What New York Can Learn from Barcelona’s ‘Superblocks’
I live and work in Poble Nou and I checked out the Superille. It was marvellous.<p>It is (I believe) a temporary project to explore how it all might work. In that sense, it&#x27;s prototype and that&#x27;s in fact really cool too. Basically they did an MVP of a Superille - low cost and very fast - in order to validate their hypotheses.<p>They mocked up the place to give people a feel of how living in this way could be. And they spent as little as possible - using old tyres and paint and recycled plywood to mark out spaces and make them feel &quot;owned&quot; by the people. Placing large lots of (quite big) trees and plants in pots on the car-free streets to see how it felt to walk down a street that was leafy and spacious and open.<p>The amount of extra space feels inspiring and liberating. Walking is faster if you want it to be - you can cut across streets and don&#x27;t need to wait at stop signals. A lot of people riding bikes. A lot of smiles.<p>They definitely could have done a better job explaining it though. I have friends who support the idea but felt they could have been better informed. It felt like they didn&#x27;t give enough warning.<p>However, what is interesting and cool is that once it was in place they did their best to engage residents in a dialogue about the proposal - they painted markings on the tarmac of the streets to lay out spaces for people to assemble and discuss. They had a soapbox platform for people to rant from, and a bunch of chairs scattered around the street for people to sit and discuss. They had walls for comments to be posted.<p>I certainly hope they go ahead with making it permanent and making more of them.<p>Cities without care are very different and much more humane places to live. Scale matters and cars warp the scale of a city in ways that are counterproductive to vibrant urban life.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure we can overcome the technical issues that restrain us from our inevitable transition away from routine private car use in cities. Problems like what to do about parking are a legacy of the current broken system, not a fact of nature. The economic incentives to car ownership and the infrastructure that supports it are baked into cities right now. But this can change - but not by solving parking but by  solving the underlying system and that includes pressuring the system to change through initiatives like this.