These days of torrid Barcelona and Saint John's festival there are no locals in the streets, only visitors. It suits me because I really like walking among strangers when I need to clear my head, I like hearing different languages and observing people who, after a year of work, decide to spend their savings in our home. We must be doing something right, and it's not just the beaches. I walk worried about the news of structural corruption in Spain, but I lift my gaze from the screen and enter the stairs of the Hospital Clínic from the metro. There is a grand piano, played by a young man with sensitivity, as if he were at the Liceu. Patients stop there, children fall silent, and when the recital ends, everyone returns to their routines. Next to the bust of doctor Valentí Carulla, there is a sign explaining that more than 8,000 people work at the Clínic every day and night of the year, whatever the brawl in Congress or the media event of the moment. Here, doctors have earned the moral authority of those who resolve, with knowledge generated over centuries, critical health complications in patients of all kinds. Hospitals were invented long before states, and they are the last bastion of civilization when, in the Western world, voters turn to the right seeking quick solutions. Walking through the Clínic is an effective vaccine against fear, and it helps to regain confidence in the caring society.
1.7 billion has been announced for the new Clínic, but no one seems to believe that the planned schedules will actually be met. Big announcements are made about trains, but La Sagrera has been waiting for thirty years. Protected housing is not taking off, despite the emergency. The growing frustration over the inability to implement urban projects generates significant social unrest, and in a country with a cult of ownership, many residents mobilize to stop certain transformations in their neighborhood, while critical infrastructures (such as healthcare) have no one to advocate for them. All these tourists with whom I walk the streets of Barcelona live in cities where a similar thing happens; some projects go ahead because they are economically profitable (shopping centers, football stadiums, franchised museums, luxury hotels), while public housing, hospitals, or schools take decades to develop. Why is it so difficult to make projects effective? Why has the Sagrada Família moved forward and, on the other hand, why is it so difficult to lay the first stone of the Hospital Clínic? Not too far from the Clínic, at the old Gustavo Gili publishing house, there is a good exhibition with plans of Barcelona's strategic projects. Visitors comment on the admired projects, point to places on the plans, take photos of the project images. But they wonder if they will ever really see them. As I take mental notes, I think that the challenge is no longer just the design of the project, but who is behind these projects, ensuring that they do not get bogged down in an ocean of bureaucracy. Cities have no method; each generation has generated institutional structures to undertake major transformations. The Olympic Games were not held alone; a good part of the success was built through the governance of the defunct Municipal Institute for Urban Promotion. We were born in cities with a high level of services, but over the last century the organizations that made them possible have fragmented, generated dysfunctions, overlaps, redundancies, and contradictions that do not help to be decisive. Public bodies have been created with theoretically independent boards of directors, but which end up subjected to the voting discipline imposed by the parties. The problem of protected housing in Barcelona is not the 30% rule or the density parameters of a new plan, but who is at the decision-making table on housing. The West looks to the right, but I fear that neither authoritarianism nor privatization will substantially improve the effectiveness of the complex societies we live in. The right is not more effective: it is more opaque and less democratic. And it is averse to accountability, because it is difficult to defend the general interest of operations that benefit only certain companies. Like buildings, to survive, institutions must be renovated. It is nowhere written that the statutes of a public company cannot be changed or that its directors must always hide behind the generalist and content-empty explanations of the departments. We should make it a little easier for ourselves and give a voice and demand accountability from the senior officials who govern us. It is risky for political parties, but a guarantee of proximity for citizens.
