Towards the metropolitan region of Barcelona

The institutional and political recognition of the Barcelona metropolitan area and its formal expansion to other municipalities in the Maresme, Garraf, Alt Penedès, Vallès Occidental, and Vallès Oriental regions has been a pending issue for decades. The demand for the metropolitan region as an effective network of the main urban centers around the Catalan capital was heard this week at two events. The first, organized by the Amics del País association; the second, at the start of a metropolitan reflection cycle at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).

The real Barcelona goes far beyond the city itself and the 36 municipalities that make up the metropolitan area. Today, the real metropolis has a regional scope that brings together 160 municipalities and more than five million inhabitants. It is the great economic engine of Catalonia and one of the main ones in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. In a world where more than half of the population currently lives in cities that accumulate 80% of the gross domestic product, the great economic competition is decided among global metropolises.

On the metropolitan issue, Barcelona took an important and regrettable step backward when in 1987 Jordi Pujol liquidated the Corporació Metropolitana to stop what was considered a counter-power to the Generalitat led by the then mayor Pasqual Maragall. Pujol had been inspired by what Margaret Thatcher's government had done with Greater London, the metropolitan government of London, led by the Labourite Ken Livingstone. Today, 34 years later, London has recovered the political, institutional, and jurisdictional recognition of Greater London, while the Barcelona metropolitan area remains basically a supramunicipal entity with shared services. The Corporació Metropolitana was created in 1974, still under Francoism, and liquidated in democracy. It is difficult to understand conceptually.

Unfortunately, in 1987 Jordi Pujol liquidated the Corporació Metropolitana to stop what was considered a counter-power to the Generalitat led by the then mayor Pasqual Maragall

Endowing it with effective powers and political recognition – including the possible direct election of the metropolitan president and its representatives – raises suspicions. Firstly, from the Generalitat, but also fromsome municipalities, which fear losing part of their local identity and autonomyl. Well, these distrusts must be overcome, as London has done, but also other metropolises such as Manchester, Liverpool, Stuttgart, and Hannover. Paris is also taking steps in this direction.

Large cities today face global problems – housing, sustainability, taxation, mobility, security, civility, tourism, among others – that require global solutions. Hence the need to advance in this direction throughout the metropolitan region, whose future is not in competition between the cities that form it, but with other megacities. And this can only be done from a global local power that coordinates the different strategies to attract investments and wealth production, aligned in turn in a set of multi-level decisions with the state and regional governments. This is a general feeling of most experts every time the metropolitan reality is debated and has been repeated twice this week in Barcelona.

I am a big fan of Henry Cisneros, who was mayor of the Texan city of San Antonio in the 1980s and later Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Bill Clinton. Cisneros maintained that cooperation between cities always turned out to be a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and he illustrated it with a formula that became famous in the world of municipalism: 2+2=5.

Large cities today face global problems – housing, sustainability, taxation, mobility, security, civility, tourism, among others – that require global solutions

Barcelona and its metropolitan region have many geostrategic and logistical potentialities, with the Catalan capital as a great and successful brand and engine. One of its great advantages is to concentrate within a radius of only five kilometers vital infrastructures such as the port, the airport, and a powerful logistics zone, in addition to high-impact economic agents such as the Zona Franca and the Fira. This gives it an intermodality and connectivity capacity that other large metropolises envy.

The elements to constitute an effective metropolitan government are there. It is difficult to accept that the brake ends up being a matter of distrust. The path is not a hyper-centralist Barcelona, but one that leads the great metropolitan solution.