This 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the historic report Management or Chaos: The Barcelona Metropolitan Area by the Cercle d'Economia. It was a diagnosis of the reality of a territory in full chaotic growth due to the absence of common policies for its organization and which demanded, among other issues, a supramunicipal body with authority over the municipalities of the so-called Greater Barcelona, which the Cercle considered indispensable for the economic future of Catalonia. Today, despite advances in this area, there are still important pending metropolitan issues.
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán signed an article about the publication of the report in the magazine Triunfo, where he stated that its importance lay in the fact that the Cercle's diagnosis escaped the sole "combative criticism" of social groups and forcefully involved, for the first time, the Catalan bourgeoisie, who saw in that chaos a clear degradation of the possibilities for economic expansion of Barcelona and its area of influence.
Indeed, 50 years ago, the Barcelona metropolitan area represented 10% of the Spanish population and generated 16% of the gross national product. However, all that potential was jeopardized by speculative frenzy that expelled citizens from Barcelona towards what had become a suburban belt, while industrial activities dispersed without any order or strategy throughout the territory. Management over chaos was therefore imposed.
It was necessary to intervene and plan to correct all that chaos. Joan Mas Cantí, then president of the Cercle, summarized in the presentation of the report that its purpose was for Barcelona and all the cities in the area to be "rationally ordered spaces" so as not to lose sight of the fact that "growth is for something, and that something is to live better." That is why the Cercle demanded "to define with the utmost precision the space on which urban planning must act." And he added: "The definitive recognition of the territory of the Barcelona metropolitan area —of all its territory— as the main space for urban management in the province of Barcelona and the projection of this recognition at the legislative level appear as a fundamental requirement."
The publication of Gestión o caos had a great impact and, although it was not decisive in those years of late Francoism, it did have great influence. A year later, the Barcelona Metropolitan Corporation was constituted, and in 1976 the Metropolitan General Plan (PGM) was approved. The Corporation was born to respond to the much-demanded supramunicipal authority, and the PGM remains in force awaiting the approval of the Metropolitan Master Plan.
The Corporation, promoted by the Francoist mayor José María de Porcioles, was inherited by the first democratic mayors of Barcelona, Narcís Serra and Pasqual Maragall. The former had precisely been one of the drafters of the report and Maragall replaced him in the mayoralty with the firm purpose of using the Corporation for the construction of metropolitan Barcelona. However, this generated the reaction of Jordi Pujol, who dissolved it in 1987 considering it a counter-power to the Generalitat, a Catalonia within Catalonia presided over by his great rival Maragall.
Despite the liquidation of the Corporation, it would be fair to recognize that the metropolitan area has advanced in these five decades from chaos to management. However, there are still pending issues. The main one, the absence of a metropolitan government with real executive powers. These types of supramunicipal executives are being implemented in many European metropolises. Even London, which also in the 1980s liquidated its Greater London for identical reasons as Pujol, has recovered it.
In Barcelona, it will not be easy to follow in the footsteps of the British capital due to the distrust that this process also arouses in the municipalities, jealous of losing part of their autonomy. As an example, the current election campaign, in which statements about the metropolitan area are only pro forma and based on obvious facts. In practice, the demand for a government in the image of the Corporation has disappeared.