Made for People, Not Cars: Reclaiming European Cities

Summary

With the number of passenger vehicles rising across Europe, cities are grappling with air pollution, traffic accidents, and the loss of public space. In Spain, the city of Pontevedra has managed to overcome these challenges, surpassing national air quality standards and creating safer streets. The key, according to the Galician municipality’s mayor, is an urban model that prioritises residents over cars – without imposing an outright ban on private vehicles. It is a bright summer evening in Pontevedra, a Galician city in the northwest of Spain. The air is filled with a contralto accompanying a live jazz show in a corner of the big town square. A few metres away, four teenagers play soccer with an orange ball that two younger children try to touch in vain. A family takes a selfie while, seated on a nearby bench, four elderly women are engaged in a lively conversation. The intervals between one jazz piece and another are filled with the chirping of birds that are attracted to the greenery around the fountain. Looking at the images of Pontevedra from the 1990s, with lines of cars stretching as far as the eye could see, it would be very difficult to predict a future like this. But since family doctor Miguel Anxo Fernández Lores was elected mayor in 1999, the Galician city has been implementing policies that go well beyond regulating vehicles in its streets. The goal, according to the 71-year-old mayor, is to recover public space for the people. “When we reclaim public space and guarantee universal accessibility, then people have autonomy,” the mayor says. A politician of the Galician Nationalist Bloc party (Bloque Nacionalista Galego, BNG), Lores is now serving his seventh mandate and is willing to run for an eighth in 2027. Galicia is mainly and historically ruled by the right-wing Popular Party, and is the birthplace of several of its national leaders, which makes the local leftist and nationalist BNG’s long rule in Pontevedra an exception in the region. When we recla...