Living Cities: The agony of Car-Free Sunday

A conversation on what makes a livable city.
By AITOR HERNÁNDEZ-MORALES
With GIOVANNA COI
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Happy Thursday, city lovers!
This week: In Brussels, Car-Free Sunday comes just once a year … But what if it didn’t?
Further down, we look at Madrid through the lens of filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s cameras.
THE CAR-FREE DREAM: For the past 25 years Brussels has undergone a magical transformation on a single Sunday in September. During that time Belgium’s capital region becomes the largest car-free zone in Europe, with nearly all private motor vehicle use banned for a limited number of hours.
The absence of cars on the streets and the offer of free public transport throughout the area transforms the city, allowing tens of thousands of pedestrians, rollerbladers and cyclists to enjoy the public space from which they’re largely banished during the rest of the year.
But like some fairy tale spell, by evening the ban ends and motor vehicles vroom back onto the boulevards, reclaiming their dominance over the city for the next 364 days.
Easy wins: Beyond giving locals a chance to safely experience life in a liveable city, car-free Sunday has a proven impact on environmental and health conditions within the Belgian capital.
According to the regional government’s environmental agency, levels of nitrogen dioxide — a toxic pollutant generated by combustion engines — dropped by between 62 and 79 percent, while car-related nitrogen monoxide decreased by between 62 and 100 percent. That’s huge in a city where air pollution is so bad that it causes an estimated 1,000 premature deaths each year.
Tell me why? In the immediate aftermath of the event each year, mostly green-minded politicians raise the same question: Why is the city car-free for only a few hours each year? “Once a year is like Christmas: the exception confirms the rule,” Brussels’ caretaker Mobility Minister Elke Van den Brandt, a member of the Greens, said this week. “Once a month is a habit — the new normal.”
This year Christophe De Beukelaer, leader of the economic liberal Les Engagés group, suggested Car-Free Sundays could be good for the economy and expressed support for celebrating the event with greater regularity, “allowing residents to take back ownership” of their streets. But David Leisterh, president of the local wing of the center-right Reformist Movement — which won the most votes in last June’s regional elections — dismissed the event as nothing more than a symbolic celebration.
Brussels lags behind: While cities across Europe are making strides to get polluting cars out and reclaim public space for active mobility, the Belgian capital stands out for lagging behind. The smog-filled present is unlikely to improve in the future: Instead of betting on fewer cars, the parties most likely to form the region’s next government are against further restrictions.
This week the Reformist Movement, Les Engagés and the French-speaking Socialists teamed up in the Brussels parliament to propose postponing the scheduled extension of the regional Low-Emissions Zone. As of next year, cars and vans that run on diesel under the Euro 0-5 emissions standards or petrol under the Euro 0-2 rules are supposed to be banned within most of Brussels; the proposed deferral would allow the polluting vehicles to circulate for an additional two years. It appears certain that locals will have to contend with toxic air — at least until next year’s Car-Free Sunday.
NEW VATICAN JUST DROPPED: Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama announced plans this week to create a liberal Muslim enclave inside Tirana, with the goal of “promot[ing] a tolerant version of Islam that Albania is proud of. ” The proposed Sovereign State of the Bektashi Order would be ruled by Baba Mondi, the Bektashi Order’s leader. It would be a quarter the size of Vatican City and would lack traditional sovereign features such as an army, border guards or courts.
VIENNA RESISTS: Devastating floods hit Central Europe this week, wreaking havoc in cities like Budapest, where the waters rose well past the riverbank and reached homes and the national parliament. Despite heavy rain in Vienna, the city survived the potential catastrophe unscathed thanks to its flood defense system, which once again proved to be able to cope with massive amounts of water. The combination of the artificial Danube island and the city’s flood control channel, which serves as a sort of holding pool for excess water, allowed the Austrian capital to handle a discharge of 11,000 cubic meters of water per second.
MET RESET: Greater London’s Metropolitan Police is revising the way it stops and conducts searches of locals after determining that black community members are been disproportionately targeted by officers. A new plan will seek to “reset” the force’s relationship with Londoners of color and redesign how searches are conducted in the future.
Todo sobre Madrid: This week Leyla and Paul’s musical offering has a filmic twist. Inspired by Almodóvar’s Madrid, they’ve dipped their toes into the scores and soundtracks that have brought the city to life on the silver screen.
“One of Europe’s top filming destinations, Madrid’s long been a captivating cinematic protagonist — the colourful dramas of Almodóvar, the unsettling worlds of Alejandro Amenábar, the poetic realism of Basilio Martín Patino, all emanating out of the same place,” Leyla said. “From old classics to contemporary auteurs, documentaries to genre cinema, here’s an introductory sonic guide to Madrid through film.”
ALMODÓVAR’S MADRID: Cities are often used as backdrops for films, but some directors lean into the urban context of specific places with such intensity that the surroundings end up becoming leading characters in their movies. That’s certainly the case with filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, whose oeuvre reads as a multi-decade love letter to the Spanish capital. On the occasion of the conclusion of the Conde Duque Cultural Center’s mayor exhibition on the subject, this week we’re taking look at how the director zooms in on different parts of the city, using its neighborhoods as explicit elements of the plot, or more to transmit more subtle reflections on his characters.
La niña bonita: Raised in rural Spain, Almodóvar spent his childhood developing an almost mythical idea of Madrid which he based on his mother’s recollections of her rare trips to the capital, a place that she portrayed as a fast-paced metropolis where anything is possible. He moved to the city with the intention of studying cinematography, but the official film school was constantly closed due to student strikes and he ended up working at the state telephone company, a gig he took up with the goal of raising enough funds to move to Paris or New York. But that move never happened: Instead, he started experimenting making low-budget films that captured the spirit of Spain’s transition to democracy and the Movida, a counterculture period of Madrid’s history that stretched from dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 to the middle of the next decade.
The best example of this is 1980’s “Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón,” a surrealist comedy about the wild adventures of punks in a Spanish capital that seems to simultaneously be incredibly modern and shockingly decrepit. That vision of the city as a place that is open and almost disconcertingly avant-garde was further transmitted in films like 1983’s “Dark Habits” and 1987’s “The Law of Desire,” which used Madrid as a backdrop for storylines featuring the exploration of sexual kinks and frank portrayals LGBTQ+ characters, topics that had been taboo during the Franco regime.
The imaginary city: Almodóvar’s love affair with Madrid is perhaps exemplified by his hit 1988 comedy, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, whose protagonist is Pepa, an actress trying to deal with a devastating breakup.
The bulk of the action takes place in her penthouse apartment, a dream flat that the director wanted to build on the rooftop of the capital’s iconic Círculo de Bellas Artes building, but which he had to instead create within a soundstage after it was discovered that the desired location could not structurally support the weight of his camera equipment. In the film, the aforementioned flat looks out on a fantasy version of the city’s skyline that both looks realistic and boggles the mind because it can’t possibly exist.
That dreamy, surrealist vision of the city is complemented by secondary figures like the taxi driver who has redecorated his vehicle with leopard-prints or the ditzy model from Andalusia, characters that help cast Madrid as a city that is frenetic, surreal and diverse, where everyone dresses and behaves outrageously. 1989’s ‘Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!‘ and 1993’s ‘Kika‘ feature similarly vividly colored, satiric depictions of the capital that border on the cartoonish.
A love-hate relationship: But not all of Almodóvar’s films feature dazzling visions of the city. In “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” (1984) the director takes viewers to the depressing housing estates that were built to house the thousands that came to Madrid as part of the great post-war rural-to-urban migration. The shabby, claustrophobic, Le Corbusier-inspired tower blocks of the neighborhood known as las colmenas — “the beehives” — are constant reminders of the miserable life led by Gloria, the film’s protagonist, a woman so desperate to escape her surroundings that she sells her son to pedophile in order to buy household appliances that she hopes will distract her from the torment of day to day life.
A somewhat less dire view of the capital’s working class districts is relayed in “Volver” (2006), where the depressing housing blocks of the Vallecas neighborhood are depicted as remarkably tight-knit communities where low-income neighbors get by helping one another with small loans and by frequenting living room beauty salons.
In both of the aforementioned films, as well as in others like 1995’s The Flower of My Secret, Madrid is depicted as a place that is both enticing and toxic. Indeed, in all of them older characters yearn for and eventually flee back to rural villages in La Mancha that are depicted as simpler, more peaceful places. All of them, of course, are reminiscent of Almodóvar’s own hometown of Calzada de Calatrava, and reflect the conflicted sense of place felt by many who migrate from rural locales to metropolitan settings.
We’re back with our weekly cities-related trivia challenge! Last week we asked readers to identify where vanillin, the low-cost synthetic vanilla extract that is widely used to flavor ice cream, was invented. This was a bit of a trick question: While the synthetic was first manufactured in Holzminden, it appears to have been invented in Berlin — a city no one listed among their guesses.
The product was made in 1874 by chemists Wilhelm Haarmann and Karl Reimer, who changed the world by deducing vanilla’s chemical structure and developing a way to industrially produce its synthetic version, vanillin. Today it continues to be used to enrich foods like ice cream and chocolate, and to make perfumes smell even sweeter.
This week’s challenge … Should be a walk in the park. Where was the world’s first fully public urban park located? The first reader to identify it — preferably without using a search engine — gets a shout-out in next week’s newsletter.
— The Finnish government will invest €144 million in the new tramway linking Vantaa to the capital, Helsinki city hall reports.
— Water voles, eels and otters are set to make a comeback in London as part of the city’s plan to boost wildlife in its rivers, the Standard reports.
— Regulators across the Atlantic are moving to address car bloat by limiting the height of SUVs and pickup trucks that prove so deadly for pedestrians in collisions, our friend David Zipper reports in Fast Company.
THANKS TO: Leyla Aksu, Paul Dallison, and my editors Kelsey Hayes and Stephan Faris, and producer Giulia Poloni.
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POLITICO’s Global Policy Lab is a collaborative journalism project seeking solutions to challenges faced by modern societies in an age of rapid change. Over the coming months we will host a conversation on how to make cities more livable and sustainable.