Joan Anton Solans, once the General Plan for Barcelona (1976) was drawn up, which is still in force today, carried out an intense urban management action in the City Council, which incorporated so much public land that the subsequent democratic city council received a fabulous inheritance. And two years before the plan, in 1974, the Metropolitan Corporation of Barcelona had been created, the predecessor of the current Area (AMB). He then repeated the move as General Director of Urban Planning of the Generalitat, with the creation of Incasòl, which operates throughout Catalonia. There has never been a similar action on the Trinitarian front of planning, management and institutionality. And that was half a century ago.
The disarticulation of urban planning has led to an over-dimensioning of planning and neglect in management and institutions, to the point of rhetoric and immobility. There is a whole professional class that every day is in charge of focusing urban planning on the exclusive work of planning, which goes from being a tool to an end.
And so, the current master plan for the AMB area, currently being drafted, is a prefiguration, an image; albeit with an immense amount of documentation. It constitutes the sacralisation of planning, the realm of technicians, and the possible development will only be the simple fulfilment of the plan, never its overflow. This magnificence weakens the margin of possible politics and limits the future. A day later, when the concrete general plan will still have to be made, in a hierarchy that began seventeen years ago, with the Territorial Plan of the Region (PTMB), and which continues. All this forms a world without much sense, very coherent with an AMB government that brings together from Junts to Comuns passing through PSC and ERC.
Catalonia's third budget escapes the politics of other governments and consolidates a tool of exclusivity, denied to the rest of the country in the name of a certain narcissism. And, instead, the frontier of metropolitan politics should transcend beyond the scope of the AMB, with the Maresme, the Vallès and the Martorell area, today neglected and without government. The metropolitan fact is played out in the abandoned periphery, but a "government of unity", formed by the great Catalan political arc, does without it.
The 1976 PGM was not an image but a chessboard open to multiple possible and unforeseeable games, including the Olympics. It was developed by means of plan modifications and with a transcendent will, precisely what the idealization of planning now wants to block. Now urban policy becomes about making plans, when these plans should be a tool of territorial policy, and it constitutes an inversion of concepts, because the plans become more of a project, more design and image than a framework for the game, and thus public governance is renounced. And at the moment in Catalonia we have a lot of territorial and sectorial plans without any management tool.
With few exceptions in Catalonia, urban planning has followed the model of the 1960s over the last 50 years: partial private management plans. In this way, areas that were called technological end up in commercial estates, and the height of progressivism has been to force the completion of all urban development (including green areas and banks) before the first residential building. With an inevitable consequence: very expensive land and degradation. The administrations have been satisfied with a cession of 10% of the roof, which until now had not been sold well, when it was not even the necessary quota of social housing; whatever it was before being active agents. Let us be clear: from now on it will be necessary that around half of all new urban land created be for social housing policy, in surface rights. No administration is prepared, nor do they know it, nor do the agencies exist for it.
We need a framework like the one created and enjoyed by Joan Anton Solans: institutionality, planning and management. But in half a century we have not reproduced anywhere any territorial corporation like AMB: neither in the Pyrenees nor in the Ebro, which call for attention to development, nor in the Camp de Tarragona or in the Vallès. We have only consolidated the exclusivity of the AMB. And the territory is the main public capital, whose administration should be a powerful vector of economic and social action. Nothing.
The current path will not lead to any housing policy framework, either in the short or medium term – now that the baby is crying – nor to any mobility or environmental policy, with the broad vision that Solans was capable of. Only then it could be done from a few centres: Barcelona City Council, Corporation, Generalitat and little else, and today a more systematic and broad action is necessary. Not in vain has half a century passed.
The anger of urban planning, with the aura of sophistication and the excuse of its uncontaminated neatness, reaches a deep crisis, a reduction that closes all innovation. In order to stop the fears of a regression, all future is blocked. This fact is part of the current crisis of the administrations, whose political result is completely reactionary. For all this I do not believe that Joan Anton Solans can rest too much in peace.
