Books
The Lessons of Superblocks
The protean personality of Salvador Rueda combines a scholar’s rigor, which impregnates both his theoretical mind and his professional practice, with a communicator’s power. Frequenters of his writings and works enjoy the spin of unexplored perspectives that kicks off his thoughts, but also feel the grip of their clarity. And those who have seen him speak are moved by the pathos with which he elicits reaction to today’s crises.
The author does not deny that in choosing the classical format of the philosophical dialogue, his purpose was to explain to the general public what superblocks are, and how it is that they can change everything without changing anything. But there’s more. Rueda strips the totality of his wild thought, to use a Lévi-Strauss expression. The chapters give an idea of his intentions: frame, public space, money, noise, mobility, technology, democracy…, the battle of Barcelona.
The title bears the number of superblocks it would be necessary to build in Catalonia’s capital: Rueda presents these elements as basis for his proposed ecosystemic urbanism. Superblocks are not the only kind of urban project, nor lone improvement operations. They are part of a grid that adapts to the city’s morphology and road network to radically change its model of mobility and public space, without incurring huge expenses or damaging urban functionality.
The idea’s success seems bound to contemporary evils: expansion, simplification, banalization, and crisis. So the book is a wake-up call.
