Barcelona is in the midst of dramatically rethinking its urban fabric to address issues around urban mobility and climate change. Initially laid out in this 2014 Urban Mobility Plan for Barcelona, the city is now implementing something it calls superilles (or superblocks in English).
Here’s what it looks like:
The idea is to concentrate transit and vehicular traffic onto the edge of these new superblocks and then convert the interiors into livable spaces for pedestrians and cyclists. Here’s a description from the Agència d’Ecologia Urbana de Barcelona:
“Superblocks are made up of a grid of basic roads forming a polygon, some 400 by 400 meters, with both interior and exterior components. The interior (intervía) is closed to motorized vehicles and above ground parking, and gives preference to pedestrian traffic in the public space. Though the inner streets are generally reserved for pedestrians, they can be used by residential traffic, services, emergency vehicles, and loading/unloading vehicles under special circumstances. The perimeter, or exterior, of Superblocks is where motorized traffic circulates, and makes up the basic roads.”
The result is going to be an absolutely radical shift in the amount of public space given to drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists. When their 2014 report was issued, it was estimated that 73% of public space was allocated to cars (versus pedestrians). This plan will completely flip that ratio. With the superblock model, it is estimated that 77% of public space will now be allocated to pedestrians.
Here’s what that is expected to look like…
Before:
After:
There are also plans to expand the bicycle network to roughly 95% of the city’s population.
Before:
After:
If any of you are from Barcelona, I would love to hear a local perspective on this mobility plan. Were and are there cries of a war on the car?
Images: Top image from Tom Walk (Flickr); Maps from Urban Mobility Plan of Barcelona 2013-2018
I am a big fan of Twitter.
I use it more than any other social network and any other app on my phone (according to my battery usage). In fact, I’m such a fan that I recently started buying shares. I don’t own a lot and the Canadian-US exchange is awful right now, but I do plan to continue buying (I like dollar cost averaging).
Twitter isn’t the darling of Wall Street like Facebook is. And I think the biggest weakness of Twitter is that it’s difficult for new users to really “get it.” Facebook solved this problem early on by recognizing that new users had to connect with X number of friends right away so that they received value immediately and the next time they visited.
But I digress. That’s not the focus of this post.
This morning a friend shared a Medium article with me that was written by the Laboratory for Social Machines at MIT. The article is about a small town in Spain called Jun (pronounced “hoon”) that has transitioned to using Twitter as the dominant platform for communication between government and citizens.
The initiative first launched in 2011 and since then the mayor, José Antonio Rodríguez Salas, has been trying to get every resident onto Twitter. All 3,500 residents are even encouraged to go into the town hall to have their Twitter accounts verified. This way government employees know for sure that they’re dealing with an actual resident of the town.
Here’s a simple example of what this means for government-citizen relations (the folks at MIT translated everything to English):
In the above example, a citizen tweeted the mayor informing him that a street lamp was out. The mayor then responded, tagged an electrician, and said it would be fixed the following day. Sure enough the electrician went and fixed it the following day, and then tweeted out a photo of the lamp.
This is great. And Twitter was made for these kinds of interactions. Facebook was not.
Here in Toronto we have @311Toronto, which I have tweeted many times before with problems and they do respond quickly (far quicker than if you try and call them). But I still think there’s room for us to improve transparency and engagement across the board.
All of this is a perfect example of how technology and cities are colliding in a big way. In today’s world I really think you need to be able to think across disciplines.
Empire State Building Gay Pride Rainbow by Ahmer Kalam on 500px
By now, I am sure that all of you know that the U.S. Supreme Court made a landmark ruling yesterday (Friday, June 25, 2015). In a 5-to-4 vote, it was decided that the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to same-sex marriage.
Here is Justice Anthony Kennedy’s closing paragraph. What a great read.
With this decision, the United States joins the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Norway, Sweden, and many other countries who already allow same-sex marriages nationwide. And I am delighted to see that happen with Canada’s neighbor.
I am also proud to say that it has already been a decade (2005) since Canada became the 4th country in the world – and the 1st country outside of Europe – to allow same-sex marriages. Not because it had a direct impact on my life, but because it is the right thing to do.
It is the right thing to do because it creates “equal dignity” among all men and women (as Justice Kennedy states above) and because it’s the right thing to do for our economies.
I believe that the strongest economies are the ones that can remain open and tolerant to new ideas and all kinds of people.
Cities like Toronto and New York (as I’ve argued before) became successful precisely because they opened themselves up to new ideas and new people (immigrants).
But many studies show that as people age, “openness” declines. We become less intellectually curious and our preference for variety wanes. Perhaps this is where the expression “set in your ways” comes from and why political orientation often correlates with age.
Thankfully the U.S. wasn’t so set in its ways that it couldn’t provide equal dignity to its citizens.