4 ms·
I think this is a really common misconception around Barcelona's superblocks. When people hear "Barcelona superblock", I think they're thinking of the individu
by eigenspace 4y ago
I think this is a really common misconception around Barcelona's superblocks.
When people hear "Barcelona superblock", I think they're thinking of the individual city blocks which to be fair, are already huge and modular. (this is at least the confusion I originally had)
The idea with superblocks, is to take a cluster of city blocks and not allow through traffic in that block, instead guiding that traffic to flow around the perimeter of that cluster. Nothing here requires the city blocks to be built or look the way Barcelona's city blocks are built and look. All that's required is changes to the roads, and to try and encourage each cluster of blocks to have a mostly self sufficient set of amenities like a grocery store, cafe, etc.
In unicode art, if □ is a city Block surrounded by roads (-- and |) being used by traffic,
|_|
‾|□|‾
‾|‾|‾
then a 3x3 area of these blocks would look like
_|_|_|_|_
|□|□|□|
‾|□̅|□̅|□̅|‾
‾|□̅|□̅|□̅|‾
‾|‾|‾|‾|‾
However, a superblock would look like this:
_|_|_|_|_
|□ □ □|
‾|□ □ □|‾
‾|□ □ □|‾
‾|‾|‾|‾|‾
where the inside area is not easily accessible to car traffic. The structure of the block □ itself, doesn't actually matter.
- majormajor 4y agoThe US has lots of "self sufficient" (in that you can live in walking distance and do all your retail, grocery, cafes on foot) micro-areas like that. They're called more like "mixed use malls," though. So yeah, that's not exactly what a "superblock" is - because very few of them exist without parking. Doing both parking + easily walkable gets expensive. Getting rid of the parking doesn't work because I've never seen one of them "self sufficient" to the point of most people not having to commute (either to there for those who work there or from there for those who live there). Even if you find a job and a place to live in the same superblock, people are gonna (a) want to have options to leave that job in the future and (b) know people outside of those blocks. All that to say: if the superblocks don't solve the need-for-a-car problem, they aren't gonna do much for the traffic or car-centric problem. And a mall surrounded by parking garages isn't exactly the walkable old European city people are wanting. So we're back to needing transit first. And then if you have the transit, do you need the superblocks - lots of walkable cities with streets open to cars.
- crooked-v 4y ago> Even if you find a job and a place to live in the same superblock, people are gonna (a) want to have options to leave that job in the future and (b) know people outside of those blocks. You seem to be stretching really hard here to try and conflate "no driving through them middle of the superblock" and "people in the superblock aren't allowed to have cars", but those aren't the same thing at all. You just put the parking in centralized places at the edge of the superblock, where economy of scale can apply.
- majormajor 4y agoThat's not the point I'm trying to make. If everyone still needs cars, you gotta put them somewhere. And the roads have to be big enough to accomodate the commuting and the inter-block traffic. If you put them on the perimeter and route the cars around the perimeter, you don't have a walkable city, you have a car-centric city of high-traffic roads people drive on to walk around little walkable islands. *Same even if you put them under the superblock.* Tons of these sorts of mini-downtown walkable areas in LA, for instance, but nobody's calling LA walkable. Transit, transit, transit. You can't superblock your way around the need for it. "Walking to a car to drive to another part of town" instead of "Walking to a train to get to another part of town" is going to give you a dramatically different experience, since one of those is far, far more friendly to low-density SFH surrounding development than the other.
- mplewis 4y agoYes, you do still need the superblocks. A city with cars on the "walkable streets" isn't actually very walkable. You really need to spend some significant time in a walkable city outside of the US to see the difference it makes.
- richk449 4y agoI love how Americans insist that systems not designed around cars won’t work to the people who are happily living in the systems not designed around cars.
- 4y ago
- rayusher 4y agoAnother example why reading the comments is better than article.