Barcelona from Mare Magnum. Flickr/Moyan Brenn. Some rights reserved.Barcelona is thriving and dying at the same time. How could that be? The sound urban policies which have been so outstandingly successful since the city recovered its democratic institutions in 1979, now seem exhausted. In fact, the upcoming May local elections will see two divergent models, head-on.
On the one hand, the current tourist, congress and business oriented “smart city” model, privileged by the ruling centre-right nationalists, with their flagship idea of Barcelona as the capital of a new Catalan state (whatever that may be). On the other hand, a participatory, people-friendly, socially-oriented model, led by a newly constituted electoral platform, originally named “Win back Barcelona” and later rebranded “Barcelona for all” (Barcelona en comú). This combination of grassroots movements and leftist parties, including the influential Podemos, seek to win back Barcelona for its city-dwellers (whatever that may mean).
Both models struggle to preserve Barcelona’s major achievements of the last decades, particularly its outstanding quality of life, but they differ over their priorities.
