’s ideas, which led to a choice of the six most supported proposals.

In an ultimate message on the Committee’s website, chairman Jean-Noël Reinhardt requests the city to incorporate the proposed new ‘eco-system’ for the avenue in its policy, if necessary in a public-private partnership (Comité Champs-Elysées 2021).

However, the two-kilometre long boulevard between the Arc de Triomphe and the Place de la Concorde is mainly known for its expensive cafés, luxury boutiques and showrooms of exclusive car brands, and the commercial rent prices are among the highest in the world (Sabbe 2021). That is probably why it took until January 2021 for Mayor Hidalgo to respond to the images, meanwhile published in newspapers and magazines worldwide. The 15 minutes-city vision of the ‘Paris En Commun’ project prefers not to focus primarily on monocentric urban interventions with an international appeal, but rather on equally spread out, polycentric facilities. Special attention is additionally provided to what the city itself considers ‘popular neighbourhoods’.

Although on a completely different scale, in such relatively limited enthusiasm, the

narrative of Barcelona’s Mayor Colau is recognisable, as she tends to question real estate speculation and business interests as a driver for urban development (Zografos 2020). Remember how, as one of the first decisions regarding the Superblocks, she shifted the location from the district’s commercial centre to a more prototypical adjacent residential zone.

In the first stage, Paris will only partially implement the plan for the Champs-Elysées, estimated at 250 million euros. Before the upcoming 2024 Olympic Games, the city will only tackle the iconic Arc de Triomphe roundabout. For the transformation of the Champs-Elysées boulevard itself, the realisation is transposed ‘to 2030’ in a subsequent tenure (Sabbe 2021, PCA 2021).

Participatory budgets and projects The transformation of the Champs-Elysées gives relatively little fundamental substance to the concept of 15 minutes-city. Much closer to the vision of the city council and the pursuit of hyper-proximity is the system of participatory budgets. Paris spends five percent of its total annual budget on projects submitted by its citizens and foresees to eventually increase the share to twenty-five percent of the budget (Willsher 2020).

In Barcelona, the objective of applying ‘new governance models’ finds expression in the reversibility and ephemerality of tactical urbanism – after all, a relatively top-down oriented strategy. Paris expresses the same goal through popular budgets enhanced by digital strategies. In a scholarly presentation of the 15 minutes-city concept, Moreno (2021) argues for adopting new qualitative participatory processes, applied at different scales of planning processes, organising feedback loops from conception to after realization, and using smart technologies to promote interaction with the public.

In a first edition, after the new board took office, 15 projects were submitted, followed by a popular online vote attended by 40,000 people. In the second year, a dedicated web platform was established and already 5,000 projects were submitted, from which 67,000 people ultimately chose 188 projects. In 2016, the participation rate increased again by 39%. (Urbact 2017). According to the web platform, a total of 2,751 projects were effectively implemented

by May 2021, including new public gardens, coworking spaces, renovated schools, pedestrian areas or sport facilities (Ville de Paris 2021b). The excellent distribution of the participatory projects throughout the city shows a big difference with the classic ‘urban projects’ along the Seine announced on the Paris Futur platform. The city ensures that distribution of participatory projects in its criteria and encourages a guaranteed portion in what it calls the ‘popular neighbourhoods’, indicated on the plan in green blotches (Ville de Paris 2021b).

Arhip-Paterson (2021) analysed the level of authenticity in what he calls a “left-wing partisan political offer.” Authentic partisanship is still present, but its intensity must attentively be weighed against hijacking by district mayors, including the right-wing ones, who in turn try to attract non-partisan participatory budgets to their district.

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Fig. 6.15 - 6.19. Make the Chemin Vert green again. N/a. Untitled. 2015. Paris. https://mairie11.paris.fr/pages/le-vert-de-retour-rue-du-chemin-vert-10023 Fig. 6.20 - 6.22. Pedestrianisation of Vavin Street – Edouard Quénu Street – Water management project. N/a. Untitled. 2015-2018. Paris. https://budgetparticipatif.paris.fr/

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submitted in 2016, elected with 908 votes and has a budget of 240,000 euros. The project could be compared to the intervention at Consell de Cent in Barcelona, as space for cars is reduced from two to one lanes, and green elements replace parking spaces. The pedestrianization of Vavin Street is reduced to a minimal budget of 20,000 euro, designated as a laureate by merely 289 votes. Similarly to Barcelona’s most ephemeral tactical interventions, this bottom-up idea consists of a purely technical change in the mobility management of the street. In the same year, the Edouard Quénu Street became a laureate with 316 votes at the cost of 210,000 euro.

These projects can be interpreted as little pieces of a puzzle in a larger mobility shift. Changing the way we move is, just as in Barcelona, a logic key element, especially for a sustainable concept built around the interaction between time and space. Considering the bigger picture, Paris aims for a similar shift from car to slow mobility, with clear goals as a bike lane in every street by 2024, a project estimated at the cost of 350 million euros, and the parallel reduction of 60,000 parking spaces (Whittlle 2020).

Fig. 6.23. Spread of participatory projects across the city. Ville de Paris. Untitled. 2021. Paris. https://budgetparticipatif.paris.fr/bp/ Fig. 6.24. Spread of urban projects on the ‘Paris Futur’ website. Paris Futur. Untitled. 2021. Paris. http://parisfutur.com/

As an illustration of what participatory projects entail, I mention four projects on the intersection of pedestrianisation, improving environmental qualities and climate change adaptation.

The first one is considerably large-scale. A project that ‘strives for better water management’, impacting five city districts with 42 sub-interventions, was elected in 2018 by 20,981 people. The budget of no less than 4,000,000 euros is used to recover rainwater from roofs, parks and gardens, to install water atomizers in several parks and to construct naturalised quays.

Other projects are very small-scale. The project ‘Bringing back green in the Rue du Chemin Vert’ was

It must be noted that the spatial impact of such small participatory projects overall seems very limited, to almost purely symbolic statements of citizen’s appropriation. One can critically ask whether the value of the smaller projects is the most efficient way of using public resources or whether they get diluted in the metropole’s wideness.

Car-free streets are not arranged according to an integrated design, as it is the case in Leku Studio’s design for Sant Antoni in Barcelona, but are limited to traffic signs and in the best case to the placement of a few flower boxes replacing parking spaces. In the Parisian street transformational projects, the projects may provide a sense of co-creation, but they lack the spatial quality that van be brought by the expertise of a spatial planner and an integration in the broader vision of an urban project.

A similar consideration applies to the biodiversity value or climate change adaptational impact of these efforts. Both in the proposal to transform the Champs-Elysées and in the small-scale participatory projects, the addition of massive vegetation and softening is scant. In the conceptualization of the notion, the emphasis is not on biodiversity or radical spatial climate adaptation, but on spatial compactness, land use, and frugality with primary resources as interpretation of ‘ecological sustainability’ (Moreno 2021). Ultimately, the lack of mainstreaming biodiversity goals in the planning phase is striking, as well in Paris’ as in Barclona’s examples. The integration of biodiversity experts in planning teams, right from the start of planning or design initiatives, is a necessary (therefore not sufficient) condition to start forcing real change in urban planning processes (De Boeck 2021 b).

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Ambition, speed, contextualisation However, even when Paris and Barcelona are starting from a similar political project and aiming for a similar notion of the sustainable city, the methods along the way differ significantly according to the mentioned implementation processes. Particularly the interpretation of citizen’s participation, the implementation of new governance models and the mechanism of systemic spread are miles apart.

The different approach may be due to the fact that the Superblock concept is intrinsically a spatial concept. In contrast, the 15 minutes-city concept is a more ephemeral time-space concept. Moreover, Barcelona consciously links the Superblock archetype to a ‘tactical urbanism’ strategy, leaving no other option than an immediate start of the implementation.

In Paris, on the other hand, just like in the London National Park City, people opt for an overarching, inspiring story that implies less direct spatial realizations.

Barcelona opts for a tangible transformation, as soon as possible, responding to the acute crises of contemporary public space and the balance of the city as an ecosystem. The future vision, expressed in a single plan of an array of Superblocks, is relatively static in the end.

The rollout only seems to require a methodology and rhythm of implementation. The time pressure of short legislatures forces rapid deployments. However, supported by the theoretical reversibility of tactical urbanism, the result is fundamentally an approach with a relatively top-down character.

Paris is allowing much more freedom in its trajectory towards the ‘sustainable’ city. The 15 minutes-city is a broad framework filled in by a range of possible tactics: temporary corona measures, participatory budgets, public consultations about pedestrianization, and a formal parallel trajectory of classic urban projects. The call for citizen participation and new democratic policy models is fulfilled by concrete spending of the budget, resulting in an arsenal of thousands of small interventions. On the other hand, they are probably less robust in terms of coherence associated with the strong branding of the Superblocks.

Ultimately, all of these sustainable urban projects struggle with the contextualization of the concept to physical reality. Just as it was elaborated to be the case in the description of Superblocks’ implementation process, Paris knows that it takes time to model a concept tailored to its context: The quarter-hour city is not a magic wand and must be adapted to the local conditions of each city. Paris is both a world city and a city unbalanced between east and west, between north and south. There are re-balances, in particular economic, habitat and work to be carried out (City of Paris 2021 c)

Barcelona ‘15 minutes city’?

As a final consideration, it is intriguing to wonder how the Parisian hyper-proximity ideal would be contextualised to the specific situation of Barcelona? Graells-Garrido et al.

(2021) conducted a survey based on a vast amount of mobile phone, census, and volunteered geographical data to investigate movement patterns between origin and destination.

The researchers found very strong links between the socio-demographic profile of certain neighbourhoods, the presence of facilities and the travel patterns. For example, it appears that tensions due to unbalanced access to food outlets are the most consistent factor that causes mobility effects.

An extensive set of parameters leads to significant and fairly detailed indications about the ample or insufficient presence of certain services and facilities in certain city districts. Further research and updating according to this methodology can be promising in delivering policy recommendations and insights for a balanced polycentric city structure.

While Barcelona strives for optimal speed, Paris communicates explicitly about the long duration of the implementation. In a country like France, everything one needs is already built. Therefore, it is a question of avoiding a new expansion of the city and realizing a slow transformation, spread as evenly as possible over the 17 arrondissements of the city, each with its physiognomy. Paris transformation, from a city heavily based on a centre-periphery structure into a polycentric structure, will not happen overnight.

In the meantime, Barcelona and Paris are in playful competition with cities going through a similar process. In Spain, the walkable Metrominuto concept in the small town of Pontevedra has long been a fact and a source of inspiration, while the rapidly progressing Superblocks Vittoria-Gasteiz overtake Barcelona as an avantgardist. The 15 minutes-city in Paris runs parallel with more provincial and challenging successful examples in Metz or Nantes.

Fig. 6.25. Relationship between shown factors and human mobility flows varying across Barcelona. N/a. Idem. 2021. In Graells-Garrido et al. 2021.

Spatial distribution of the local regression factors from the GWR model. Each choropleth map uses a color scale with red tones to depict positive values, and blue tones to depict negative values. Factors: a) Distance. b) Neighborhood Population. c) Destination Population. d) Neighborhood Touristic Attractiveness. e) Destination Touristic Attractiveness. f) ∆ education. g) ∆ entertainment. h) ∆ finance. i) ∆ food. j) ∆ government. k) ∆ health. l) ∆ professional. m) ∆ recreation. n) ∆ religion. o) ∆ retail. p) ∆ public transport. q) ∆ neighborhood amenity diversity. r) ∆ neighborhood Human Development Index (HDI). s) ∆ neighborhood mean age. t) ∆ % women population. u) weekend flag (binary). v) visiting other neighborhood (binary). w) ∆ ratio immigrants to nationals.

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Concept

Barcelona’ Superblocks

London National Park City

Paris ‘15 minutes-city’

Political project

‘Barcelona en Commú’ Mayor Ada Colau Four year terms 2015 – 2019 – 2023

‘Paris en Commun’ Mayor Anne Hidalgo Six year terms 2014 – 2020 – 2026

Non-governmental Foundation Seeking broad political support Incorporated by Mayor Sadiq Kahn

Prominent theorists

Salvador Rueda (BCNecología) Urban Mobility Plan 2013-18 (Ajuntament 2015) City architects Guallart, Salvado, Matilla

‘Guerilla-Geographer’ Daniel Raven-Ellison Bottom-up social media campaigning

Carlos Moreno (Université Paris Sorbonne) Droit de cité, de la “ville-monde” à la “ville du quart d’heure” (Moreno 2020)

Framing

Social – ‘Fill the streets with life’ Reclaiming public space

Nature – National Park Green space and landscape

Spatiotemporal - Hyperproximity Technologie - Smart City

Definition of ‘sustainability’?

Common goals

Social cohesion and collaboration, health and environment (focus onbiodiversity, sustainable energy, reduction of noise, air pollution and CO2)

Community building health and environment (focus on air pollution and biodiversity)

social inclusion and social cohesion, health and environment (focus on climate change mitigation and energy)

Specific accents

slow mobility, flexible solutions, proximity (added since 2020)

Nature and landscape

Proximity, slow mobility, security, culture and sport, building on the digital revolution

Strategy

‘Tactical urbanism’, in combination with high-end realisations

Enthusing, relationship building between politics, business and community

‘Chrono-urbanism’ Mix of participatory and urban projects

Participation

From top-down in Poble Nou to improved (indirect) participation in Sant Antoni, Large-scale overarching webplatform

Diversity of events, ‘Become a National Park City maker’, Foundation website

Participatory budgets: final project election by 231.000 voters (10% of the population), Large-scale overarching webplatform

Realisations

128 ha of Superblock realisations from 2015 to 2023, experimenting with degrees of materialisation, pace and systemic spread

Events, mapping, studies, etc.

No monitorable strategy or action plan for realisations on the field

2,751 participatory projects were effectively implemented, from 2014 to 2021.

Urban projects (ParisFutur.com)

Financial implication

City funded project, investing, for example, 350 million euros in bike infrastructure, or 37.8 million euros for the realisation of the competition designs

Non-governmental project, no direct action plan for realisations on the field

Participatory budgets, 5 to 25% of the city budget, up to 2 million euros per project City projects, for example, the transformation Arc de Triomphe square

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CONCLUSIONS By planning to spread the Superblock transformations across the entire city, Barcelona is pursuing the ambition to reclaim public space, currently still heavily dominated by motorised traffic. The fight for public space is the fight for the street as a future polytechnic ‘place’ (Mumford 1934, 1938), integrating space for human encounters, biodiversity and climate change adaptation.

The city enjoys international recognition after branding ‘tactical urbanism’ as a conscious strategy towards ‘the sustainable city’ (Cohen 2017, Ajuntament 2021 c, Informant 2 2021). However, even when sporadically combined with fragments of high-end design realisations, the ephemeral realisations clash with a fiercely polarised public opinion. The controversy is induced by pushing through imperturbably an urban transformation, to decrease car use as an extremely polluting, unhealthy and space-consuming factor in the city (Rouillard and Guiheux 2016, Nacto 2017, Mueller et al. 2019), but with a strong spatial and emotional impact (Gössling 2020). The process took off with a rather top-down approach and a limited level of co-creation, leveraging the momentum of a new policy team with a visionary political project (Zografos 2020). Since tactical urbanism is intrinsically based on trial-and-error as a strategy, the city continues to pursue its plans but adapts the concept and its implementation with a slight increase in (mainly indirect) participation and with a shift from the archetypal model to a network of ‘green axes and squares’, albeit with a significant reduction in the level of ambition in the potential final phase.

The speed and the level of ambition of the trajectory to a city-wide transformation meander between two axes. The first axis represents the evolution of materialisation, from temporary interventions to a recognisable language of high-end pavements. The second axis indicates the speed and methodological approach of systemic spread. A resulting matrix defines a basemap for the possible trajectories towards the image of the transformed city. Experts advocate for spreading the concept quickly and systemically throughout the city, making use of ‘low-tech urbanism’ (López 2020) and limited resources, to protect residents from the harmful health effects of car dominance, almost as an ethical duty (Betevé 2021, Rueda 2021). However, this approach hits the limits of balanced timing requirements. An immediate systemic spread does not leave space for sufficient appropriation and adjustment. Furthermore, the in-between state creates ambiguous spatial qualities, only has a limited lifespan, and demands a clearer roadmap for the next transformational phase (Informant 5 2021). After the non-obvious re-election of the city council in 2019, the political power has deviated to a relatively cautious and balanced approach regarding space, time, budget and support, betting on a limited number of four high-end realisations as the first step towards a scale jump over the entire Eixample. (Ajuntament 2020 b).

Several studies ascribe the Superblocks extensive positive effects. However, a critical assessment is needed to distinguish whether these conclusions can be drawn immediately from the first tactical, acupunctural interventions. Such is the case for the (lo-

cal) reduction of noise level and air pollution (Mueller et al. 2019), public transport performance (TMB 2019, Rueda 2021) and the creation of social interactions in the neighbourhood (Honey-Rosés 2019, Field observations 2021). Nevertheless, a citywide systemic roll-out is a prerequisite for a substantial reduction of car traffic and health effects on a large scale (Mueller et al. 2019). Also, green gentrification effects (Anguelowski 2017, Informant 7 2021) may be avoided by a more equally spread rollout, in addition to providing sufficient social infrastructure or regulation of socio-economic activity in the neighbourhood (Informant 2 2021).

The level of achievements in environmental goals such as climate adaptation, biodiversity, or water management is shallow in the tactical phase and only slightly improved, but still a missed opportunity for a genuine turnaround in the high-end realisations, due to a lack of structural integration of biodiversity goals in the planning phase, and a lack of quality in planting realisations and maintenance (Informant 1, 3 2021). Although the visuals resulting from the recent design competition exude more extensive vegetation, the capacity of natural values along multifunctional axes remains intrinsically low (Informant 6 2021). The integration of biodiversity experts in multidisciplinary teams, right from the start of planning or design initiatives, is currently lacking and therefore a necessary condition to start forcing biodiversity values in urban planning processes (De Boeck 2021 b).

In a comparison of projects heading towards the same notion of the sustainable city, quite different trajectories appear to exist. While the ‘London National Park City’, starting from a non-governmental foundation, chooses to primarily and thoroughly enthuse politics, community and stakeholders for partnerships and mentality changes, the Parisian ‘15 minutes-city’ opts for a spatio-temporal concept of ‘hyperproximity’, combining participatory projects with classic urban projects. Within this triangle, Barcelona presents itself as a city that is fully committed to an imminent transformation on the field, acknowledging the urgency and momentum created by the social and environmental crises in the city. In the first eight years of the implementation process, Barcelona will have transformed 128 ha of public space, as an advance on the planned 700 ha, in the Eixample alone (Ajuntament 2020 a, 2020 b, 2021 c).

The challenge for the remaining time of the current tenure will be to deliver performant realisations. A symbiosis between the skills of Barcelona’s competition laureates and city experts is germinating. However, the teams should also integrate biodiversity experts as soon as possible to seriously mainstream nature goals. Only through the achievement of convincing realisations, making maximal use of the remaining lean opportunities for co-creation, a positively evolving Superblock’s ‘guiding image’ can result in visionary ‘hopefulness’ (Chombart de Lauwe 1964), surpassing controversy, elections and ideologies, to enable a following scale jump in the implementation process, and to achieve the much-needed social, health-related and environmental effects of the Superblocks.

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