When it comes to urban development, the new word on everyone’s lips, in tandem with resilience, is adaptation. As the vulnerability of cities to the effects of climate change increases, so does the urgency for more radical, transformational adaptation policy, which challenges unsustainable development in a radical way by connecting adaptation and mitigation efforts through large-scale, non-linear interventions within a system that itself produces climate change and social vulnerability.
From a scholarly standpoint, critical urban adaptation studies like those of Chu (2017) or Shi et al. (2016) question the neoliberal design and politically neutral character of adaptation strategies. Despite louder calls from academia for transformational adaptation, only a small number of cities undertake this in practice, if any adaptation strategy is planned by the government at all. How can we explain this gap between the reality of climate research and the everyday processes of urban politics and planning? What are the constraints preventing municipalities from planning and implementing transformational interventions?
Barcelona’s Superblock Model
Lessons can be learned, with respect to these questions, from Barcelona’s superblock intervention, a transformational project that challenges the current model of urban development by employing radical changes in the urban infrastructure in order to mitigate carbon emissions and respond to climate-change induced problems like the urban heat island effect.
A superblock (“superilla” in Catalan) is a traffic-regulated 3×3 cell of nine city blocks designed to divert cars to its perimeter and maximize public space in its interior. Garnering international media attention, the project is part of Barcelona’s large-scale New Urban Mobility Plan 2013-2018 (NUMP) which seeks to divide the city into a total of 503 superblocks. So ambitious is its goal of drastically reorganizing urban mobility infrastructure, that it represents a new urban model: reducing traffic of private cars by 21%, converting 60% of the space occupied by cars into public space, diminishing noise contamination, reducing the city’s 3,500 premature deaths per year attributed to air pollution, and cutting down CO2 emissions per capita by 40%.
Resistance to Change
Superblocks are not a new concept in Barcelona. While traffic pacifications started as early as the 1970s, the first block free of motorized traffic was created in 1993 in the old town’s La Ribera district, followed by several more during the 1990s and 2000s, the most famous of which was in the Gracia district in 2005.
However, the current program’s pilot project in the district of Poblenou (SP9) faced resistance from political and societal spheres. Its implementation at the beginning of September 2016 was accompanied by negative headlines in the local media, criticism of technical and organisational implementation shortcomings, and resistance from local residents’ groups. A non-legally binding—yet media-effective—neighborhood referendum in May 2017 resulted in the majority of the participants voting against the continuation of the SP9 pilot project, even though the low turnout of the referendum raises doubts about its legitimacy.
Protests against the superblock pilot in Poblenou, 2017. Photo by Ferran Nadeu
A Question of Politics
To understand how and why barriers to this superblock’s implementation arose, an understanding of the political context is crucial. The motives and political orientation of this policy have changed over time. While the superblock project has been on the desk of municipal governments for some 20 years, it was not approved until the NUMP was passed under the former centre-right mayor Xavier Trias (2011-2015), whose proposal for mobility and public space was mainly market-orientated. Trias’ party Convergència i Unió (CiU) has traditionally stood for business-friendly policies and targeted at local economic sectors, which played a key role in securing the city council’s approval for the NUMP in March 2015.
Today, the implementing actor of the superblocks is the city’s current minority municipal government of Mayor Ada Colau led by Barcelona en Comú (BeC), a new political party born from the anti-austerity 15-M Movement and that rose to power in May 2015. The party is characterized by its progressive agenda and ambitions to rearrange traditional political power relations and develop public policy centred on residents’ quality of life, access to an affordable city, and new models and sources of local economic development. Until 2015, the municipal government was firmly in the hands of the centre-left Socialist democrats (PSC) and the centre-right CiU. Other parties represented in the city council are the centre-left Socialist democrats (PSC), the left-wing Catalan pro-independence parties Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) and Capgirem Barcelona (CUP), the centre-right Ciutadans (C’s), and the conservative Partit Popular (PP).
“You’ll be my Colau, I’ll be your superblock.” A show of support for Ada Colau’s superblock pilot in Poble Nou
Ideological Tug of War: Branding Barcelona’s city model
What does this context tell us about barriers to the implementation of the program? At first glance, the reasons for implementation failures seem straightforward: One one hand, many residents and business owners felt excluded by what they perceived as a top-down implementation process. On the other, the historically industrial, low-density neighborhood lacked the suitable socio-economic and demographic characteristics for the implementation: Few businesses that benefitted from more pedestrian traffic versus more that depended on private vehicle access. But although these factors may have played a role, the reality is more complex. Urban politics and transformational adaptation are inevitably mingled with issues of power.
The present superblock case is a striking example of how the struggle for institutionalized power via control over the city model (the so-called “modelo Barcelona”) acts as the main driver for implementation shortcomings and socio-political resistance against the program, and in general as a structural barrier to the implementation of transformational adaptation initiatives.
The superblock project represents a radical transformation on a municipal scale towards a new city model. Its potential scope, international acclaim, and irreversible legacy have made the city’s political actors eager to take ownership of the project and use it to push their own agenda.
In 2014, the ex-president of the PSC municipal group—the ruling party until 2011— blamed Xavier Trias (CiU) of falsely claiming credit for the project, pointing out that traffic pacifications had long been an urban practice in Barcelona. In DATE2016, the current party in office, Ada Colau’s BeC, made their own claim of SP9 by creating a new pilot project just a few blocks from the one that had been planned by ex-mayor Trias, which had been preceded by a lengthy participation process. According to a former CiU councillor, this was a politically motivated intent to claim ownership of the project:
“Colau could have implemented [this planned superblock] […] if she had wanted to. And why didn’t they? Because everything had already been done. So they couldn’t have said that it was theirs, because it was the previous government that had developed the project. But it’s a political issue of ‘no, no, this [project] was mine’”. (Former CiU councilor)
The political appropriation and personification of the project are strategies to claim political credit for the program. This struggle to push through their agenda has far-reaching impacts.
First, it leads to management shortcomings. Conducting an inclusive participation process and background research on the local socio-economical characteristics requires a long-term implementation strategy. Yet, the effort to implement the program during the legislative period of four years in order to claim the political credit results in a rushed implementation over the summer of 2016, especially under the absence of political consensus, competing city models, and a fragile minority government.
“We are under pressure [to implement the project within the mandate]. At the same time,we are working on a city pact thinking towards the future. […] And yes you have political guidelines, because in the end it is a matter of politics, and this changes every four years.” (Executive employee of the department of forecasting the urban model, municipality of Barcelona)
Second, present data analysis shows that the appropriation of the project leads to an even more intense political polarisation in which “all the right-wing parties [are] against the superblocks because it was a proposal of BeC” (local businessperson). Established growth-oriented parties act against the program not because they consider it as good or bad, but because their paramount concern is to prevent the new radical left political power BeC (which is critical of Barcelona’s current growth-based economic model) from defining and branding the new Barcelona city model, and this extends much beyond the design and implementation of superilles interventions. It reflects deeper ideological divides for which the superilles project is made a symbol:
The progressive agenda of BeC represents a risk to the “long-established [forces], which cannot tolerate that their power is taken away. So, they have to try to annihilate it.” (Executive employee of the Urban Development Agency Barcelona)
Third, political polarisation leads to societal polarisation. As superblocks become a symbol for deeper ideological divides, societal opposition against the project emerges not only because of implementation issues, but because citizens who do not agree with the ideological orientation of the party are against any project they perceive as being connected to BeC. This is even the case for opponents from the pro-independence left who in theory support socially-progressive and environmentally-centered projects, but reject Ada Colau’s “neutrality” towards Catalonia’s independence.
“The government of Colau has passionate supporters and detractors. […] Now it’s not ‘the superblocks of Barcelona’, it’s ‘the superblocks of Colau’. […] So those who are against the party, government or the person in charge, are, by default, against the project.” (City councilor of the municipal group of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya)
In addition to technical shortcomings and ideological divisions, it is the transformational character of the superblock project itself that clashes with old established beliefs and habits and thus provokes social, cognitive and cultural contestation. This includes opposition to how the program challenges the dominance of private car use, the perception and use of public space, and measures that some see as a threat to economic growth and Barcelona’s “modernity”.
“For [BeC], the rhetoric is ‘we must recover the space occupied by cars’ […].We don’t want to have all those things on the streets, children’s playgrounds and so on. There is no need to put that in the middle of the street. […] [The importance of free car circulation] is an empirical question; for 10.000 or 20.000 years […], circulation leads to economic activity.” (Representative of a neighbor association against the superblock in Poblenou)
Fourth, the above factors makes it easy for societal, political and economic opposition to shift the discourse on the superblock program from environmental and social issues to economic, technical, and ideological ones. Consequently, local media coverage is more about implementation problems, opposition to the pilot-project and its alleged negative impact on economy rather than about the potential benefits to public health, air quality or climate change mitigation.
What Does This Mean for Transformational Adaptation?
Returning to the opening question, a key challenge of implementing transformational strategies relates to the non-linear, radical and transformational character of those strategies. Urban planning that challenges established political and economic development pathways by questioning the very essence of a system (i.e. urban mobility, the purpose of public space) inevitably comes up against issues of power and is rarely met with political consensus. Rather, implementing a project like the superblocks creates an ideological tug of war in which the power to frame and enforce interpretations of the city model is fought out. In this sense, urban transformational adaptation must confront unavoidable socio-political barriers and is at least as much about the fight for power as about environmental issues themselves.
The municipal government currently seeks to inaugurate four more superblocks before the end of the mandate in May 2019, most notably the one being created around the Sant Antoni Market. The planning and implementation processes of the new superblocks are preceded by wide-ranging participation of neighbors, merchants and entities in the area. Bottom-up participation is without doubt a significant step in receiving neighborhood support and reducing cultural and cognitive preconceptions. Yet, it remains to be seen whether a well-executed implementation is enough to overcome barriers driven by power struggles. The SP9 Poblenou pilot-project has shown that implementation shortcomings are just one of many reasons for socio-political barriers to transformational adaptation, over which urban planners may have little influence.
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This blog post is based on qualitative research on power and politics of urban transformational adaptation carried out in Barcelona, 2017.
