Towards the Post-Pandemic (Healthy) City: Barcelona’s Poblenou Superblock. Challenges and Opportunities

This chapter engages with a specific feature of existing debates about urban design, planning, and COVID-19.1 We argue that the experience of Superblocks, specifically the case of Barcelona’s Poblenou,2 may succor health, social, and economic inequities and, consequently, may prevent the spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19. There has not yet been a large public survey to examine the role this new urban design plays in mitigating the effects of COVID-19. Our research therefore sheds important light on the role Superblocks can play in providing a more inclusive, resilient, healthy, sustainable, and safer environment in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond (see also March and Lehrer; Yerena and Casas, both Volume 3). After the 2020 pandemic outbreak, a growing number of surveys claimed that environmental factors, such as weather condition and air pollution played a major role in the transmission of the virus (Dobricic et al, 2020; Poirier et al, 2020). Specifically, as shown by Coker et al (2020), long-term exposure to ambient air pollutant concentrations contributes to chronic lung inflammation, a condition that may promote increased severity of COVID-19. In light of these considerations, the pandemic has confronted cities with needing to deal with the high level of congestion and pollution in order to reduce the pandemic’s impact on rates of contagion and, consequently, mortality. These issues, along with a lack of community and healthy public spaces (Slater et al, 2020), pose a threat to people’s aspirations and experiences of urban living, and have been aggravated by the pandemic outbreak.