Let's get Aotearoa moving: Ecological Urbanism a talk with Salvador Rueda.

Kia ora koutou:

This public talk with Salvador Rueda recorded on the 20th of May covers ecological and ecosystemic urbanism, proximity, pedestrians vs citizens, naturalization of the public space, integrated urban mobility, social cohesion, habitability, Barcelona and Wellington.

Some quotes from Salvador:

" When people ask me: Are electric cars the future?
I say no, electric bicycles are."

"For me public space is sacred. It can't be used almost exclusively by motorists. In time, future generations will look back at us the same way we look at the middle age people when they were throwing their urine out the window."

"Ecosystemic urbanism considers public space as an "agora", as a space for democracy. Public space is a democratic expression of the right for movement particularly for active modes (walking and cycling)."

"The Barcelona Superblock is the biggest recycling project in the world. We are freeing up 7 million square meters of public space for people and without tearing down a single building ... and the great thing is that it is very cheap. The Barcelona City Council will invest 300 million euros in tactical urbanism interventions to make it happen. If we did this over 4 years, it would not even be a 2 % of the LTP budget and it changes everything."

"The idea of density is what makes a city. At a conference of the Institute of Civil Engineers a few days ago, someone asked me what do we have to do to face the climate emergency?
I said look, do not build any more single family dwellings, the world can't take it."

"We need to be able to turn things around, design cities in which we can travel to places by foot. On foot the used energy for an average journey is equivalent to a domestic 150W light bolt energy consumption, the same journey in a private car would need 6,000 times more (fossil based) energy. This is where disaster lies, it is urgent and we have very limited time to turn the situation around. It all begins by changing the urban mobility model of our cities and our life styles. I have no doubt about it."

"The public transport network is instrumental for a City like Wellington. In Barcelona it helped defining the perimeter of the superblocks. The superblock strategy has a prior element in order to resolve the commercial speed and the efficiency and the frequency of the new network. We have to ensure that the specialised thoroughfares are specifically designed to accommodate public transport."

Amongst the attendees there were people with different backgrounds and interests which was really our goal. We have had policy specialists from central and local government, academics, design and transport professionals and climate change, transport, mobility and urban design advocates ... decision makers and urbanists!

Special thanks to our host the Victoria University of Wellington and our partner the Embassy of Spain in New Zealand for supporting Urbanhub Aotearoa and Urbanhub Barcelona.

Nga mihi
The Urbanhub team

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