The Walking City

A sign in victoria-Gasteiz alerts drivers to the pedestrian paradise ahead.

- Wes Enzinna

On weekends, Calle de Postas in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, feels like a never-ending block party. Cyclists share the magnolia-shaded street with off-leash dogs and teetering toddlers. There are bustling cafe tables and families on benches eating ice cream. That’s life in this city of 200,000 in the Basque Country, where nearly half the streets have been converted into car-free zones over the past decade.

“This city is my test case,” says Salvador Rueda, a Spanish urban planner known for overseeing large-scale pedestrian conversions in Barcelona and Buenos Aires, among other places. Vitoria-Gasteiz, he says, is his “laboratory,” a city whose history as a center of auto manufacturing—it’s home to factories for Mercedes and Michelin—makes it an unlikely showcase. “If we can do something here, others can see it and replicate our results.”

Rueda, 66, is known as the world’s leading proponent of “superblocks”—in which groups of commercial or residential streets are barred to through traffic, crisscrossed by pedestrian walkways, and carpeted with grassy malls. Thanks to his work, Vitoria-Gasteiz has 63 of them, with plans for 48 more. “It’s a revolution,” Rueda says as we ride bikes down Calle de Postas. “A cheap revolution, where you don’t have to demolish a single building.”