Deciding where the housing should be built

I'm writing from a mountainous landscape, past the Toses pass, among trees of warm colors, a prelude to winter. Leaving the AP-7 and the Eix Transversal has made me confront the stark reality of the half of Catalonia's municipalities that are losing population. You can see it from the roads: the closed restaurants, the shops with empty signs, the lack of life on the streets.

This is not the ugly Catalonia as Ignasi Aragay described a few days ago, because it is undeveloped and dominated by forests and mountains. They are austere villages, with some heritage buildings that would be a delight if they were in the center of Barcelona, ​​but many are empty, boarded up, and covered in graffiti of varying degrees of ingenuity.

Migration from rural areas to urban centers has created a very strange situation: owners of large houses or villas who only visit on weekends, while young people have to leave the villages because there's no work during the week. There's overcrowding when the slopes are snowy and enforced calm the rest of the year. Meanwhile, the specialization of tourism on the coast has led to an increase in tourist apartments, directly impacting housing affordability, even in small, already strained villages.

City planning needs to incorporate science, as Ramon Gras argues. And if cities are to be for people, they must be approached, first and foremost, from the perspective of the social sciences. On October 30th, a seminal conference on the sociodemographic future of Catalonia took place at Món Sant Benet in the Bages region. It was organized by the Knowledge, Territory, and Innovation Platform, which emerged from the Catalan Association of Public Universities. The Center for Demographic Studies shared its ongoing research: Catalonia's population continues to grow, by almost 100,000 people per year, and we are reaching demographic records. The increasingly aging population is a consequence of one of the lowest birth rates in the world. And Catalans already come from very diverse backgrounds, which poses significant challenges for the labor market and the education system in achieving true integration.

All of this has a crucial implication in urban planning: beyond the 1,700 social rental apartments in Barcelona, ​​or the successive announcements of 10,000, 50,000, or 200,000 subsidized housing units that have been announced in Catalonia, it is necessary to identify where there are young people and which households will face difficulties in finding exclusion.

Barcelona and Madrid reached one million inhabitants in 1930, and since thenCities with more than 100,000 inhabitants have grown significantly. For decades, while families have been looking for homes in the Barcelonès, Garraf, Maresme, Vallès, and Tarragonès regions, the interior of Catalonia and the Pyrenees have been losing population. The 1995 General Territorial Plan of Catalonia already identified that, without action, the population trend would be to concentrate around Barcelona. But reality has surpassed projections. Today, we can conclude that the effort to distribute jobs and households throughout the territory has not had the desired effects: data indicates that the population of Alt Penedès, Baix Llobregat, Barcelonès, Garraf, Maresme, and the two Vallès regions already comprises 5.3 million residents, equivalent to 67% of Catalonia's population. The planned territorial rebalancing towards the interior has not been achieved, nor has a polycentric model similar to that of Switzerland or the Netherlands been reinforced.

Thirty years ago, the Territorial Plan aimed to decentralize tertiary activity and services, and to carry out localized land development projects in alternative urban systems, strengthening intermediate cities. But economic reality is stubborn, and today companies only consider central locations, regardless of land prices. They prefer proximity to Barcelona because they believe that otherwise they will attract talent. Small towns are losing population, and there are municipalities where more than 75% of births are to foreign mothers. It's not just the towns anymore: intermediate cities are also finding it difficult to attract intensive economic activity in the form of jobs.

Perhaps the debate isn't about how many homes need to be built, based on outdated assumptions, but rather understanding which municipalities need strengthening to counteract the cycle and thus prevent rampant speculation in Barcelona. Living in medium-sized cities has advantages, such as enjoying natural surroundings and being able to better balance work and family life without wasting time in traffic jams. This requires making the most of existing assets, complementing productive activities with tourism, and strengthening regional centers as service hubs for several municipalities. Some municipalities will need social cohesion and integration, and where private housing should be promoted, while others already have a supply of apartments...high standing They will only need protection.

All of this also puts a lot of pressure on mayors, who are on the front lines of institutional responsibility for dealing with population growth, with little room to generate and distribute wealth more effectively. The difficulty lies in the fact that everything is changing so rapidly that the new territorial plan must be agile, set realistic objectives, and incorporate the variables of the climate emergency and renewable energy. Because demographic pressure doesn't appear likely to stop anytime soon.