Modeling the Health Benefits of Superblocks across the City of Los Angeles

Abstract

Superblocks can help to transform urban areas into pedestrian-centric neighborhoods. First launched in Barcelona, Spain, they are expected to reduce harmful environmental exposures, increase green space access and thereby provide substantial health benefits. However, few studies have examined the practicality and likely benefits of implementing Superblocks in other metropolitan areas. We developed a methodological framework to build a generalizable City of Los Angeles (LA) Superblocks Model and evaluate the predicted health benefits that would follow such an intervention. We derived and used five rules to guide the choice of arterial streets and candidate blocks and the choice of major bounding streets that could facilitate mobility across the metropolitan area. We next used the BenMap-CE model to perform a quantitative assessment of the health and economic benefits that would accompany five scenarios that would transform 5–50% of the residential areas in the City of LA to Superblocks. We found that the creation of superblocks resulted in significant reductions in hospital admissions and significant economic savings. The benefits were strongest when 5–10% of residential areas were transformed, but rapidly decreased as the threshold reached 30%. These results will help stakeholders determine the optimal balance between reduced car traffic and improved health outcomes. Moreover, we illustrated how to develop a Superblocks model for a highly versatile and populated metropolitan area like the City of LA and how the model can be used to assess the potential health benefits and benchmark the relationship between the scale of the Superblock implementation and the accompanying health benefits moving forward.

Superblock Design and Evaluation by a Microscopic Door-to-Door Simulation Approach

“…The multiple-criteria approach used to identify 49 feasible superblocks in Bologna city could be applicable to any city, as demonstrated in [33,37,38,49]. However, the configuration of potential superblocks may vary depending on the specific urban design.…”

“…Various versions of these schemes have been found in numerous European cities, such as "share-spaces", or "car-free development" in the United Kingdom [23,24], "woonerf" in the Netherlands [25], "car-free or car-reduced housing areas" in the Freiburg-Vauban, "Kiez blocks" in Germany [26,27] and Vienna [28], and "micro-districts" in Russia [29]. This concept has also been explored in various urban contexts, such as in China (Asia) [30], Abu Dhabi (Middle East) [31], Panama [32], and the United States of America [33]. However, the superblocks being deployed in Barcelona, Spain, are the largest in size, covering the entire city core (100 km 2 ), with 503 superblocks planned and nine implemented or in progress [10,34,35].…”

“…The Barcelona superblocks are configured by nine-block grids (3 × 3 blocks, as shown in Figure 1), with approximately 400 m side length. However, this may vary in peri-urban areas and typically depends on the structure and layout of the city [33]. The diversity of land uses, services, and population density guide superblock creation [36].…”

“…A multiple-criteria approach, which is widely used in [33,37,38,49], was adopted to identify potential superblocks in this paper, as indicated in Figure 3. First, the most suitable superblock size of 400 m × 400 m was preferred to formulate a list of initial candidates.…”

The Relationship between Urban Expansion and Air Pollution Depends on Urban Spatial Morphology in the “2 + 26” Cities of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, China

“…Since the beginning of the 21st century, urban problems such as the expansion of urban construction land, the loss of agricultural resources, and the concentration of industrial areas have become increasingly serious. Rapidly increasing concentrations of atmospheric pollutants from human activities are leading to serious urban ecological environmental issues [1]. Globally, the majority of the population lives in urban agglomerations of middle or low-latitude plains and cities in coastal areas [2].…”