Tune Our Block

Meeting sustainability goals like the Paris Agreement or SDG11 requires re-allocating urban space to transform the metabolic regime of mobility towards a fossil-fuel-free, zero-emission transport system prioritizing walking, cycling and public transport. Barcelona’s Superblock concept – a disruptive spatial and mobility innovation emphasizing human scale – opens pathways for climate-adapted, healthy, and resilient cities where accessible and connected micro-neighborhoods ensure livability and sustainability. Such re-allocation of street space is currently of utmost importance in urban adaptations to COVID19.

The goal of the TuneOurBlock project is to expand the superblock concept as a policy and planning strategy for transformative urban adaptation.

The task of AIT is the modeling of superblocks with the help of traffic simulations. The traffic effects will be integrated in the discussions with stakeholders using planning tools. In addition, AIT identifies the stakeholder groups relevant in the participation process and the tools and methods suitable for them, which are tested in the Urban Living Labs (Vienna, Berlin).

Urban planners, practitioners, researchers, and non-governmental organizations will collaborate to develop effective and transferable guidelines, policy options, and tools for implementing superblocks in different urban contexts. These implementation strategies, together with the elaborated stakeholder involvement strategies, will be tested in the Urban Living Labs, and validated by partners in Slovenia and Romania and piloted with pan-European peer groups of municipal and civil society actors.

In Tune Our Block, different methods are used to develop pathways for the implementation of the Superblock concept in European cities. Participation strategies are compared and tested for their usefulness in involving residents and other stakeholders in the planning process. AIT is testing different methods to involve people: Microsimulation is used in combination with VR/AR (virtual/augmented reality), and Rhino/Grasshopper supports direct impact assessment of planning scenarios in a workshop setting. MATSim is used to assess the impact of banning through traffic in superblock candidates.

The project is ongoing and there have been no results been published yet.