Barcelona Digital City

Today, all cities are suffering from similar issues: air pollution, traffic congestion and lack of green spaces. As a member of the global smart city movement, Barcelona has become a leader in some of the most innovative urban changes. City regeneration comes about first and foremost through more efficient management of resources and services, and through finding sustainable strategies. But how do we go about it?

The City Council is calling them Superilles (superblocks) and they are groups of streets in which pedestrians have priority over cars. They started to be sketched onto the city horizon back in 2017, with an initial investment of 10 million euros.

Superblocks exist in order to combat the scarcity of green spaces, to reduce the high levels of background noise and to tackle high levels of pollution (suspended particles [PM10] are associated with 3,500 premature deaths a year in the metropolitan area), as well as to try to reduce accident rates: in 2015 there were 9,095 acciden-ts and 27 deaths.