Barcelona, like many prominent cities, has ambitious plans to move away from car hegemony. The new mobility plan will reduce traffic by 21% and restrict vehicles to a number of big roads. This will drastically reduce pollution, and free up nearly 60% of streets currently used by cars by turning them into spaces for people. Join Salvador Rueda as he describes this bold plan to create superilles (superblocks) to “fill the city with life".

Biography

Salvador Rueda is an urban ecologist, and the founder and director of the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona (BCN) – a key driver behind Barcelona’s Superblocks. Superblocks (superilles) provide solutions to urban mobility challenges and strive to improve both the availability and quality of public space.

BCN is a non-profit agency with approximately 50 staff comprised largely of engineers, scientists and planners, and specializes in analysis and planning of complex urban systems to provide guidance for the developing plans for cities and neighbourhood districts in Europe and around the world. They have been advancing evidence based planning by developing models to facilitate sustainable planning of cities. Rueda’s new form of analysis, ecological urbanism, has provided a new language to read the city. 

The Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona is a public consortium made up of the City of Barcelona’s Council, the Council of the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona, and the Council of the province of Barcelona. The UAEB carries out mandates for different beneficiaries (public institutions, foundations, organizations and companies) in Spain and abroad to support the sustainable transformation of cities via solutions for mobility, energy management, water and waste, as well as urban planning, biodiversity, and social cohesion. The UAEB’s vision promotes a mixed and compact, efficient and diverse city, in other words a sustainable city. To this end, the agency has created new instruments and new policies related to mobility, biodiversity, social cohesion and the use of resources.