Where does Barcelona end? Where should it go? How should it get there, and with whom? The great cities of the 21st century have long since overflowed their administrative limits, and the plans that seek to define their future advance at a speed that cannot keep pace with urban reality. With the horizon set for 2050, Barcelona reflects on the city to come, and it does so not alone, but by sharing experiences with another great metropolis: Madrid. "And not to contrast models, but to emphasize what we can learn from each other," clarifies Oriol Estela, general coordinator of the Barcelona Metropolitan Strategic Plan (PEMB).
And it is that, although the two metropolises start from very different contexts and models —both historical, social, and administrative—, they share underlying challenges, precisely rooted in dimension, and in this double rhythm between planning and the city, which advances faster than any document. This common basis has been evident in the dialogue Barcelona/Madrid, two ways of being a metropolis, within the cycle organized by the PEMB Barcelona/Madrid 2050, and within the framework of the World Capital of Architecture 2026.
Within this how to be a metropolis, questioning the dimension is key. Because, just as municipalities have geographical limits, major urban problems do not understand administrative borders. How are the difficulties of access to housing managed, if not with a metropolitan perspective? And mobility? Issues ranging from climate change to inequalities require a metropolitan perspective, and neither Barcelona nor Madrid doubt this, as has been confirmed in the debate. "The challenges are the same in all metropolises, but the way of facing them is radically different depending on the instruments you have," highlighted Mariona Tomàs, Serra Húnter associate professor of Political Science at the UB, in a round table with Rosa de la Fuente, doctor in Political Science at the Complutense University of Madrid.
These instruments, however, are subject to a rhythm that cannot keep up with that of urban reality, and that is that the complexity of metropolitan challenges advances more rapidly than the institutions and regulatory instruments that they promote to manage them. "The challenge is time: how to make plans adapt to changing dynamics. Often, when we manage to solve a challenge, the challenge has already changed," as De la Fuente reflects.
"Before we were thinking for 2030. Now we are already thinking for 2050," always with the same horizon, according to her: "Achieving more habitable and more livable spaces." This long-term view requires, above all, strategy. And from the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB), they are clear: "An urban plan must be more strategic than urbanistic. It should not aim to define concrete and final proposals, but rather to define the processes to reach the city you are imagining," as Xavier Mariño, director of the Urban Planning and Natural Spaces area of the AMB, has defended from the Canòdrom de Barcelona.
"And perhaps when you reach the city you imagined, it is no longer that one, and that is why the plan must be designed to adapt. It is more important to define the process and how it should be developed, and then you will reach the definition of the project," Mariño continued, in a context in which the AMB has been working for a decade on the Metropolitan Urban Master Plan (PDUM), the document that will draw the Barcelona metropolis of the future. Now, it faces its final stretch, and it does so based on five major principles: preserving ecological functions, reinforcing a polycentric model through metropolitan avenues, prioritizing accessibility and intermodality; balancing urban fabrics to make them more inclusive and healthy, and reducing dependence on external resources. This approach will replace the current planning, in force since 1976, in a metropolitan area that has changed exponentially since then.
Thus, in the face of changes in dynamic cities, malleability is required: "We must articulate instruments that are adaptive and that start from the premise that we will have to make modifications. It is necessary that it be flexible." This is according to the general director of the Sueña Madrid Plan Office, Myriam Peón: "The urban planning that defines the city of the future is dead. It is necessary that it be adaptive urban planning." From the Urban Planning area of the Madrid City Council, this strategic planning exercise is being carried out for the first time, with regulations in force since 1997. According to Peón, when she began the path to coordinate the region in a metropolitan key, "the first thing she did was call the AMB, to learn about this organization and coordination."
Even so, there are multiple disparities between the Madrid and Barcelona cases, starting with the dimension: the municipality of Madrid, by itself, has practically the same territorial extension as the sum of the 36 municipalities of the AMB. This diversity in the territory of Barcelona can explain why the city and its surroundings have had to build cooperation mechanisms between municipalities, in a will for coordination that dates back centuries, and that Tomàs has placed beyond the 15th century, already with the Consell de Cent seeking complicities and a "territorial continuity" beyond the limits of what was then Barcelona.
"This sum of interactions between municipalities in the territory has given rise to plans, entities, institutions," until reaching an AMB that is "a policy-making machine." In Tomàs's opinion, it has arrived here despite not having a regulatory recognition equivalent to that of municipalities and provinces, which the AMB has compensated for by seeking international alliances. All of this, after being articulated through an "exercise in contortionism, which required a journey and time," according to Mariño. And, as he highlights, "in the Metropolitan Area there are many metropolitan areas." It is a diversity that precisely enriches the AMB, and that allows for finding fits and balances, "in more densified areas, and others that are not."
Together with diversity, this density is key in large cities. A city that is too dense can lead to housing tensions, saturation of public space, conflicts of uses or lack of green spaces, but at the same time, density is what structures the territory, as Peón has put on the table: "Density is what allows you to have services nearby, what allows you not to need to take the car constantly." What could be an equivalent to the 15-minute city.
This 15-minute city in Barcelona encounters the five-million city. "In the AMB there are 3.4 million people, but we have a functional territory that overflows administrative limits, up to five million people," Tomàs remarked. The fact that there is no —for now— instrument that extends coordination to the great Barcelona of five million generates grievances for municipalities that are metropolitan de facto, but not de jure, since they assume the negative externalities of being a metropolis without being able to take advantage of the positive ones and without power of influence in decision-making and in the design of policies that, in practice, affect them: "The debate is also what happens with municipalities that are metropolitan, but are not within the AMB."
"If there's one thing we have, it's that we really like to think about ourselves. We have a good number of studies, plans, urban agendas, diagnoses and reflections," which are valuable in themselves for weaving the metropolis of the coming years, but which at the same time have a derivative that is just as or more decisive: "Creating instruments is not important only for the instrument as such, but because they force people to sit down together." And this is where basic complicities and alliances are created to generate spaces of trust that lead to more cooperation and, finally, to the metropolitan Barcelona of the future.