Barcelona.cat

This book is the result of the Municipal Programme for Promoting the Special Regime for Barcelona. Barcelona City Council – with collaboration from the IDP Public Law Observatory at the University of Barcelona and the Carles Pi i Sunyer Foundation for Autonomous and Local Studies – initiated this programme in order to analyse the city’s special legal regime, consisting of Law 22/1998, of 30 December, on the Municipal Charter of Barcelona and Law 1/2006, of 13 March, regulating the special regime for the municipality of Barcelona. Its aim is to provide a space for studying and evaluating the special regime from a doctrinal and practical point of view and to be a starting point for any further updates to these regulations.

Directed by Dr Tomàs Font i Llovet (professor of administrative law at the University of Barcelona), it is a collective work that brings together the texts resulting from the programme’s constituent working groups, written by the groups’ directors, all of whom are renowned university lecturers specialising in law, government and local tax offices. The participants in the working groups include more than 100 highly qualified experts from various universities, as well as from Barcelona City Council and other administrations on a local, autonomous community and state level. This coming together of expertise has facilitated an analysis of Barcelona’s special regime with a multifaceted approach that always considers both theoretical aspects and elements related to its application: a perspective that is essential in order to successfully deal with the critical aspects that can improve the current legislative framework.

This book examines the main issues linked to the city’s special regime: the regulatory system, the political-institutional system, the organisational dimension, municipal powers, services, the municipal economic and financial sphere, and more. The result is a solid, reliable foundation for improving and updating the special regime that certainly links the Municipal Charter of Barcelona and the law of the city to an already present future, where Barcelona is granted legal instruments to boost its status as a global city.