Which Barcelona do we want?

Tourist Barcelona or the Barcelona of innovation and research: where does the city preferably want to move towards? Covid has opened our eyes to the need to rethink the future of the capital. The tourist model had already been in crisis for some time and had pushed optimal coexistence and quality of life to the limit, expelling residents and making daily life distressing in many neighbourhoods due to the excess of visitors. Now, with the sudden disappearance of tourists for over a year, there has been an economic collapse that has brought us face to face with the danger of entrusting almost everything to the tourist manna to the detriment of industry and other sectors. You can't put all your eggs in one basket. A Barcelona based solely on services with little added value is not a winning bet. What is a winning bet, however, is to recover the industrial spirit and desire for innovation, including research into new technologies and sustainability.

This is the spirit behind the proposal, still embryonic, to create the European Urban Tech, a centre that could occupy the site originally earmarked for the Hermitage Museum franchise project, on which the Port Authority and the City Council cannot agree. On paper, albeit lacking specifics, this new initiative is interesting. If the hypothetical alliance of Barcelona with the Russian museum responds to the easy logic of attracting more international tourism with an imported cultural brand, in this case we are faced with an idea of greater depth and above all of greater ambition, economically, scientifically and culturally. Because a facility in which entities such as the Institut d'Arquitectura Avançada de Catalunya (IAAC), the Barcelona Tech City and the Col·legi d'Arquitectes already coexist is already a guarantee. The three institutions have been working for some months now to become a hub that could now come to fruition in this location if it gets the necessary institutional support. Once again, the Port and the municipal government would have to come to an agreement here. And more agents, both private and public, would have to be added. In projects like this it is essential that there is a broad public consensus that makes it possible to secure funding and, at the same time, that the result serves its purpose. Only thus may the alternative to the Hermitage be logical.

Another good example of research in Barcelona is the one being carried out by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in the old Mercat del Peix, where a new research and innovation complex is to be set up, focusing on biomedicine, biodiversity and planetary wellbeing, to be located next to the Ciutadella campus. With the participation of two strategic partners such as the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas and the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, it is expected to be up and running in 2024, with 1,200 people working in it, with a high concentration of talent.

Proposals such as the Mercat del Peix or this incipient European Urban Tech, which create economic and scientific synergies, are in line with the Next Generation projects that the EU wants to promote in order to emerge stronger from the pandemic, including the New European Bauhaus. They are the way forward. And they have to be seriously considered. The building would only be a first step.