Barcelona’s Superblocks with David Roberts of Vox.
The War on Cars
The War on Cars, LLC
4.9 • 937 Ratings
🗓️ 19 August 2019
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Barcelona, Spain is testing out a powerful new weapon in the war on cars. It’s called the Superilla or, in english, the "Superblock." Last October, Vox Media's energy and environment reporter David Roberts spent ten days in Barcelona taking a deep dive into the city’s ambitious plan to reclaim more than half of its total street space from motor vehicles by creating five hundred Superblocks. In this one-on-one conversation, David sits down with TWOC co-host Aaron Naparstek and tells the inside story of Barcelona’s visionary car-fighting, air-cleaning and neighborhood-empowering strategy. Could Superblocks even be a solution for fixing dysfunctional liberal democracies? It's so crazy it just might work.
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SHOW NOTES:
Barcelona’s Radical Plan to Take Back Streets From Cars is David Roberts’ must-read five-part series at Vox. Seriously, it's great.
The Vox team produced a video about Superblocks as did Streetfilms' Clarence Eckerson.
BCNecologia is the organization behind Barcelona’s Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan and Superblocks project.
Rethinking Manhattan’s Grid at CityLab.
Follow David on Twitter.
This episode was edited by Matt Cutler. Eilís O'Neill recorded David Roberts in Seattle.
Find us on Twitter: @TheWarOnCars, Sarah Goodyear @buttermilk1, Doug Gordon @BrooklynSpoke, Aaron Naparstek @Naparstek.
Email us: [email protected]
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you live in your suburban castle and you only ever go out in your suburban land yacht |
| 0:06.4 | and the only humans you ever interact with are clerks is the target checker or your barista at Starbucks, like you lose that sense of sociality. |
| 0:17.3 | You start thinking of yourself as a driver, as a consumer, right? And so what's good for drivers and consumers? That starts to be |
| 0:26.3 | how you interact with civic life through that lens. Like I got to defend my parking and my access to my local |
| 0:33.6 | fucking Starbucks like I honestly think that suburban living on a on a subtle |
| 0:39.7 | sort of subterranean level pulls you in the direction of sociopathy. |
| 0:45.0 | Hey everybody, welcome to the war on cars. |
| 0:50.0 | I'm Aaron Napa Stack. I'm on my own this week. |
| 0:52.0 | I'm going to do a one-on-one solo episode here. |
| 0:55.9 | We do a lot of criticism at the war on cars, right? We critique drivers, automakers, |
| 1:01.2 | city DOTs, tech companies, Super Bowl ads, but if you listen to this |
| 1:05.7 | podcast, there's a pretty decent chance that you're basically on board with a |
| 1:10.6 | critique, right? Just going out on a limb. You are probably sick of your |
| 1:15.2 | city being overrun by exhaust spewing, horn-hunking, space hogging, glacier-melting cars. |
| 1:21.7 | You are down with a critique and it is of course always |
| 1:26.0 | satisfying and fun to hear the critique. It's cathartic. But what you might |
| 1:30.0 | really be wondering is what can we do about it? What are the solutions? |
| 1:35.1 | You know, are there cities out there that are winning the war on cars? And if so, how? |
| 1:41.0 | And that is what we're going to talk about today. My guest you heard his voice at the top is David Roberts. |
| 1:47.0 | David writes about energy and climate for Vox.com. You might know him by his Twitter handle, D.R. Vox. |
| 1:54.0 | Last October, David spent 10 days in Barcelona, Spain, |
| 1:57.8 | where he took a deep deep dive into Barcelona's plan |
... |
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