In the face of demographic change, more planning and less demagoguery
The reality is what it is. In the last ten years, Catalonia has grown by almost 700,000 inhabitants. As demographer Andreu Domingo explains in this week's dossier, the feeling among residents that there has been a meteoric change is true. It has happened. Catalonia now has eight million inhabitants, which demands a different type of management and investment than it was ten or twenty years ago. More resources are needed, or at least, efforts need to be reoriented according to new needs. However, this meteoric change is not only due to immigration, which is undoubtedly one of the key factors. It is a change that has many specific characteristics, many internal mobility factors, which affect some places more than others and, also, in one way in some places and in another way in others.
At ARA, we've taken a closer look, and for months, a team of journalists has been examining the data from these past ten years to see how it has affected the 900 Catalan municipalities. With the help of experts, we have been able to interpret and identify the major trends. Once this work was completed, we selected around thirty municipalities and contacted them to see how they have dealt with this population growth and what resources they have or are seeking to address it. We have also focused on two cases that represent clear and exemplary examples of the situation.
On the one hand, there's the case of Calafell, a municipality that has grown significantly with the arrival of people expelled from Barcelona who have settled in second homes. The problem is that many don't register, for example, to keep their doctor in Barcelona, but this prevents the municipality from having the administrative tools to manage this increase, since resources are tied to the number of inhabitants. The other case is Olot, which has received a large immigration force working in the area's industrial estates and meat processing plants, but which, in turn, has many housing problems because, among other reasons, local residents are very reluctant to rent to outsiders. In Barcelona, on the other hand, what's happening is paradoxical, since there's a significant substitution from below and above. Broadly speaking, it's driving out middle- and working-class residents by receiving both low- and high-income immigrants, known as expatsSome of these expelled people flock to the metropolitan area, which, in the form of concentric rings, also receives new population that expels one another.
There is the capacity to handle this population increase, which, let's not forget, is largely the result of economic growth and the need for labor. However, what is needed is better planning for how it is distributed, anticipating needs, and providing support both through urban and mobility planning and through the management of populations experiencing greater demographic pressure. The pace of administration is very slow, and more agile instruments are needed to manage waves like the ones we are experiencing now. Only by addressing the problems and planning in an agile and coordinated manner can we prevent this growth from being exploited by far-right forces that champion xenophobic rhetoric.
