City block
Based on Wikipedia: City block
The Invisible Grid Beneath Your Feet
Barcelona is running an experiment that might reshape how we think about cities. They're taking their famous grid—those uniform blocks that have defined the city since the nineteenth century—and essentially erasing the streets inside clusters of nine blocks at a time. Cars can still drive around the perimeter, but inside? The streets belong to people walking, children playing, neighbors chatting. They call these "superilles," Catalan for superblocks.
It's a radical idea. And to understand why it matters, we need to talk about something so fundamental to cities that most of us never think about it at all: the city block.
What Exactly Is a City Block?
At its simplest, a city block is the smallest cluster of buildings surrounded by streets. That's it. Streets wrap around a collection of structures, and that bounded space is your block.
But this simple definition conceals enormous variety. Walk through the medieval core of Rome or Istanbul, and you'll find yourself in a maze of irregular shapes—blocks that look like they were carved by centuries of negotiation between neighbors, accidents of history, and the whims of terrain. These aren't planned. They grew.
Now picture Manhattan. The grid there is almost military in its precision, a deliberate imposition of order that dates to 1811, when city commissioners decided that New York's future growth would follow a rigid pattern of rectangular blocks. No more organic sprawl. Just geometry.
These two approaches—organic growth versus planned grids—represent fundamentally different philosophies about how humans should organize their shared spaces.
The Grid Takes Over the New World
When European colonizers built cities in the Americas, they overwhelmingly chose grids. Philadelphia led the way, and New York followed with its famous Commissioners' Plan. The grid was efficient, democratic in its regularity, and—crucially—easy to survey, sell, and tax.
The standard approach became what urban planners call "perimeter block development." Buildings line the edges of each block, their front doors facing the street. Behind them, the interior of the block becomes something else entirely—courtyards, gardens, parking lots, service alleys. The public face of the city wraps around private or semi-private cores.
This pattern emerged organically in European cities over centuries, but American planners codified it, turning a traditional arrangement into a systematic principle.
Size Matters More Than You'd Think
Here's where things get interesting. There's no standard size for a city block. And the differences are dramatic.
A typical Manhattan block measures about 264 feet by 900 feet—roughly 80 meters by 274 meters. That's extremely elongated, almost like a loaf of bread. Walking the short way across takes maybe a minute. Walking the long way takes considerably longer.
Chicago uses a different standard: 330 feet by 660 feet, or about 100 by 200 meters. This creates a useful mnemonic for navigation. Sixteen blocks going east-west equals one mile. Eight blocks going north-south equals one mile. Many American cities adopted this Chicago-style spacing, which is why you'll hear people in cities from Denver to Phoenix giving directions in blocks.
Melbourne, Australia, curiously enough, uses the exact same dimensions as Chicago. Their blocks originally followed a square grid, but planners later split each square with a narrow lane down the middle, creating those familiar rectangular proportions.
These differences matter more than you might expect. Smaller blocks mean more intersections, more corner lots, more opportunities to change direction. Larger blocks can feel monotonous to walk but might accommodate bigger buildings or more interior green space.
When Blocks Become Addresses
In much of the United States and Canada, the city block does double duty as an addressing system. Each block of a street gets allocated one hundred building numbers. So if you're looking for 1450 Main Street, you know it's in the block between 1400 and 1500—probably between 14th and 15th cross streets.
This system is so intuitive that Americans often don't realize how unusual it is. In many European cities, building numbers simply count up from one end of the street to the other, with odd numbers on one side and even on the opposite. Finding a specific address might require knowing whether it's near the beginning or end of a very long street.
The American system turns the grid itself into a kind of coordinate system, making navigation almost mathematical. If you know the block numbers increase by one hundred at each cross street, and you know roughly where the cross streets fall, you can estimate your location without a map.
The Exception Proves the Rule
Not all European cities developed organically. The exceptions are revealing.
Turin, in northern Italy, preserves a remarkably regular grid pattern dating back two thousand years. The Romans founded it as a military settlement, laying out streets along two main perpendicular axes—the cardo running north-south and the decumanus running east-west. This pattern proved so durable that it survived into the modern era.
Then there are the cities rebuilt after World War II. Frankfurt, heavily bombed, was reconstructed with more regular blocks than its medieval predecessor had known. Destruction created an opportunity for rationalization, though the results often lacked the charm of what had been lost.
Enter the Superblock
Now we return to Barcelona's experiment, but with context. A superblock—or super-block, with a hyphen—is exactly what it sounds like: a block that's super-sized. It encompasses multiple regular city blocks, bounded by major arterial roads rather than local streets.
The key innovation is what happens inside. The internal streets might still exist physically, but they're demoted. They no longer serve through traffic. They become local-only, often with drastically reduced speed limits—ten to twenty kilometers per hour in Barcelona's superilles, which translates to about six to twelve miles per hour. That's barely faster than a brisk walk.
Through traffic gets routed around the perimeter. Inside, the streets transform into something closer to shared public space.
The Asian Superblock
Barcelona didn't invent the superblock. In fact, this urban form has deep roots in Asian city planning, particularly in Japan and China.
The concept works differently there. Instead of retrofitting an existing grid, these cities were designed from the start with what planners call a "supergrid"—a network of wide arterial roads creating large cells. Inside each cell, narrower local streets form their own smaller grid or quasi-grid pattern.
One urban researcher, Chen, describes this morphology as "a large-scale net of wide roads that defines a series of cells or Superblocks, each containing a network of narrower streets."
The result is a hierarchy of movement. Major roads handle heavy traffic moving across the city. Local streets handle the fine-grained circulation within neighborhoods. The two systems interact only at specific, predictable points.
The Perimeter Block: Europe's Dense Secret
There's another variation worth understanding: the perimeter block. This is essentially the traditional European approach refined into a principle.
In a perimeter block, buildings occupy the entire edge of the block, creating an unbroken street wall. The center remains open—a courtyard or garden shared by the residents whose buildings surround it.
What's remarkable about perimeter blocks is how much density they can achieve without tall buildings. Six or seven stories of apartments arranged around a shared courtyard can house as many people as a high-rise tower, often with better quality of life. Every unit has access to private or semi-private outdoor space. Natural light reaches the courtyard. The streetscape remains human-scaled.
This is why cities like Paris and Barcelona feel simultaneously dense and livable. The buildings are substantial, but they don't overwhelm. The streets feel enclosed but not claustrophobic.
Blocks as Conversation
When someone gives you directions using blocks as a unit of measurement—"it's about three blocks that way"—they're engaging in a peculiarly urban form of imprecision.
Because blocks vary so much in size, and because they're usually rectangular rather than square, "three blocks" means different things depending on direction. Three blocks north might be half a mile. Three blocks west might be a quarter mile. And in cities without regular grids, the concept barely applies at all.
Yet people use this language constantly in North American and Australian English. It's become an informal unit of distance, understood intuitively even when it's technically meaningless.
This linguistic quirk reveals something about how deeply the grid has shaped urban consciousness in the New World. The block isn't just a physical reality—it's a way of thinking about space, a shared mental model that makes cities navigable even to strangers.
Seeing Blocks Differently
Urban planners and geographers who study city blocks have developed technical ways of defining them that reveal hidden complexity.
One approach includes the sidewalks as part of the block—the complete bounded area including the narrow strips of pavement that separate buildings from the street proper. This captures the full public-private interface, including alleys, small gardens, and any other elements that aren't formally part of individual property lots.
The alternative approach excludes sidewalks, defining the block only as the combined area of all the private land lots that touch each other within the bounded space.
The difference between these two definitions—what you get when you subtract the smaller from the larger—contains all the shared infrastructure of urban life: the sidewalks where we walk, the alleys where deliveries arrive, the narrow strips of grass between buildings and pavement.
This might seem like academic hair-splitting, but it matters for planning. How you define a block determines how you measure density, how you allocate costs for infrastructure maintenance, how you think about the relationship between public and private space.
Jane Jacobs and the Life of Blocks
No discussion of city blocks would be complete without mentioning Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" transformed how we think about urban form.
Jacobs argued that short blocks were essential to vibrant urban life. Short blocks mean more intersections, more opportunities to turn corners, more routes between any two points. This creates what she called "intricate pools of cross-use"—people from different parts of a neighborhood crossing paths, seeing each other, creating the casual social connections that make cities feel alive.
Long blocks, by contrast, create isolated corridors. Pedestrians have fewer choices about their routes. Neighborhoods become compartmentalized. The organic mixing that makes cities interesting gets designed out.
Jacobs was writing specifically about American cities, where the grid imposed a certain uniformity. But her insight applies more broadly. The size and shape of blocks profoundly affects how people move through urban space, and how that movement either encourages or discourages human connection.
The Future Is Porous
Barcelona's superblock experiment points toward one possible urban future: taking existing grids and selectively permeating them, creating zones where the car's dominance gives way to other forms of movement and gathering.
But this is just one approach. Other cities are experimenting with converting parking lots inside blocks into parks. Some are creating mid-block passages that let pedestrians cut through rather than walking all the way around. Others are adding housing to commercial blocks that previously emptied out after business hours.
What unites these experiments is a recognition that the city block, for all its apparent permanence, is actually quite malleable. The streets that define its boundaries can carry more traffic or less. The buildings that line its edges can welcome the public or exclude them. The interior spaces can remain hidden courtyards or become shared amenities.
The block is not just a container for urban life. It's a canvas.
Walking the Grid
Next time you're walking through a city with a regular grid, pay attention to the rhythm your body falls into. The regular intervals of intersections. The predictable moments when you can see down a cross street. The way your mental map builds itself from repetition.
Then imagine that same walk through a medieval European core, where every turn reveals something unexpected, where you navigate by landmarks rather than coordinates, where getting a little lost is part of the experience.
Neither is better. They're different tools for organizing human settlement, different answers to the question of how millions of people can share limited space. The grid prioritizes efficiency, legibility, democratic uniformity. The organic tangle prioritizes discovery, intimacy, accumulated history.
Most cities contain both—planned expansions butting up against ancient cores, rectangular blocks giving way to irregular clusters. The seams between them are often the most interesting places, where two logics of urban space meet and negotiate.
And somewhere in Barcelona right now, children are playing soccer in what used to be a street, reclaiming the space between buildings for something older than grids or blocks—the simple human need to gather, to move, to be together in public space.