Such a Sense of Possibility

And letting go of unreasonable expectations

This Summer, I spent six weeks living in Barcelona. That means I’ll probably be writing about Barcelona for the next six months. Please bear with me.

Carrer del Consell de Cent is one of many streets in Barcelona transformed into a pedestrian thoroughfare. On any given night, families are lining up for ice cream at a shop in one of the intersections turned into a plaza. An older couple strolls hand-in-hand and a gaggle of children rowdily chase a ball. Performers with their makeup done but not yet in costume are chatting on a bench while a young woman sits alone reading on the next bench over. Restaurants and bars have tables set outside, spilling into the middle of what used to be a street, overflowing with people eating, drinking, and laughing.

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I sat at one of those bars about a decade ago, with a table set precariously on the curb as cars whisked by. This evening, and every evening now, the street is still bustling, but with people, not cars.

Some say you can’t change the car culture of modern cities, that the politics and infrastructure make it too difficult. But Barcelona proves otherwise—you can, at least a little bit. Carrer del Consell de Cent is part of the Superilles (Superblocks) program, an ongoing experiment to transform the city. As Salvador Rueda, the former Director of the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona, described, “We want these public spaces to be areas where one can exercise all citizen rights: exchange, expression and participation, culture and knowledge, the right to leisure.”

You can see, hear, and feel those rights in all their exuberance and messiness on Carrer del Consell de Cent. You’re energized in the moment and, afterward, left with a sense of possibility: this is what a city can be like.

Such a sense of possibility is crucial for a vibrant society. Through it, we recognize how else we could organize our activities, spaces, and institutions. And we don’t just see this from afar. We participate in it. We walk down the street and we become part of that environment, making that vision of a city real. In doing so, we manifest difference. We create and demonstrate other ways of living together.

But such a sense of possibility is also increasingly difficult to come by. Our social, political, and environmental problems are rampant. This leads to feelings of pessimism and cynicism. It’s easy to disparage experiences such as walking down Carrer del Consell de Cent as mere blips, glitches in otherwise unpleasant and overbearing conditions. I can hear someone reading this saying, “Even if there are a few nice streets like that in Barcelona, well, that’s Barcelona…most cities are still really unfriendly…and anyway, there’s a lot of problems with the Superblocks too.”

Such a sense of possibility is also increasingly difficult to come by because the marketplace of ideas is monotonous and conservative, more and more dictated by the actual market economy. Distinctiveness is either shunned or made generic to scale and sell better. This perspective feeds into cynicism about the unescapable recuperation of all things into commodities.

Although the feelings of pessimism and cynicism are understandable, they stunt us. They thwart us from appreciating the people and places that are making a difference, by making things different. If we want a vibrant society, we need to make, experience, and value experiments like Carrer del Consell de Cent because they offer alternatives that move us.

Admittedly, when I hear the word “alternative,” I cringe. It reminds me of awkward youth culture. It feeds back into cynicism because so much of what was once “alternative” quickly ended up in shopping malls and is now available online alongside everything else.

But the word is actually meaningful. It marks something as distinctive, unconventional, and an option. We just need to let go of our expectations.

We expect alternatives to be lasting and, at the same time, to continue to be novel. We expect alternatives to have significant effect, to collide with the status quo and change it—but not to lose its edge in that collision. In other words, we expect alternatives to succeed without changing. We expect alternatives to be uncompromised. We expect alternatives to be spectacular.

These are unreasonable expectations.

Maybe when I cringe at hearing the word “alternative,” what I should be cringing at are my dogmatic beliefs. Maybe this is true for many of us.

If we let go of these expectations, we find ourselves surrounded by remarkable ways of living that can inform and inspire us.

Of course, there are very real and significant problems with the Superblocks—not the least of which is tourism. Of course, we can’t simply replicate what happens in Barcelona in Sante Fe or Atlanta or Minneapolis, or London. Of course, these 800 words or so gloss over the immense amount of work that went into making strolling down Carrer del Consell de Cent possible: the lobbying, the negotiation, the spending, the labor to tear up and remake streets and the labor to maintain these remade streets.

But also, and at the same time, we shouldn’t discount the possibility that, through all that work, some things can be made otherwise.

Also published July 1, 2026: Under The Circumstances.