Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1237

Barcelona is in the midst of dramatically rethinking its urban fabric to address issues around urban mobility and climate change. Initially laid out in this 2014 Urban Mobility Plan for Barcelona , the city is now implementing something it calls superilles (or superblocks in English).

Here’s what it looks like:

The idea is to concentrate transit and vehicular traffic onto the edge of these new superblocks and then convert the interiors into livable spaces for pedestrians and cyclists. Here’s a description from the Agència d’Ecologia Urbana de Barcelona :

“Superblocks are made up of a grid of basic roads forming a polygon, some 400 by 400 meters, with both interior and exterior components. The interior (intervía) is closed to motorized vehicles and above ground parking, and gives preference to pedestrian traffic in the public space. Though the inner streets are generally reserved for pedestrians, they can be used by residential traffic, services, emergency vehicles, and loading/unloading vehicles under special circumstances. The perimeter, or exterior, of Superblocks is where motorized traffic circulates, and makes up the basic roads.”

The result is going to be an absolutely radical shift in the amount of public space given to drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists. When their 2014 report was issued, it was estimated that 73% of public space was allocated to cars (versus pedestrians). This plan will completely flip that ratio. With the superblock model, it is estimated that 77% of public space will now be allocated to pedestrians.

Here’s what that is expected to look like…

Before:

After:

There are also plans to expand the bicycle network to roughly 95% of the city’s population.

Before:

After:

If any of you are from Barcelona, I would love to hear a local perspective on this mobility plan. Were and are there cries of a war on the car?

Images: Top image from Tom Walk (Flickr) ; Maps from Urban Mobility Plan of Barcelona 2013-2018

Over the weekend I received a marketing email from a real estate company advertising their new mobile app. I didn’t download it.

Nowadays, every company and brand seems to have a mobile app. If you don’t already have one for your organization, I bet many of you have thought about creating one. This is natural given how profound the shift to mobile has been.

But I can’t help but feel like we are overestimating the kind of attention that many of these apps will receive. App usage is highly concentrated. We’ll spend hours on Instagram, but almost every other app in existence gets ignored.

I love how marketer  Seth Godin puts it : “the two scarce elements of our economy are trust and attention.” Attention is not scalable. Each of us have a finite amount of attention to give. And there’s lots of competition for it.

At the same time – to borrow Godin’s thought process – a lot of people will sacrifice trust for the sake of attention. We overpromise because we become desperate. I mean, if you think about it, every company or organization is trying to figure out how to get you to pay attention to them.

But I’d like to think that trust can also help you garner attention. Once I trust someone or some organization, I’m more likely to give them the time of day. They’ve earned it. And I feel like that’s where things are headed in today’s information economy.

Trust and attention. Think about it. They’re pretty powerful things, no matter how you spend your days.

We may not all agree on things like bike lanes and transit , but if there’s one thing that can generally unite a city it’s playoff sports. 

I love the solidarity that it creates. You may have nothing else in common with the person sitting next to you at the bar, but suddenly you’re best friends because your team is winning.

As I write this post, #WeTheOther is currently breaking the internet after CBS Sports ran a cheeky online poll asking: Who will win the NBA title? The four options were:

1. Warriors
   

2. Thunder
   

3. Cavaliers
   

4. Other
   

For those of you who don’t follow basketball, there are only 4 teams left in the NBA playoffs right now! So in what was likely a deliberate snub to the Toronto Raptors, CBS conveniently obfuscated them in their poll.

Here’s how Mayor John Tory quickly responded :

What would sports be without the trash talking?