ProEixample 4.0: A Land Trust and a Parametric Rulebook for Barcelona's Leftover Streets

Q: Who wrote "ProEixample 4.0: A Land Trust and a Parametric Rulebook for Barcelona's Leftover Streets"?

This article was written by UNI Editorial and published on uni.xyz, a platform for design professionals and creative thinkers.

Q: What is "ProEixample 4.0: A Land Trust and a Parametric Rulebook for Barcelona's Leftover Streets" about?

This article covers topics related to Urban Design, Urban Planning. A Hyperblock winner that reads Barcelona through eleven historical layers and turns surplus Eixample road space into commons run by a land trust.

Most Superblock proposals stop at the moment the cars leave. ProEixample 4.0 begins there. Once traffic is pushed out of Barcelona's grid, a vast surface of asphalt is left behind with no clear owner, no programme and no rules for how it should change. The project treats that surplus as the real design problem: what happens to leftover road infrastructure in a car-free city, and how can it be reprogrammed to strengthen urban ecology? Its answer is a system rather than a masterplan, a parametric framework paired with a governance model that decides who gets to build on the reclaimed ground.

Developed by Paul Strobel, Max Blake and Jochen Schumacher, the proposal was named the Winner of the Hyperblock competition. Its site is the Eixample, the district whose repetitive grid of chamfered blocks has become the testing ground for Barcelona's Superblock experiments. The team approaches it with an unusual degree of analytical patience, building from the history of the whole city down to the scale of a single block before proposing anything physical.

Eleven Layers of History as a Design Brief

Perspective illustration of a raised terrace with two seated figures beside a planted bench, a tiered housing block behind, and birds in a cloudy sky

The raised terrace in this opening view, with two figures resting beside a planted bench and a tiered housing block stepping back behind them, is the end point of a long chain of reasoning. The project starts with a historical analysis that traces eleven thematic layers through Barcelona, from ancient myths to post-COVID conditions, covering political conflict, infrastructure, migration, ecology, commerce and cultural production. The designers read the city as a dynamic system of overlapping forces rather than a fixed artefact, mapping these layers into timelines and data diagrams.

That framing matters because it explains the calm, inhabited quality of the image. The terrace is not presented as a heroic gesture; it is one possible outcome of migration patterns, economic shifts and infrastructural decisions that the analysis shows have reshaped Barcelona again and again. The rooftop, here turned into an active public platform, becomes evidence that the city's next manifestation can be read and steered rather than simply imposed.

Streets Recast as Social Corridors

Elevated perspective illustration of a narrow tree-lined street with glazed pavilions and a greenhouse-like structure, pedestrians below, and birds overhead

Street-level perspective illustration of a cyclist and pedestrians passing glazed kiosks and a signed pavilion beneath large translucent tree canopies

The two street views show what the reclaimed carriageway can carry once vehicles no longer claim it. From above, a narrow tree-lined street fills with small glazed pavilions and a greenhouse-like structure, while pedestrians occupy the full width below. At ground level, a cyclist and walkers pass glazed kiosks and a signed pavilion beneath large translucent canopies. The block analysis behind these scenes identified the dominance of vehicular infrastructure over public space as the Eixample's key inefficiency, and these drawings are the direct inversion of that finding.

What stands out is the scale of the interventions. Nothing here replaces the existing fabric; the pavilions are light, transparent and modest, slotting into the street section rather than walling it off. This reflects the city-scale reading in the analysis, which observes that top-down planning strategies tend to falter over time while bottom-up interventions take root physically. The kiosks read less like a designed set piece and more like the kind of incremental occupation a neighbourhood might produce for itself, given the right framework.

Courtyards and Plazas as Green Commons

Perspective illustration of a plaza with a glass greenhouse hall, stepped planters, children playing, and housing blocks rising behind the tree canopies

In this plaza, a glass greenhouse hall anchors the space, stepped planters break the ground into usable terraces, and children play beneath tree canopies with housing blocks rising behind. The project describes the conversion of courtyards into green commons, and this image shows that ambition at its most generous: productive glazed volumes, planting and open play space sharing a single civic ground.

The greenhouse is a telling choice. It links the scheme to the green-technology trajectory among the six speculative futures the team developed through a futures wheel method, alongside democracy 4.0, global migration and post-COVID urban shifts, projecting Barcelona toward 2050. Rather than painting a single utopia, the futures wheel gives the design a set of plausible pressures to respond to, and the plaza becomes a place where ecology, food and social life overlap in response to them.

A Governance Model Drawn as an Axonometric

Axonometric drawing of a street block from above, showing glazed pavilions along a tree-lined sidewalk beside a long slab building and a larger corner block

The axonometric pulls back to show how these pieces sit within a block: glazed pavilions lined along a tree-lined sidewalk, set beside a long slab building and a larger corner block. It is the most diagrammatic drawing in the set, and the most revealing, because it shows the scheme as a pattern that can repeat across the grid rather than a one-off composition.

That repeatability depends on the project's core mechanism, a Community Land Trust that mediates between public authorities, residents and private stakeholders. The strategy unfolds in four steps, allowing transformation to happen incrementally while keeping the system coherent. The CLT is what turns a parametric idea into something buildable: it answers the question of who holds the reclaimed street, and it gives residents a formal stake in what the pavilions along their sidewalk eventually become.

Why This Project Matters

ProEixample 4.0 earns its win by refusing to treat the car-free street as a finished outcome. Many proposals celebrate pedestrianisation with planting and benches and leave it there; this one asks what comes after, and recognises that surplus space without ownership or rules tends to stagnate or be captured. By coupling a parametric spatial framework with a Community Land Trust, the designers address the institutional question that most urban design competitions quietly skip.

The illustrations also make a persuasive case for restraint. Light glazed pavilions, greenhouses, planted terraces and rooftop platforms add programme without overwhelming Cerdà's grid, and the extensive historical and city-scale analysis gives each move a reason to exist. For anyone thinking about how cities will reallocate road space in the coming decades, the project offers a useful lesson: the most durable design may be the one that sets out the process, the stakeholders and the rules, then lets the neighbourhood fill in the rest.