How will Barcelona be in 2050? What houses will there be, who will live there, and what will be the lives of those born there today? Imagining a city twenty-five years from now may seem like a science fiction exercise. But, to try to get closer to this Barcelona that does not yet exist, the National Foresight and Strategy Office of the Government of Spain has decided to look to the future through data. The result is Future Lives: A Day in 2050, a report that puts figures, projections, and analysis to a future that, at first glance, seems distant, but which in reality has a lot of present.
Although the exercise is national in scope, with changes pointing to Spain as a whole, the Government has chosen Barcelona to present it and turn the Catalan capital into the specific setting for this look into the future. Many of the changes described therein are extrapolable to the city: smaller homes, more flexible housing with more shared spaces, but also an older population, more diverse families, and less linear life and work trajectories. It is the drawing of a society that is still twenty-five years away, but which in some aspects can already begin to be recognized in the streets of Barcelona.
And there is one that makes it especially evident: housing. Although this is only one of the major areas addressed by the report, it has been the big underlying theme of this day in Barcelona, with the presence of the three main political leaders of the city, Catalonia, and the State: the mayor Jaume Collboni, the president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, and the president of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez. Because talking about how we will live in twenty-five years also forces us to look at what is happening today with housing and what decisions are being made to reach that Barcelona of the future.
The question was especially pertinent on a day that came less than 24 hours before a Council of Ministers in which the Spanish Government plans to approve a new housing decree, known as the Maricarmen decree, due to the eviction of an 87-year-old woman in Madrid from the apartment where she had lived for seven decades. The case, which has become a symbol throughout the territory, has provoked a series of mobilizations in different cities, from Madrid —with more than 350 tents installed in the Plaza del Sol— to Barcelona, where Sánchez's visit coincided with several demonstrations and street closures.
It is in this context that Sánchez has taken advantage of the report's presentation to pressure his partners to support the decree in tomorrow's Council of Ministers. On the table are measures to contain market pressure, reinforce protection against evictions, regulate seasonal rentals, and make certain speculative operations more difficult. "Governing the housing market is one of the present and future challenges," Sánchez affirmed during the presentation of Vidas futas. Among the proposed measures is also a 21% VAT on tourist apartments, in line with the desire to "privilege the residential use of homes over tourist use," although the Spanish president avoided specifying the content of the decree that will be brought to the Council of Ministers tomorrow during his speech.
In the same vein, the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, has called for the need to "set limits on the unrestrained power of money, greed, and speculation" and has assured that the Catalan Government will redouble its efforts to guarantee access to housing.
Barcelona itself has served as a setting to provide concrete examples of this transformation. The Glòries area, where the report was presented —specifically at the Disseny Hub—, "concentrates a large part of the city's urban renewal," as Mayor Jaume Collboni highlighted, with new facilities, green spaces, and transport infrastructures. Among the projects he has championed as an example of this Barcelona of the future for which he assures that all administrations are working on, the Ona building stands out, initially conceived for offices but which will finally incorporate 120 protected homes, in addition to a sports center, the Clot library, and public offices.
Although Sánchez has not visited the Ona building, which is expected to start construction in 2029, he has visited Illa Sibèria, in Poblenou, a development of 42 protected affordable rental homes, as an example of this Barcelona that is already beginning to build its future, also in terms of housing. Because, as Sánchez has remarked, the objective of the report is not only to imagine what will happen in twenty-five years, but to identify what actions can be taken today to arrive better prepared for that tomorrow. That is to say: "what can we do today to arrive better prepared for that tomorrow?", Sánchez has defended.
A question that precisely crosses the report Future Lives. What can change in our lives if the trends we already detect today continue? How will homes and families be? How will we work, how will we age, how will we learn or how will we relate to technology? The report addresses it through ten major areas.
1. Smaller and more flexible homes
Homes will be increasingly smaller, especially because the number of people living alone and of households made up of one or two people will increase. The report predicts that, from 2028, single-person households will be the most numerous in Spain. This will also change the way homes are designed. In flats shared by non-family members, for example, each person will seek to have more personal space and privacy. In homes where families live together, on the other hand, there will be a tendency to share more spaces and to use the same room for different functions, especially as flats become smaller.
2. More diverse families
But not only will the size of homes change, but also the people who live in them and how they coexist. The family will increasingly be less of a single model: single-parent households and families with children from previous relationships, couples who do not live together, and unions between people of the same sex or different nationalities will increase. The number of people reaching 40 without having had children will also grow: 28.6% of women did so in 2023, compared to 10.8% in 2000. All these changes will also force a rethinking of housing, because flats will have to respond to these new forms of coexistence and increasingly diverse family needs.
3. Motherhood is delayed
This transformation of households is also linked to another demographic change: fewer children are being born, and later. If current trends continue, according to projections from the National Institute of Statistics, by 2050 women will have an average of 1.29 children and the first will arrive around the age of 32. Although this delay is not only due to a matter of personal preferences —factors such as access to housing, working conditions, difficulties in reconciling work and family life, childcare policies, and access to assisted reproduction also play a role—, these trends can have consequences for the composition of society and for how care will be distributed in the future.
4. An older society
This decline in birth rates, coupled with an increasingly longer life expectancy, will make Spain an older society. And also with more people living alone: around one in four could do so by 2050. At the same time, some 2.7 million people over 65 could need help with daily activities. A reality that will force a rethinking of care, which today largely falls on families and, especially, on women.
5. New ways of living to combat loneliness
In the face of an aging society with more people living alone, forms of coexistence and care will also have to change. The report points to the growth of formulas such as cohousing, intergenerational housing, or communities of neighbors with shared services and spaces, which allow for maintaining private spaces but also creating support networks.
In addition, the idea of seeking solutions to loneliness beyond the healthcare sphere will also gain weight: professionals and services will be able to put people in contact with activities, entities, and groups in their environment to help them create bonds and reduce isolation. Even pets can play a more important role as a source of companionship and support in the face of unwanted loneliness.
6. Less linear career paths
Changes in the way of living will also be accompanied by changes in the way of working. Professional trajectories will be less linear and more changeable, with more possibilities to combine periods of work, training, and pause. Teleworking and flexible hours may become consolidated, while four-day work weeks or periods of professional pause for studying or resting could also gain ground. This flexibility will also modify the relationship with housing, which in many cases will have become a workspace, with the increase in teleworking. But this new way of organizing work will not be available to everyone in the same way.
7. A life increasingly guided by algorithms
Technology will not only change how we work, but also how we decide what to watch, what to listen to, or even what interests us. Algorithms will increasingly have the capacity to anticipate and condition our tastes, habits, and decisions, but this capacity can also make it easier to influence what we think and the decisions we make. The personalization of leisure and information can lead to even people living together sharing fewer references. At the same time, however, the desire to disconnect from screens and recover spaces outside the digital environment may also grow.
8. AI will also transform classrooms
This digital transformation will also reach education. Artificial intelligence could allow adapting content and learning pace to each student and help teachers prepare materials and tasks. But this personalization, as the report warns, also poses risks, such as increased inequalities or possible biases of the systems. The challenge will therefore be to incorporate this technology without replacing the role of teachers or the relationships created within the classroom.
9. From car ownership to more shared mobility
The report also points to a change that may still seem futuristic today: mobility based on autonomous vehicles and fleets of shared cars and motorcycles on demand. If this transformation consolidates, the car could cease to be primarily a owned good to become a service that is used when needed. A trend that is already especially visible among younger generations, who increasingly have less relationship with private vehicles: in 2023, only 56% of young people between 18 and 29 years old had a driving license.
10. More preventive health, but with new risks
Technological advances will also change the way we care for our health. By 2050, detecting a disease before symptoms appear or controlling it from home could become increasingly common, with greater weight given to telemedicine, remote monitoring, artificial intelligence, genomics, and new therapies.
But more advanced medicine will not necessarily mean a healthier society. The increase in sedentary lifestyles and obesity, mental health problems, and the emergence of new risks may gain weight in the coming decades. The report also warns of a possible expansion of allergies and an increase in antibiotic resistance, which could make the treatment of some infections difficult.