© Maria Corte

The “Barcelona model” was founded with the aim of creating a more just city by improving public space and the urban landscape. After thirty years, the shiny surface conceals urgent issues created by a neglected housing policy. 

Barcelona is a dense city, made out of the sum of small parts, both private and public, and most of its neighbourhoods are very diverse. Its small scale, its diversity and its high density are features that explain many of its advantages: it is a city on a human scale, a city that values proximity. It is “the smallest big city or the biggest small city”. These features are also key factors when explaining the challenges it faces: the housing crisis, environmental problems, mobility and the domination of the big over the small, the global over the local, the specialist over the diverse, the “exclusive” (and therefore excluding) over the inclusive and thus shared and cooperative.

Its “almost big” size gives it the muscle it needs to face metropolitan and regional challenges and the specific challenges of being a capital, and its “almost small” size give it flexibility, diversity and agility in local policy-making. The blurring of the lines between these two conditions has often led to unsustainable imbalances which the powers that be attempt to correct with measures that provide no solutions, neither quantitative nor qualitative. But above and beyond quantity and quality, the challenge is to identify who benefits and who and what is put at the centre of the municipal policies from which everything else stems.

The “Barcelona model” that allowed the city to “make itself beautiful” or “be the best shop in the world” insisted that we would achieve a more just city by improving public space and the urban landscape of shops and façades. In the eighties, we were told that we first needed to conquer the public space by pedestrianizing squares and cleaning façades and that, little by little, this “positive metastasis” would end up improving homes and communities. Thirty years later, the reality is different. Over time, this “from the outside in” strategy has been accentuated and has created a city of shop windows and clean façades that conceal urgent problems deriving from the neglect of local government housing policy. The consequences of this lack of attention are alarming. Today, Barcelona has more than thirty thousand families on the waiting list for a home that they can afford, three thousand homeless (nine hundred of whom are sleeping rough), a 10% increase in families in fuel poverty, ten evictions per day, countless empty flats, a type of housing stock that doesn’t match the demand, a system of occupancy still stuck in ownership and rental, and a ratio of social housing under 4%, a ridiculous and unjust amount for a city that exports its urban model around the world.

We continue to repair streets, squares and avenues, improving the image and the performance of a type of commerce and tourism that does indeed benefit many people but that is also gentrifying no few neighbourhoods.

We often say that Barcelona is dying of success. This oxymoron leads to another that is hard to digest and that focuses the debate on the issue of urban regeneration: “improvements make things worse” or, at least, this kind of cosmetic improvement often leads to ethical imbalances, pushing the people they were supposed to benefit out of these neighbourhoods and making their lives worse.

Some people defend positive gentrification, which consists of bringing about transformations that involve a certain degree of social infiltration to promote greater diversity. But a city as small and fragile as Barcelona must watch the perverse economic processes that go with improvements very closely (or even better, from the inside), mapping and, in particular, controlling the abuses of power that arise. Barcelona cannot allow itself to lose neighbourhoods, but in the last four years Ciutat Vella has seen 45% of its inhabitants leave. And if an urgent solution is not found, soon even the tourists will stop coming to this counterfeit city, which more than ever is just a spectre and a stage set of the city they were looking for.

A baseline strategy to improve the neighbourhoods and keep gentrification in check must involve much more social housing and a meticulously executed map of what lies inside this city. Because social housing is not just about building. It also means improving the housing and living conditions of residents, rehabilitating communities and bringing in forms of urban recycling. It means thinking about the city from the inside out, putting people (the ones that are already there) and everyday amenities at the centre of municipal policies, and promoting this kind of positive metastasis that has to link everything together. Starting with the people and ending in the city, and not the other way around as we have been doing recently. 

Barcelona can grow, but it has to grow from within, improving the living conditions of neighbourhoods without pushing out the people who are already there. To do this, we urgently need to re-think the disproportionate amount of space given over to private transport and reclaim it for highquality community use. This will have a positive impact on families’ health and increased life expectancy resulting from improved air quality, less noise pollution, etc. Decisionmaking needs to shift level when planning new strategies to discourage the use of private transport and give strong backing to high-quality, faster, more affordable and convenient public transport, so that the entire city and metropolitan area is included. Public attention has to switch its priorities to pedestrians: this is vital for implementing the right housing policy, based on the idea that housing is not limited to a mortgage payer’s four walls. My home is also the landing in the stairwell, the entrance hall, the street, the café on the square and the tram stop. If my home is also the city, we should be able to renegotiate the amount of cars that are parked there or that pollute the neighbourhood en route to somewhere else. This negotiation is urgent because of the scandalous figure of 60% of the city’s public space being hijacked by vehicles, when only 15% of our journeys are made by private vehicle. 

It is essential that we identify the whats (housing and mobility) but it’s even more important to identify the hows.The city should be researching and trying out new methods of participation with which to pilot different forms of activism, trying to reach consensus among technicians and citizens, experts and users, public and private players, large and small, past and future…, from every possible dimension. The priority must be to reach an integrated overview of the issues: we need to create meeting and consensus platforms and launch pilot projects that give a voice to groups who might otherwise be marginalised. We’ve spent too many years making citizen participation a repetitive and adulterated mechanism for justifying processes or, what is worse, for reaching consensus without any depth or risk-taking. The new Council team is, in the majority, made up of activists that know, and have tried out in their own platforms, new and brilliant methods of empowerment and participation. These processes should be scalable and applicable to the whole city, to demonstrate that one can “govern by obeying” with creativity and ambition.

There is a broad spectrum of urgent issues and they are often justified quantitatively with a sudden multiplication of official openings and inaugurations in pre-electoral periods. There are promises to put an end to deficits and to excesses, but as time goes on, the solutions tend to be oversimplified and short cuts are found that skirt around the complexity and the diversity of the original problems. The Barcelona of the future is already built, but the future of its people is not. Urgent issues are not solved with a single brushstroke, or in a single place or following a single short cut. More than ever, we need to take risks and, as soon as possible, test out multiple responses to multiple challenges, to overcome the technical difficulties and political minorities with creativity and drive.