On any given day, a Barcelona resident can start the day by commuting on public transport while encountering construction, garbage trucks, and Guàrdia Urbana agents, and arrive at their destination as facilities such as libraries, civic centers, and public nurseries open. Before practically starting the day, the citizen, without realizing it, can interact with dozens of services that depend on the Barcelona City Council.
"In many areas of our daily lives, we interact with municipal workers, either directly from the City Council or from some of its contractors," emphasized the municipal manager, Laia Claverol, alongside the Minister of Presidency and her predecessor in the position, Albert Dalmau, and also the former City Council manager and now general director of Fira de Barcelona, Constantí Serrallonga.
In the session How Barcelona is planned, organized by The New Barcelona Post as part of the Moments Estel·lars series, Claverol detailed the magnitude of the municipal structure: the City Council has 7,700 workers, which expands to 17,000 if the set of companies and organizations that are part of the consistory is taken into account. The dimension of the City Council is considerable not only in terms of its personnel but also in the budgetary sphere: for this year, the Budget is 3.8 billion euros, as Claverol specified in a session moderated by journalist and UPF-BSM professor Toni Aira, and organized with the collaboration of Casa Seat, Barcelona Global and Must Media Group.
To coordinate all areas and ensure that the gears of the vast municipal machinery are well-oiled, the figure of the municipal manager emerges, acting as the equivalent of a CEO of a large company. Or rather "as a director of a large symphony orchestra, who must ensure that each of the instruments in turn has a good manager who makes it work correctly, and at the same time guarantee that the whole sounds good, in accordance with the municipal Government; like an acrobat," Serrallonga illustrated. And it is that the municipal Government, with the mayor at the helm, sets the path, while the executive and managerial structure is responsible for materializing it.
"Despite the changes in Mayoralties, this model has always been preserved, a fact that speaks well of our system," highlighted Dalmau, who was municipal manager until he was appointed councilor in August. With this model, which began to be established between the mandates of Pasqual Maragall and Joan Clos in the late 90s, "the municipal government makes the decisions, and behind it there is a whole team of professionals," Dalmau remarked: "In the end, the municipal manager represents a structure of managers who defend the institution."
This defense of the institution translates into the management of both the most essential public service and the most transformative urban plan, including emergencies and unforeseen events, such as the blackout that left the city and the rest of the State without electricity last Monday. When the electricity went out, the reaction was quick: Claverol and the managers of the affected areas moved to Lleida street, where the city's emergency control center is located. "We have protocols that dictate where everyone should be at all times," Claverol highlighted. Although the City Council does not have a specific protocol for blackouts —at least, until now—, there is even "a protocol for when there is no protocol," Dalmau pointed out.
"Things don't happen by chance, they happen because there is a very well-coordinated organization behind them," Claverol added. This millimeter-precise organization was also evident during the blackout, during which the City Council maintained communication by operating from Guardia Urbana police stations, which did have electricity. While the City Council officials moved to Lleida street, on the other side of Plaza Sant Jaume, those from the Generalitat gathered to coordinate management and response in facilities such as schools, hospitals, and penitentiary centers, Dalmau recounted.
From his time as manager at the City Council, the now minister recalls the management of the pandemic as crucial, during which he was manager of the Economy area: "Given the situation of possible collapse of the healthcare system, the decision was made to reconvert the organization to support it, even if it was not a municipal competence." This is how all personnel, whether office workers or Parcs i Jardins employees, changed functions to focus on the implementation of four pavilions that reinforced the city's reference hospitals. "Everyone reconverted their work, and in 24 hours four hospitals were being set up."
And from the globality and transcendence of the pandemic, to all kinds of events that occur in a big city like Barcelona. A few months after Serrallonga took office, a palm tree fell on Diagonal, injuring two people. "At that moment I saw that there was a structure of people who know what to do even when a palm tree falls; there is a structure of professionals who know how to act in each type of situation."
"There is a political level that must respond and show their face; managers try to give them little work and make it easy for them," added Serrallonga, who was manager during Xavier Trias's mandate. Like this political level, the managerial structure must manage looking at the day-to-day, but also with a long-term view, as large city projects take years to develop. The orthogonal bus network that has filled the city with H and V letters began to be conceived with Joan Clos in 2004, and Trias ended up implementing it years later; the Glòries park has just been inaugurated, and the agreement with the neighbors was reached by Jordi Hereu almost 20 years ago.
According to Dalmau, everything responds to a formula: "Look at the strategy, foot in operations; we have to have a medium and long-term view, in which we are playing for the city model, but we must not forget that every day you have to open the shutters and everything must work." The same happens in small municipalities, as the councilor has claimed, where management must be done with fewer resources: "They are people dedicated to operations, to opening the backroom's shutters every day." In addition, the public sector has many peculiarities that differ from the private, as Serrallonga has defended, and that is that "in the public sector, the straight line is not always the shortest path because, sometimes, if you go straight you hit a wall, and you don't do it; you have to take curved paths." For this reason, "there are very powerful managers in the private sector who, in the public, would last two days."
Planning a city requires this double-level view, short and long-term, to manage its daily life and project it into the future. As Claverol has highlighted, Barcelona faces this future with transformation projects such as that of the La Sagrera station and the neighborhoods it will see grow, as well as La Marina, which will gain 30,000 homes, the size of "a metropolitan city within the city," according to Dalmau. The municipal manager has gone further, with projects such as the reconversion of La Model into facilities and the transformation of Montjuïc along with the reform of the Fira de Barcelona venue. Steps forward towards the Barcelona of the future, coordinated from a backroom that never closes.