The block of Carrer del Consell de Cent reopened to pedestrians on a damp afternoon in 2023, and the small crowd that had gathered to watch was older than the council had perhaps anticipated. The stretch near Carrer de Viladomat had carried through-traffic the day before. By midday it was a green axis: continuous tree planting, generous benches, a single narrow lane for delivery and emergency access, and a surface that walked, cycled and breathed differently. Several of the residents who came down from the surrounding flats to watch had grown up on this street. Some of them had been arguing with the council about it, in one direction or another, for the better part of their lives.
The Eixample green-axes programme is the second act of Barcelona’s superblock story. The first act — the Poblenou pilot of 2016, the Sant Antoni transformation that opened in May 2018 — produced the photographs and the international press tours. The second act, rolled out one block at a time across the gridded core of the city, is the harder part: scaling a model that began as a tactical-urbanism experiment into infrastructure that survives a change of mayor.
Where the model came from
The conceptual frame for what Barcelona calls the superilla, “superblock”, belongs to the urbanist Salvador Rueda, who set out the geometry through his work at the Agència d’Ecologia Urbana de Barcelona, the urban-ecology agency he directed after its founding in 2000. The idea is a grouping of conventional Eixample blocks, with through-traffic kept to the perimeter and the internal streets reorganised for pedestrians, cyclists, residents and slow service. The model was unfashionable for years. It was also, in retrospect, unhelpfully precise: the “nine blocks” formulation gave critics an easy target and tempted proponents into over-promising the geometry.
What Ada Colau’s administration did between 2016 and 2023 was less to build superblocks faithfully than to use the concept as a political vocabulary for incremental street redesign. Poblenou, the first pilot, was tactical urbanism — paint, planters, public seating — that the city deliberately did not finish in stone before observing how residents used it. A comparable approach followed in Sant Antoni. The political logic ran: build cheap, observe behaviour, build expensive only where the cheap version held.
From pilot to programme
The plan that the Colau administration set out for the Eixample made the political bet that the lessons from the pilots could be scaled. It called for a network of green axes across the district — the city’s stated ambition was twenty-one such axes, paired with twenty-one new squares — structured as continuous pedestrian-priority streets running through the grid and intersected by public squares converted from former crossroads.
The first phase concentrated on sections of four streets — Consell de Cent, Comte Borrell, Rocafort and Girona — together with four squares at their intersections, completed in stages from 2023. The works were managed by BIMSA, the city’s municipal infrastructure company. The design model for the green axes themselves emerged from the city’s ideas competition, whose green-axis prize was shared by Cierto Estudio together with B67 Arquitectes; the same teams developed the redesign of Consell de Cent. By the city’s own account the first phase transformed roughly 110,000 square metres, added some 4.65 kilometres of green axes, and planted around 400 new trees.
Build cheap, observe behaviour, build expensive only where the cheap version held.
The Barcelona tactical-urbanism playbook, 2016 onwards
The data the city keeps publishing
The most-cited evidence for the programme does not come from City Hall at all. It is a health-impact assessment by ISGlobal, the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, published in Environment International, which modelled a hypothetical full deployment of 503 superblocks across the city. Under that scenario the study estimated that roughly 667 premature deaths a year could be avoided — attributed mainly to reduced air pollution, with reductions in noise and heat and gains in green space and physical activity making up the rest. The estimate was contested when it appeared and remains a modelled projection of a city-wide build-out, not a measurement of the blocks actually completed.
That distinction matters in the politics. The headline figure describes a Barcelona that does not yet exist; the streets that do exist carry a much smaller footprint, and the honest claim about them is correspondingly more modest. Where the city publishes its own measurements — surface temperatures lowered by several degrees on shaded axes in summer, local air-quality and noise readings on completed blocks — the deltas are real but local, and the city is careful, at least in its technical documentation, to keep the modelled and the measured apart.
The political handover
The 2023 municipal election ended Colau’s administration. Jaume Collboni, of the Catalan socialists, the PSC, took office in June 2023, having campaigned partly on a critique of the programme’s pace. The months that followed were instructive. Collboni did not cancel the programme. He slowed it, adjusted its political vocabulary, and let the first-phase works already under way reach completion. The argument shifted from whether to build to how fast, and at what cost per block.
The pace, more than the branding, became the fault line. The Eixample residents’ federation FAVB, long a force in the district’s street politics, has moved between advocacy and oversight; retailers’ associations remain divided block by block, depending on whether shops on a given axis report more or less footfall since the redesign. The opposition to superblocks was never monolithic, which is part of why the programme proved hard to kill outright: the coalition against any single block rarely held together across the whole district.
Who else has copied what
The international transfer of the concept has been uneven. Vitoria-Gasteiz, in the Basque Country, is the clearest Spanish precedent: it began implementing superblocks from 2008, under a mobility plan approved the previous year and drawn up with Rueda’s agency, on a geometry adapted to a smaller, lower-density city; the city credits the model with sharp falls in car use and rises in cycling and public-transport ridership. Pontevedra’s long-running pedestrianisation is sometimes filed alongside the superblock, although its officials tend to distinguish their own historical experiment from Barcelona’s. Berlin’s Kiezblocks, “neighbourhood blocks”, are the most visible German adaptation, keeping the principle while quietly dropping the rigid “nine block” geometry.
Beyond the obvious adopters, the model has travelled in pieces. A number of European city centres have implemented partial perimeter-traffic, pedestrian-priority schemes that read structurally as fragments of a superblock. Few use the term. Most cite the Barcelona experience in their 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 two administrations, a contested rollout, and a city-wide debate that for a stretch dominated the local press. The answer that the planners and the BIMSA engineers tend to give visiting delegations is a set of quiet operational rules rather than a doctrine.
Build cheap before you build expensive. Publish the air-quality and health data continuously, in formats an opposition councillor can quote. Do not insist on the geometry; insist on the outcome. Let neighbourhoods that want it move faster than the central plan would prefer, and let those that resist wait. Treat the programme as infrastructure, not as ideology, in the budget lines and the contracting paperwork even when the public vocabulary turns ideological. And accept that the vocabulary will change with each administration — that this is, in the end, the price of the work surviving any single one of them.
Carrer del Consell de Cent, more than a year after its opening, is now a working street. People come down on warm afternoons; the cafes have added outdoor seating; the shopkeeper opposite still misses the parking. The streets that follow it are opening in stages. Whether the Collboni administration carries the programme to the full twenty-one axes or lets it settle short is, on the project schedule, still an open question. The defence, as always in Barcelona, will be made in the data.
Sources: Ajuntament de Barcelona / Superilla Barcelona programme documentation and green-axes competition results; BIMSA (municipal infrastructure company); Agència d’Ecologia Urbana de Barcelona and the work of Salvador Rueda; ISGlobal, “Changing the urban design of cities for health: the superblock model” (Mueller et al., Environment International, 2020); FAVB (Federació d’Associacions de Veïns i Veïnes de Barcelona); Ajuntament de Vitoria-Gasteiz sustainable-mobility plan.
