To improve neighbourhood liveability and urban sustainability, Barcelona is seeking to re-organize its urban structure into superblocks, designed to discourage cut-through traffic and promote multiple uses of street space. Despite its potential, this approach is not without its limits, that should be properly taken into account. The implementation of the Supermanzana model in the Poblenou neighbourhood is explored in this paper to analyse its potentialities and constraints. Temporal synchronization between the urban level and the neighbourhood level turns out to be particularly important to reduce conflicts and criticalities.

Car dependency greatly contributes to the climate crisis and the corrosion of public space. In response, cities are introducing pedestrianisation, cycle lanes or tactical urban interventions aimed at repurposing streets for other road users. Framed as ‘experiments’, these reallocations of street space disrupt traditional transport planning procedures, often with promising results in promoting active travel. They are also associated with deep conflicts and criticism, especially by citizens defending the right to drive. Despite their ability to stop experiments, such conflicts have been little explored in the debates about experimentation and automobility. Similarly, street experiments have in most cases been uncritically embraced as a panacea for urban mobility problems, with little attention paid to experimentation as an expression of austerity urbanism. This paper aims to deepen our understanding of street experiments and their relationship to automobility by contextualising their conflictual unfolding as an expression of post-political planning in the age of austerity urbanism. Through a critical examination of the Torino Mobility Lab, a collaborative pedestrianisation experiment in Torino, we show how the governance-beyond-state setup of such projects masks a complex and contested coexistence of different meanings and processes for reimagining urban mobility and public space. We show how conflicts emerge embedded in the problematic and post-political governance of transport experiments. Nested within austerity urbanism, the experiment remains limited in its ability to create healthy spaces for participation. We conclude by highlighting the limitations and contradictions of attempts to overcome car dependency embedded in post-political frameworks and neoliberal-austerity planning practices.

There is great uncertainty about the transition from human to autonomous driving vehicles (AVs), as well as about the extent and direction of their potential impacts on the urban built environment. Planners are aware of the importance of leading this transition but are hesitant about how to proceed, and public administrations generally show a passive attitude. One of the reasons is the difficulty of defining long-term visions and identifying transition paths to achieve the desired future. The literature on AVs is growing rapidly but most of the visions proposed so far do not consider in detail how circulation and parking of AVs will (or could) be differently regulated in cities. In this study, three visions for the Italian city of Turin are proposed. The aim of these visions is to highlight how different forms of regulation of AV circulation and parking can impact on the sustainability and livability of the city. A focus group and a set of interviews with experts and stakeholders were used to validate the three visions and assess their advisability and sustainability. This visioning exercise is the first step in the development of a backcasting process.

Transit Oriented Development (TOD) is an effective way to integrate land use and transport in pursuit of the goal of sustainable development. Most of the literature on TOD is devoted to station areas in urban contexts; even when TOD is considered with a regional approach, suburban and rural stations are poorly investigated. Analysing a case study, this paper explores spatial potentialities and constraints for TOD in suburban and rural contexts. The results show that conditions for TOD around suburban and rural stations vary substantially from those around urban stations. A broader, more complex and context-sensitive approach to TOD is recommended.