Governing a municipality is not governing the real city

We have just held municipal elections to choose the people who will represent us in the city councils for the next four years. An essential exercise in democratic societies, but one that today raises some questions about the extent of its effectiveness.

As we have been advocating from the Barcelona Metropolitan Strategic Plan (as well as from other instances), our reality is fully metropolitan and most of the great future challenges we face should be addressed from this scale, that of the real city of 5 million people, which even exceeds the limits of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area constituted in 2010.

In reality, to be able to adequately govern (and manage) the city, we should consider at least four dimensions: the metabolic, the functional, the administrative, and the identity-related.

Let's see what each of them is about below.

The city as an organism that consumes resources and generates waste

The reach of the footprint required by the fundamental metabolism of cities (linked to water, food, or energy) has been increasingly global for some time. The same happens with the places where the waste generated ends up. Even so, territorial environments with which cities maintain greater interaction to make their metabolism work, in addition to sharing certain physical characteristics, can still be identified. These are ecoregions or bioregions, which are related, for example, to water basins or the type of soil, vegetation, or predominant crops. In the case of Barcelona, this space reaches at least Catalonia, and it is acceptable to understand that it extends further, towards the Ebro valley and part of the Levante coast.

The city as support for daily activities

The daily life of people living in a city does not only consist of consuming resources to survive, but also involves a whole series of movements and interactions that are determined by lifestyle. The city fulfills, in this dimension, a series of key functionalities. Currently, we would be talking about going to study, to carry out care activities, to work, to shop, to visit family or friends, to enjoy leisure, etc. These displacements are usually repetitive and limited to a radius that in the vast majority of cases does not exceed 60 minutes. We are talking about metropolitan areas or regions. In Barcelona, as is increasingly recognized, this real city of daily life extends to more than a hundred municipalities and 5 million inhabitants.

The city as an administrative space

The identification of "city" with "municipality" is common and has its logic. Historically, in the absence of metropolitan dynamics, urban centers were clearly integrated within administrative limits. Currently, and precisely because of the incidence of these dynamics, the real city can overflow not only one administrative space, but several. Municipalities, counties, provinces... faced with an urban reality that expands physically and functionally, the ability of different levels of government to influence everyday issues referred to in the previous section is blurred. Barcelona, whose functional limits were already surpassed long ago, today has an institutionalized metropolitan area that reaches 36 municipalities and 3.3 million inhabitants. But, as we said before, the real city already goes further, exceeding municipal, county and provincial borders (at least along the southern coast) to become the daily space for some 5 million people.

The city as a space of identity

One of the defining features of urban life is the establishment of community relationships and a sense of belonging. When this does not happen, we find ourselves with unstructured cities and high rates of vulnerability. The neighborhood scale is key in this regard, but we also know that other factors, such as digitized social networks, disrupt the references we have traditionally used to build our identity. Similarly, the closest scale is not always the one with which everyone identifies most. In a study carried out a few years ago during the elaboration of the Besòs Agenda, it was found that the population of Badalona has a strong identification with their neighborhood, that in Santa Coloma de Gramenet many people identify with their neighborhood, but many others with the municipality as a whole, and that in Sant Adrià del Besòs most people say they are from Sant Adrià, leaving aside the valley dimension (except in the case of La Mina).

We have, then, at least these four layers that must be considered when governing a city and facing the challenges they present. Ideally, the four layers should coincide as much as possible with their territorial dimension, as has happened at some point in History, but we have already noted that this is not currently the case and, on the contrary, the trend is towards a greater misalignment of everything.

We have a real city, the metropolitan region, which needs an increasingly wide territory to nourish and sanitize itself, which includes many and diverse administrative entities and which does not generate much, if any, sense of belonging among the people who live there. A situation that is shared with many other cities around the world.

What, then, is the recipe for better governing cities, in our case what we understand as "Barcelona"?

The first thing we have to do is decide which of the four dimensions of the city we put at the center. In our case, we choose the real city, the metropolitan region, because throughout the Barcelona Demà process we have found, as has already been said, that the common challenges that these five million people face should be addressed from this scale to be more effective.

In this way, the metropolitan region would have to have at least some control over its metabolism, as well as assume responsibility for the impacts that this may generate in other territories (the ecological footprint), in particular, in the rural environment. A proposal that we put forward in this sense is to promote, with the indispensable involvement of the Generalitat de Catalunya, an Urban-Rural Pact in which aspects such as water management, the energy model, food sovereignty, and the distribution of economic activity and talent would be addressed as priorities to foster a greater balance in the burdens and benefits of each territory, while guaranteeing the supply and sustainability of each resource.

As for the relationship between the real city and the administrative city, one would have to wait for the existence of a clear regulatory, competence, and financial framework for metropolitan realities both at the state level, where it is absent (so it will be necessary to press again during the imminent electoral campaign), and at the Catalan level, where the Área Metropolitana de Barcelona is the exception that, as we have seen, does not provide a definitive solution to the challenge of how to govern the metropolis. For now, then, we must rely on the willingness to collaborate among all administrations, as well as on the alliance between public, private, and community actors to build bottom-up governance instruments that allow the development of policies and projects at the appropriate scale.

If we want to reconcile the real city with the city of collective identities, the work will be even more complex, but not for that reason unmanageable. Discarding at first the search for a citizen identification with the metropolis, as some studies have shown, it must be precisely this process of building bottom-up tools, as well as the fundamental attention to those more vulnerable neighborhoods and the fight against residential segregation, in short, intermunicipal solidarity in the form of equalization mechanisms, the factor that facilitates a greater attachment to what is metropolitan. The neighborhoods, then, as the basic community unit of metropolitan-scale policies and the metropolis as a guarantee of the progress of the neighborhoods.

That said, we must be aware that in today's world we have to consider a fifth layer not mentioned until now, but which can be as or more decisive for the future of cities than the previous ones: that of capital flows. Many of the decisions made in cities have to do with the will to attract these flows, and this requires, at the same time, many resources and efforts to achieve better international positioning. We could say that this dimension does not really have a concrete territorial translation, as it deals with global as well as immaterial flows, which makes it even more difficult to govern.

Taking, then, the four most governable dimensions, we hope that the new period that opens after the two consecutive electoral events will be more propitious for understanding the evident centrality of the metropolitan factor in our country and that both state, regional, and local authorities will articulate the necessary instruments to allow problems to be addressed at the appropriate scale. From the Barcelona Metropolitan Strategic Plan, we will continue working with the agenda determined by the Metropolitan Commitment 2030 to achieve this.