People's assembly in Plaça Catalunya. Flickr/Sergio Alvarez. Some rights reserved.
“We’re losing Barcelona and we want to win it back.”
These are the opening words of the manifesto of the new electoral alliance Barcelona en Comú (which can be translated as "Barcelona for all"). It’s a sentiment that will resonate with city-dwellers across the world. The alliance is already topping some polls in its bid to win this May’s city council elections and bring to an end decades during which urban development became a get-rich-quick scheme for private investors. The Catalan capital, which was a hotbed for radical politics of all stripes in the early twentieth century, immortalised in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, is giving birth to a 21st century vision of municipal democracy.
