In 1992, Barcelona achieved one of its primary objectives with the organization of the Olympic Games, which became known as "putting the city on the map." Indeed, after that event, the Catalan capital once again became a "point of attraction for outsiders" (to use the terms used before the war to promote tourism). Mayor Maragall, who chaired the Games' organizing committee, feared that the city would not have sufficient hotel supply to cope with the challenges. With his well-known stubbornness, a Hotel Plan was implemented in the late 1980s, which even included the allocation of public land for the construction and operation of establishments. The measure was strongly opposed by a lobby that would eventually become very powerful, the Hoteliers' Association, which believed it would generate excessive supply that would be impossible to offset by the then-subdued demand. For very different reasons, the neighborhood movement also spoke out against it, one of whose leaders stated in an assembly that "the next time Barcelona is proposed for an international event, we should say no." And this "no," explained journalist Maria Favà, "is the result of a feeling that is taking root in the most critical sectors of the city, who believe that because of the Games, they are selling us the city piecemeal, that a city is being built for us." yuppies from which the working classes are scared away."
However, the logic pursued prevailed and in the same year of the Games, in 1992, El Prat airport reached ten million passengers per year for the first time. Since then, the number of people visiting the city has not stopped; the airport rose to fifty million passengers per year: in twenty-six years, the figure had multiplied by five. the term yuppies (an acronym for "young urban professionals") has fallen into disuse, and the young people who actually exist can only realize the enormous difficulties, if not often the sheer impossibility, of finding an affordable apartment in all of Barcelona. The city has changed a lot in recent years, and the world even more so. An environmental awareness that imposes itself, even on the initially most reluctant, in the heat of the moment makes us reconsider the way we produce and the way we move, while calls to "de-escalate," or at least make growth sustainable, are increasingly frequent and unavoidable.
Faced with this new rationality, there are public managers who cling to old beliefs—making valid Keynes's admonition that "practical men, who believe themselves exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually slaves to some economist or the Catalan model, the Catalan model designed for the greater glory of Madrid." We need, therefore, critical thinking—and action—that strives for another way of making cities. In New York, we have just found an example in Zohran Mamdani, a thirty-three-year-old politician, the son of a wealthy family of Indian origin, who has just won the Democratic Party primaries to become the mayoral candidate, defeating a member of the establishment like Andrew Cuomo. We do not yet know if Mamdani, who defines himself as a "democratic socialist" (almost a sin in the United States), will win the municipal elections in November, but we can look at his electoral campaign, focused on the cost of living: his motto is "In the city we can afford"A city we can afford, a city we can afford. When he ran for office a few months ago, he said his vision was to use every tool available from City Hall to make New York an affordable city, a city that the working class, who not only built it but have also maintained it, can continue to call home. Dubbed "the Alcatraz of alligators," President Trump has said, "He's going to have to be stopped. We don't need a communist in this country, but if we do get one, I'm going to watch him very carefully for the good of the nation." For the good of all of us, we should indeed pay close attention to what politicians like the young candidate for mayor of New York say and defend.
