// Long-read★ Long read
Barcelona’s superblocks: governance lessons
Two years after the Eixample’s expansion of the superblock model, the most-asked question among visiting city-halls is no longer how, it’s how did the politics survive.
Politics, procurement, funding — how cities decide and pay.
// 4 stories · last updated July 2026
Two years after the Eixample’s expansion of the superblock model, the most-asked question among visiting city-halls is no longer how, it’s how did the politics survive.
The decisive sentence in a Zurich tender is no longer the one with the lowest number in it. On a procurement officer's screen in the city's finance department, a spreadsheet adds the purchase price of a thing — a flee…
On a working morning in Prague's New Town, the most consequential anti-corruption tool in the country is also the dullest thing on the screen: a government website at smlouvy.gov.cz, the national registr smluv — "regi…
On a grey morning in the European quarter, the building that does more than any other to shape how Europe's cities will report on their own warming looks like nothing at all. It is an office. There are lanyards, a cof…