Towards The City We Want, BarcelonaGuest:
Xavier Matilla. City Architect & Planner, Professor.
Barcelona, Spain
Tuesday, September 5th, 2023
11:00 AM EST/5:00 PM CET
About:
Xavier Matilla was Chief Architect of the city of Barcelona between October 2019 – June 2023. During this period, he has directed many urban transformations with the aim of achieving a healthier, friendlier and fairer city. Highlight being the “Barcelona Superblock” project, internationally recognized as an effective strategy to transform city streets into spaces with better environmental quality and more l ABOUT his presentation: At a time when cities need new urban models to approach the future with optimism, Barcelona has shown that it is possible to move towards a healthier, kinder and fairer city for it citizens thanks to the Superilla Project. Barcelona is a compact and dense city, with a polycentric urban model, but it has a significant deficit of green areas and a problem with its car-centered mobility model. Car use takes up more than 50% of public space and is also the main source of atmospheric and noise pollution. Superilla aims to improve all the city’s streets, while proposing a new, more efficient mobility model through promoting public transport, cycling and walking, so that it takes up less room, is healthier and pollutes less. This allows 1 out of every 3 streets to be freed up from through traffic, and to transform them into new “green axes” in such a way that they “naturalise” the city and promote local activities and social relationships, constituting a true environmental and social infrastructure, a true systemic change. During the last 4 years Xavi Matilla has promoted the project, defining a vision of the future for the whole city and at the same time executing a phase with 4 new green axes (4.65 Km / 10Ha) and 4 new squares (1Ha) that allow to demonstrate that it is possible to move towards the city we want.
