The Carrer Consell de Cent reopened to pedestrians on a damp February afternoon in 2023, and the small crowd that had gathered to watch was older than the council had perhaps anticipated. The block between Carrer Comte d’Urgell and Carrer Vilàdal had been a four-lane through-route the day before. By midday, it was a green axis: continuous tree planting, generous benches, a single narrow service lane for delivery and emergency vehicles, and a surface that walked, biked and breathed differently. The grandmothers who came down from the surrounding flats to watch had grown up on this street. Several of them had been arguing with the council about it, in one direction or another, for the better part of forty years.
The Eixample green-axis programme is the second act of Barcelona’s superblock story. The first act, the Poblenou pilot of 2016, the Sant Antoni transformation of 2017, the Sant Martí expansion of 2018, produced the photographs and the international press tours. The second act, which is being rolled out one block at a time across the gridded core of the city, is the harder part: scaling a model that started as a tactical urbanism experiment into infrastructure that survives mayors.
Where the model came from
The conceptual frame for what Barcelona now calls the superilla belongs to the urbanist Salvador Rueda, whose work at the Agència d’Ecologia Urbana de Barcelona in the late 1980s and early 1990s set out the geometry: a three-by-three grouping of conventional Eixample blocks, with through-traffic permitted on the perimeter and the internal streets reorganised for pedestrians, cyclists, residents and slow service. The model was unfashionable for two decades. It was, in retrospect, also unhelpfully precise, the “nine blocks” specification gave critics an easy point of attack, and gave proponents an easy way to over-promise the geometry.
What Ada Colau’s administration did between 2016 and 2023 was less to build superblocks faithfully and more to use the concept as a political vocabulary for incremental street redesign. Poblenou, the first pilot, was a tactical-urbanism intervention, orange paint, planters, public seating, that the city deliberately did not finish in stone before observing how residents used it. The same approach was taken in Sant Antoni and in the limited pilots in the Gràcia and Hostafrancs neighbourhoods. The political logic was: build cheap, observe behaviour, build expensive only where the cheap version held.
From pilot to programme
The 2020 Eixample plan, which Janet Sanz, deputy mayor for ecology, urban planning and mobility under Colau, took to the Conseil municipal in November of that year, made the political bet that the lessons from the pilots could be scaled. The plan called for twenty-one green axes in the Eixample district alone, structured as continuous pedestrian-priority streets running roughly north-south and east-west, intersected at four-block intervals by new public squares converted from former roundabouts and crossroads.
The first four green axes, Carrer Consell de Cent, Carrer Borrell, Carrer Rocafort and the small stretch of Carrer Girona, were commissioned through the same tender in late 2021, completed in stages between February 2023 and June 2024. The total contract value, according to Barcelona City Hall’s own published procurement records, was approximately €38 million. The construction was managed by BIMSA, the city’s municipal infrastructure company, and the design competition was won by a consortium led by the Estudio Lola Doménech together with the local landscape office DEU+. The trees, of which more than 500 were planted, were sourced from the Catalan municipal nurseries network on a five-year care contract.
Build cheap, observe behaviour, build expensive only where the cheap version held.
The Barcelona tactical-urbanism playbook, 2016 to 2024
The data the city keeps publishing
The political defence of the programme has, since 2018, been built on data published by ASPB, the Agència de Salut Pública de Barcelona. The most-cited piece of work is the 2019 modelling study that estimated, under the city’s 503-block hypothetical full deployment, an annual reduction of roughly 667 premature deaths attributable to air pollution, noise and physical inactivity. The estimate was contested at the time and remains contested. ASPB has since published successive refinements with smaller deltas, calibrated to the actual rather than hypothetical rollout. The 2023 update used measured air-quality data from the 2016-2022 pilots and produced a more conservative estimate of approximately 137 premature deaths avoided annually under the 2025 deployment trajectory.
The smaller number is, in some ways, more politically useful. It is harder to dismiss, easier to defend at a Conseil municipal hearing, and concrete enough to sit alongside the air-quality measurements that the city now publishes monthly for each completed green-axis block. NO₂ concentrations, monitored by the Barcelona air-quality network, have measured between fifteen and twenty-one per cent lower on completed green-axis blocks compared to matched control blocks elsewhere in the Eixample, a delta consistent with the 2019 hypothetical, scaled to the much smaller actual footprint.
The political handover
The 2023 municipal election ended Colau’s administration. Jaume Collboni, of the Catalan socialist party PSC, took office in June 2023 with a plurality won partly on a critique of the Eixample programme’s pace and partly on a plurality coalition that included superblock supporters. The post-handover months were instructive: Collboni did not cancel the programme. He slowed it, adjusted its political vocabulary, and renamed parts of it. The four under-construction green axes were completed under the new administration. The 2024 budget envelope reduced the next-tranche commitment from twelve to seven new axes by 2027.
The renaming matters less than the slowing. The Eixample residents’ association FAVB has shifted its public position from advocacy to oversight; the cycling federation Bicicleta Club de Catalunya, historically supportive, has begun openly critical commentary on the slower pace; the small business association of the Eixample, Barcelona Oberta, remains divided block by block depending on whether shops on a given axis have measured an increase or decrease in foot traffic since the redesign.
Who else has copied what
The international transfer of the superblock concept has been uneven. Vitoria-Gasteiz adopted the model formally in 2018, with explicit credit to Rueda, on a smaller geometry adapted to the city’s lower density. Pontevedra’s long-running pedestrianisation programme was sometimes labelled a superblock retrofit, although Pontevedra’s officials are usually careful to distinguish their own historical experiment, which predates Rueda’s formalisation, from Barcelona’s. Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Kiezblocks initiative, which has redesigned segments of the Wrangelkiez and Bergmannkiez since 2020, is the most visible German adaptation; it has explicitly renounced the “nine block” geometry while keeping the principle.
Beyond the obvious adopters, parts of the model have travelled in pieces. Lyon’s 7th arrondissement, Paris’s 11th, Bordeaux’s Saint-Pierre, parts of central Brussels and the Centro Storico of Bologna have each implemented partial-perimeter pedestrian-priority schemes that read, structurally, as quarter-superblocks. Few of those projects use the term. Most cite the Barcelona experience in the technical reports without taking on the political risk of the brand.
The governance lessons
The most-asked question among visiting city-halls is no longer how the design works. It is how the politics survived three administrations, two municipal elections, two contested rollouts in Sant Antoni and Hostafrancs, and a city-wide debate that, at peak, reached the front pages of La Vanguardia for fourteen consecutive days in October 2017. The answer that the BIMSA officials and the senior planners at Agència d’Ecologia Urbana have settled on, in the post-handover briefings they now give visiting delegations, is a series of quiet operational rules.
Build cheap before you build expensive. Publish the air-quality and health data continuously, in formats opposition councillors can quote. Do not insist on the geometry; insist on the outcome. Let neighbourhoods opt in faster than the central plan would prefer; let neighbourhoods that opt out wait. Treat the programme as infrastructure, not as ideology, in the budget lines and the contracting paperwork even when the political vocabulary turns ideological. And accept that the political vocabulary will change with each administration, and that this is the price of the work surviving any single one of them.
The Carrer Consell de Cent, a year and a half after its opening, is now a working street. The grandmothers come down on warm afternoons. The two cafes on the corner have added outdoor seating. The shopkeeper opposite still misses the parking. The four green axes that follow it are, on schedule, opening in stages through 2025 and 2026. The seventeenth axis, which would complete the original 2020 plan, is currently absent from the 2027 budget. Whether the Collboni administration extends the programme or lets it stall is, on the BIMSA project schedule, an open question. The political defence will be made, as always, in the data.
Sources: Ajuntament de Barcelona (Eixample plan documentation), Agència d’Ecologia Urbana de Barcelona, Agència de Salut Pública de Barcelona (2019 and 2023 modelling studies), BIMSA procurement records, Barcelona air-quality monitoring network, FAVB neighbourhood federation, Conseil municipal sessions 2020-2024, La Vanguardia archive (2017 superblock debate), Bicicleta Club de Catalunya.
