Just before the dawn of the twentieth century, there was one issue faced in the urban landscape which rose, literally, above all others.

Manure.

Horses had been a key method of transportation for centuries, however with a population boom and rapid urban growth, within several decadesthe sheer number of horse-drawn vehicles had outpaced existing infrastructure. With horse-drawn vehicles being the mainstay in cities the world over, the pollution the animals caused was reaching international crisis levels. In 1894 The Times reported that within fifty years every street in London would be stacked with nine meters of manure. In New York City, the city had a horse population of over 100,000 which produced approximately around 2.5 million pounds of manure every single day. It was not just the unsightliness and smell which citizens had to contend with but there was considerable noise pollution caused by thousands of hoofs over cobbled streets. The effects of just how bad the issue was can still be seen to this day. The charming stoops which made up a lot of New York City architecture were designed with manure evasion in mind. In 1898, the world’s first International Urban Planning Conference convened in New York City with the focus squarely on how to deal with manure. No solution was reached. At the time, it seemed inevitable that part of city life meant dealing with roads caked in filth.

However, in just over ten years’ time from the conference, horse-drawn vehicles quickly vanished from the streets. The mass production of cars had arrived and were quickly seen as a saviour for urban living. They were, in comparison, the quiet, odourless, and more sustainable than horses since they expelled only harmless exhaust. A century later, the world is once again seeing the same issue. Urban areas congested with noisy, polluting traffic which brings severe health ramifications and pushes infrastructure to its limits. Cars, like their predecessor the horse, are now undergoing a transition. Fossil-fuelled cars are being phased out in favour of electric vehicles.

The parable of the Great Horse Manure Crisis tells of a seemingly insurmountable predicament suddenly and effectively solved by invention. However, the simplicity of this solution will probably not be repeated. The pollution caused by cars and other fossil-fuelled vehicles has reached international crisis levels. In America, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that vehicles cause nearly 75 percent of the carbon monoxide pollution within the country.

Electric cars are set to replace the combustion engine, however despite being quieter and cleaner than cars powered by diesel or petrol, they aren’t a one-stop fix. Increasingly, cities and urban areas around the world are looking at having fewer cars on the road full-stop.

Barcelona, Spain’s second largest city, cars were becoming a major problem, creating excessive and dangerous levels of pollution. The noise levels in the city also exceeded recommended levels, resulting in citizens living with unhealthy levels of noise pollution around them, making Barcelona one of the loudest cities in the world.

The solution was simple, to close off certain streets to traffic in areas known as superblocks. Vehicles are allowed with limited and then traffic is only allowed to move in one direction and at low speed (no more than ten miles an hour). This opened up the space to be used as a safe and open place for pedestrians. It is relatively low-cost, requiring no additional infrastructure with the bulk of the costs going on new street signs and paint for roads. 

The pilot scheme to introduce superblocks in Barcelona started in 2014 amid some push-back from local residents and business owners. Residents were concerned about gentrification, rising property values, and residents’ displacement, already hot-button subjects in the city. Green and civic spaces raise property prices, so in a city of mostly renters the issue of rent going up and pricing tenants out was an issue.  Business owners were concerned that the lack of traffic would result in dropped sales. However, in areas where superblocks have been implanted, the reverse has happened. With more people walking by, having a look inside a shop no longer required the frustration of having to find an available parking space, park, pay for parking, and then walk to the shop. Local businesses have grown in superblocks by 30%.   

Barcelona aims to create 503 superblocks by 2050, which is estimated to prevent 667 premature deaths every year. The city is also well-suited for superblock development, as the city was built before the invention of cars and was originally designed for pedestrian traffic. Following this logic, superblocks could be implanted in several other European cities, most of which still use roads first laid centuries before cars were invented.

Pedestrianisation is becoming more of an option in urban planning across the globe. As well as Barcelona, other major Spanish cities are pedestrianizing its streets such as Madrid. The city of Pontevedra, Spain, banned cars from its city centre in 1999 and has achieved a 70% drop in CO2 emissions since. In Scandinavia, Helsinki and Oslo, who have a combined population of over a million people, cut pedestrian deaths to zero by reducing cars in the cities. In Bogotá, Colombia, has approximately one million people travel by foot or bike on Sunday mornings through its community-based Ciclovía programme which has been replicated across hundreds of cities as far away as Jakarta, Indonesia. Across the world, pedestrianisation has led to a number of positive and unexpected outcomes. Across pedestrianised zones, trade has increased. In New York City, there was a 49% drop in commercial vacancies in pedestrianised zones, and in Mexico City there was a 30% increase in commercial activity. Across Latin America Ciclovía-based programmes also promoted greater social cohesion with over half the routes spread across low-income areas and participation of minority groups at 61%.

From an environmental, social, health, and economic level, pedestrianisation seems to be the way forward but are there drawbacks? While pedestrianisation is somewhat easy to implement in cities designed before the widespread use of cars, many of the world’s most prominent cities were built with the car at the forefront of urban planning. Most of America’s cities were designed with widespread car use in mind, the same goes for many cities in the Gulf such as Dubai and Riyadh. As a result, moving on foot or by bike can be challenging, and changing the existing infrastructure to be pedestrian focused will be much more of an extensive task.

Cities need to change. Similar to how horses came and went, transportation and the way that urban planning is thought about is also entering a new era. There needs to be a shift across all aspects of city planning to guarantee a more community, economic and environmental focused approach in finding solutions to the pollution caused by cars. Pedestrianisation is one aspect which can be utilised to ensure a more sustainable future for cities and those who live in them.

By Eve Maleham