Kurator

Cities all over the world are waking up to the incalculable damage the car has been doing to our cities, our economies and our health over the last 100 years. Now though, the concept of the car free city life is finally becoming the new paradigm in urban planning that puts people first, and relegates the car to the bottom of the transportation hierarchy.

This video is a 5 minute introduction to the “superilles” – superblocks – plan in Barcelona.

“But the coolest idea in it is “superblocks” (superilles in Catalan), a concept developed by Salvador Rueda, director of the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona. (Cities of the Future has a great interview with Rueda and a history of the superblocks concept — highly recommended. The Guardian also has nice piece.)

The idea is pretty simple. Take nine square blocks of city. (It doesn’t have to be nine, but that’s the ideal.) Rather than all traffic being permitted on all the streets between and among those blocks, cordon off a perimeter and keep through traffic, freight, and city buses on that.

In the interior, allow only local vehicles, traveling at very low speeds, under 10 mph. And make all the interior streets one-way loops (see the arrows on the green streets below), so none of them serve through streets.”

http://www.vox.com/2016/8/4/12342806/barcelona-superblocks