Barcelona' s radical new strategy will restrict traffic to a number of big roads, drastically reducing pollution and turning secondary streets into ‘citizen spaces’ for culture, leisure and the community.





Nine blocks in Barcelona’s Eixample district will make up a ‘superblock’, the city’s new strategy for sustainability.

Currently faced with excessive pollution and noise levels, the city has come up with a new mobility plan to reduce traffic by 21%. And it comes with something extra: freeing up nearly 60% of streets currently used by cars to turn them into so-called “citizen spaces”. The plan is based around the idea of superilles (superblocks) – mini neighbourhoods around which traffic will flow, and in which spaces will be repurposed to “fill our city with life”, as its tagline says.





Black routes allow public transport and cars at 50km/h, while green routes only allow private vehicles at 10km/h to prioritise pedestrians and cycling.



In Eixample, a superblock will consist of nine existing blocks of the grid. Car, scooter, lorry and bus traffic will then be restricted to just the roads in the superblock perimeters, and they will only be allowed in the streets in between if they are residents or providing local businesses, and at a greatly reduced speed of 10km/h.





An Eixample superblock of about 400 x 400 metres, would be inhabited by between 5,000 and 6,000 people. The same as many small towns. Construction, economy, water, residues, metabolisms, social cohesion also will be captured in these superblocks.





This revolutionary design, engineered by Ildefons Cerda in the late 19th century, had at its core the idea that the city should breathe and – for both ideological and public health reasons – planned for the population to be spread out equally, as well as providing green spaces within each block.









Source: Superblocks to the rescue: Barcelona’s plan to give streets back to residents