The favorite sport of Barcelona residents is complaining. For months, the topic that monopolizes indignant conversations over lattes and orujo shots is the lack of cleanliness in the city. If we look at the main indicator of the Barcelona spirit, the sacrosanct municipal Barometer (in this case, from last December), cleanliness is the second problem that worries citizens with 11.8 (insecurity wins the grievance battle with 20.8), far above access to housing (6.5), municipal political management (5.6), and unemployment and labor conditions (5.5). That cleanliness worries the neighborhood is even more evident in the comparison of figures from 2019 to 2021; the percentage grows from 3.6 to the aforementioned 11.8. But there's no need to get bogged down in numbers; it's enough, as I said, to listen among the clamor of a terrace to notice that, for many people, Barcelona is getting dirty.
Is Barcelona a dirty city? As always happens in these Byzantine discussions, it depends on the existential glasses one wears and where one has lived. I have walked a thousand times through Manhattan among tons of garbage and dodging rats the size of a cat that make your hair stand on end (in fact, when I introduce my beloved Barcino to a New Yorker compatriot, even when we are on the subway, the first thing they find admirable is the cleanliness). But I have also wandered through Copenhagen and the immaculately civil cities of the north, cities that, being so sanitized, don't even have people on the street, becoming phantasmagorical postcards. In general terms, and may the hotheads who practice the daily sport of putting the mayor in their mouth to insult her forgive me, I would say that equating Barcelona with a dirty city is objectively disproportionate and unfair.
That said, the perception of a deterioration of Barcelona's streets due to the presence of trash is worrying... especially when it could be avoidable! In neighborhoods with narrow and congested streets like those in Ciutat Vella, where I have the joy of living, the presence of trash is especially painful and makes one's eyes bleed even more if we think that the Gòtic, whether we like it or not, is one of the spaces where planetary tourism goes to admire our city. It also bothers me to see the wastebaskets in Plaça Sant Felip Neri or on Salomó ben Adret street congested with shit (and yes, I must confess that often the garbage bags that stuff them are also mine), but the thing, I insist, is even more painful because it's unnecessary, since current technology has tools to amend the accumulation of dirt with an innovation capacity that would not require the experience of NASA's brains.
Current technology has tools to amend the accumulation of dirt with an innovation capacity that would not require the experience of NASA's brainsIn a small and narrow neighborhood where a large number of elderly people live, it is normal that from eight in the evening the streets begin to accumulate trash and that both tourists and inhabitants have to swallow labyrinths of dirt until the meritorious street sweepers collect them at midnight (which assures us four hours contemplating detritus). All this could be a vision of the past if residents had their own system of exclusive containers with QR access that could be stored in their respective building entrances and an application of trackingthat would notify us of the arrival of the garbage collectors so we could take them out to the street just as they passed by. In 2022, when most citizens have automatic cleaning systems at home and know how many meters away the Glovo delivering our food is, being able to track the cleaning service is not a science fiction milestone.
In fact, our engineers have developed transport, orientation, and storage technologies from which everything I describe could be done by automated machines that would save humans the costly task of picking up other people's shit. Technophobes will tell me that all this robotizes our lives, eliminates jobs, and that, instead of playing the modern guy, I could move my ass and throw the trash (properly recycled) into the containers I have 450 meters from home. I admit the readers' criticism, of course, but I respond that any technological advance implies a redistribution of the labor market, that intelligent machinery has been part of our lives since we carry a phone in our pocket, and that, ultimately, this sedentary and mechanized world that awaits us is a reality to which we must adapt whether we like it or not.
I don't know if Barcelona is dirty or not (and I'm sure readers will respond to this Punyalada with photographs of streets overflowing with garbage); what I do know for sure is that the innovation that emerges from the city can make it cleaner and more livable. And also, without thinking that any future time is better or blindly believing in the innovations that Jobs or Zuckerbergs have given birth to, it will always be better for a machine to get dirty with our waste than to have a group of human beings bending down to collect the remains of my dinner that I deposit on the street every night.