There would be, first of all, and forgive me my dear Ildefons Cerdà, a ban on cars in the city. Not for environmental reasons or to improve lung health (I already damage it enough by smoking like a stevedore), but because moving around by car has always seemed tacky to me. The subway is one of the best inventions in the history of bipeds and Barcelona, a goddess limited by two rivers, is easily perforated into a thousand burrows. If people are claustrophobic, they can screw themselves and walk. As for the streets ancestrally destined for vehicles, far from maintaining the asphalt or painting them with inframental screen prints, we would put fine sand or sablón, the best platform for walking, with that crec-crec spicy sound that is the soundtrack of the Mediterranean. Once that's done, there would be no need for trams, interurban buses, or other nonsense. To important places, of course, we would travel by plane.
But we would move very little (who knows if to listen to Shakespeare well sung in London or make a fool of ourselves spending a lot of money in New York), because we would live in the best city in the world. In fact, honoring the misanthropy of the great cities of mar enllà, we would barely leave our neighborhoods. After several years of globalization, Barcelonians need a bit more civic roots. In fact, any district of Barcelona holds liters of beauty, especially those that undocumented people consider more impoverished and dirty. Thus, we would also improve the issue of cleanliness, as everyone would go back to buying in bulk, avoiding packaging, which is the largest tonnage of accumulated shit by the human race. Scientists say that green purifies the air and excites happiness: whether for that reason or as a concession to the people, we will plant trees everywhere. Plants, if it's not too much trouble, on the balconies.
With all this, we would have solved the issue of moving and sleeping, because people would treat Eixample, Sarrià or Gràcia as their town again and no one would be tempted to spend millions of euros on an attic as dreadful as those that populate Diagonal. Using this infallible method, our neighborhoods would look like Italian cities. All this, of course, would attract many newcomers and visitors. We will only ask immigrants to properly pronounce neutral vowels (which will allow us to expel a large part of the natives, which is good) and with tourists, I regret, we will apply a form of notoriously capitalist racism consisting of charging them five times more for any consumption. This will scare away enough people so that we all fit. The issue of criminality has an easy solution: just legalize all drugs, retire the narcos and give their job to pharmacists.
Let's go to culture and education, which are the only truly transcendent things (in the field of business and making money, Barcelonians have centuries of experience and the administration will help enough by not touching the picarols). The best paid professionals in the city will be teachers, who will teach children the art of reading, writing, taking a walk and solfège. Going against my liberal creed allergic to quotas, I will decree that women systematically earn more money than men (in turn, and to ensure that prosperity is accompanied by a happy life, we will prohibit them from marrying, but not from giving birth). Let's continue. Given that we have universally excelled in all possible forms of art, any artistic facility must commit to 70% strictly Catalan programming and content. The rest of the world, for the first time in our history, will be something exceptional.
To compensate for past injustices, and within the first hundred days of government, the administration will subsidize taxes for our best chefs, mixologists, head waiters (and practically all self-employed workers). The city's leading architect will become Lluís Domènech i Muntaner, leaving the bore Gaudí in a well-deserved second division; as a consequence of this fact, the Sagrada Familia will be magnanimously scrapped, leaving only the original hail there. The statue of Columbus will be replaced by a replica of the Liberty and the Joan de Borbó promenade will be renamed Avinguda Josep Maria de Sagarra. All festivals will be prohibited, but there will be hundreds of music venues in each neighborhood. I will double the number of municipal markets; I am enthusiastic about markets. For every Wagner we will have two Mozarts. In dealerships we will put libraries.
Your future mayor will use the pronoms febles correctly, will be an atheist, but knowledgeable about biblical abbreviations and so on. He will bother you very little, in general. What more do you want, Barcelonians?