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dentify and accompany the landing in Barcelona of quality investment projects and economic activity capable of transforming the territory and creating jobs. With this objective, Barcelona & Partners is born, an initiative of Barcelona Global that aims to recover the spirit of public-private collaboration that has always characterized the Catalan capital and that has generated so many successes in the past.
The initiative already has the support of companies such as Banco Sabadell, Fundación Puig, Cuatrecasas, Agbar or Colonial and has now just added the Barcelona City Council, the first public institution to get involved in the project.
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The need to strengthen ties between the public and private sectors is essential, since in recent years the excellent relationship and mutual collaboration when tackling large strategic projects has deteriorated as a result of populist policies, remunicipalization strategies and a lack of long-term vision. Barcelona & Partners can be a good opportunity to re-establish that good harmony and end a climate of distrust that prevented looking and working together for the future.
Under the leadership of Barcelona Global, whose presidency has just been assumed by Aurora Catá, the new agency will focus on three major challenges: generating concrete strategic projects with the capacity to transform the territory and implementing them in Barcelona; identifying economic sectors, institutions, companies, markets, territories, investors, professional profiles and major events likely to develop their activities in Barcelona; and developing strategies and programs to attract these projects.
Although initially linked to this association, the goal is for Barcelona & Partners to become an independent body with its own structure in about three years, following the example of other successful international cities such as Milan, Paris and Berlin.
Barcelona Global, which until now was chaired by hotel entrepreneur Pau Guardans, already has a thousand members and has set itself the main mission of contributing to the recovery of the city and its economic activity at a particularly difficult time as a consequence of the viral pandemic. "We must take advantage of the opportunity based on our strengths: tourism, services, education..., recover economic activity as quickly as possible to minimize the impact it will have on people," said Aurora Catá, partner at Seeliger y Conde, during the assembly that ratified her appointment.
In addition to the Barcelona & Partners agency, Barcelona Global also wants to promote other projects, such as the launch of an international school for a thousand students that has English as its base language and that is affordable, with prices similar to those of a subsidized school. The school would be intended to host the children of international professionals who have decided to make Barcelona their place of work and residence.