“We need a city for people, not cars”: Walking Melbourne’s streets with Barcelona Superblocks mastermind Salvador Rueda
Globally renowned urban planner and mastermind behind the Barcelona Superblocks concept, Salvador Rueda, visited Melbourne for Design Week. While here, he hit the pavement with 300,000 Streets lead convener Nina Sharpe and a group of city-shapers to get a sense of Melbourne’s potential for transformation.
On his recent visit to Melbourne, design legend Salvador Rueda said something that stuck: in our current way of living we give the city to the car, not the citizens. His musings are not an attack on the automobile – he admits to having a car, albeit rarely used – but an invitation for system-wide, integrated thinking that leads to transformation.
"The car is not domesticated", was his opening provocation during a roundtable event hosted by RMIT (facilitated by Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Alec Cameron and Vice-President Strategy and Community Impact Tom Bentley), acknowledging that our cities remain dominated by vehicles rather than people. We need to fundamentally "redesign the networks of the city" to create "a human urban city for people, not cars".
Salvador has dedicated his career to addressing the escalating climate crisis and has consulted to more than 140 cities across the world. During his stay in Melbourne, RMIT recognised his contribution by awarding him an honorary doctorate for his vital contributions to the built environment. Salvador’s credentials are many and varied: a biologist, psychologist, activist, water steward and, eventually, one of the world’s most influential city planners. Or – as his wife Cecilia described him – the Shakira of urban planning.
The Superblocks revolution
His goal in the design of the Barcelona Superblocks was simple: to better the lives of the people of Barcelona through mobility and public space. It is an urban revolution to transform city life, centred around improving liveability and aiming to release maximum public space for human use.
A ‘superblock’ covers an area of multiple city blocks – typically nine in a 3x3 format – that excludes through-traffic. In this space, citizens have priority, though cars still have low-speed access to all buildings within the area. Superblocks transform formerly car-dominated streets into public spaces that can be used for a range of activities and can release up to 70% of the city that is currently locked to traffic.
The economic feasibility, according to Rueda, is what makes it most compelling. The 500 Superblocks proposed for Barcelona come at a cost of €300 million (€30 million per year over 10 years), which represents relatively modest investment for transformative city-wide change. And the liveability evidence speaks for itself, with demonstrated improvements in health outcomes, reductions in air and noise pollution and street parties in abundance.
So what are we waiting for, Melbourne? Salvador sees the resistance to change as a cultural and political problem, as these are the barriers making it difficult to implement change. The main obstacle, he says, is that we “have the car in our brains. It is not a traffic problem, not an economic problem, it is a cultural problem," and both industry and the media reinforce this cultural norm.
“Public space allows us to move from being pedestrians to citizens”
Participation and tactical urbanism played a central role in the successful delivery in the Barcelona context. Rueda claims that matching participation with a solution that makes sense was key. He believes in a process where technical teams are guided to develop their solutions based on community-defined priorities. Good outcomes emerge from a process when it is the decision of the people, not the sector.
In thinking about people in cities, Salvador taught us to consider things from an important perspective: public space allows us to move from being pedestrians to citizens. Being a pedestrian is a mode of transport, being a citizen is something so much more. How can we create better conditions for citizens in Melbourne?
Salvador’s design efforts and life work are a direct response to facing the biggest challenges of our times and he believes that if you get mobility right, you get the opportunities to address climate adaptation. As an urban ecologist he knows that shade and soil provide a refrigeration process that allows for adaptation and our concrete cities diminish our ability to respond.
Hitting the streets of Melbourne
We experienced pockets of this refrigeration on a walk through the city with Salvador, Cecilia and a group of street super-humans I invited to join us. We were guided through Guildford Lane by community leader Katherine McPherson, who shared stories of the transformation of the laneway. The work was enabled by City of Melbourne’s Green Your Laneway program back in 2017, but was carried through to stand as a green oasis with the time and love of the community, and a deep pride of place that the local residents share.
We then visited the test garden at Federation Square – a partnership project between Hassell Architects, Superbloom and University of Melbourne – guided by Susie Quinton, who proudly shared the beginnings of a much bigger planned project. It is a sample site of the broader project in the Melbourne Arts Precinct and is a densely planted, biodiverse space that was previously concrete. Now you see an abundance of life including the much loved blue-banded bees who can be spotted flittering around.
Our walk took us down Swanston Street, where we spoke of Postcode 3000 and the influence Rob Adams has had on Melbourne; and via Hosier Lane, where streams of tourists still visit what residents believe to be a site that is a shadow of its former self. As Salvador walked, he could see scope for transformation and was observing nothing but possibility.
Walking Melbourne’s laneways with Salvador Rueda.
Could we have Melbourne Superblocks?
During a talk he gave that same night, Salvador shared photos of our walk celebrating the pockets of change he experienced, and the scope for scale city-wide. His 40 years of experience and the wisdom that comes with this allows him to see possibilities that others are blind to. Salvador believes Melbourne's existing structure makes Superblock implementation "very possible" in the central business district. The grid layout provides an ideal foundation for the superblock model.
Professor Marco Amati has worked with Salvador for a number of years now to explore what an application of the Superblocks model would look like for Melbourne. You can read more about this here, but in summary, Amati proposes that to reshape the city centre in ways that better meet the needs of Melburnians, now and in the future, the grid must be redesigned. During the Design Week presentation, he shared the technical drawings that demonstrate this scope, alongside the pockets of change that we had experienced during our city walk in Guildford Lane and the test garden.
Technical solutions exist, but cultural and governance innovation is needed to implement them at scale. The superblock model offers a proven framework that can be adapted to Melbourne's context to dramatically improve urban liveability through participatory, systems-based transformation. The change in Barcelona through implementing the Superblock model, positions the model as one that is most effective for comprehensive urban change.
300,000 Streets views the streets of Greater Melbourne, as an interconnected network which applies a systems lens to how we approach change. The ambition for this network is for the people of Greater Melbourne to have agency to regenerate their streets and actively participate in decision-making and the ongoing care of their neighbourhoods. There is so much we can learn from Barcelona, and other global cities that can be applied and adapted to our local context.
