Foment is committed to a more connected metropolis to face Catalonia's major challenges

BarcelonaConnections. This is the key word in the fifth report on rethinking the metropolis, presented this Thursday by Foment del Treball through its Barcelona Society for Economic and Social Studies. The document argues that only through a strong and coordinated metropolitan region can Catalonia face the major challenges it faces, including demographics, housing, mobility, security, and innovation. Fifteen years after the creation of the Barcelona metropolitan area, the debate has long questioned whether the 36 municipalities and approximately 3.2 million inhabitants that formally comprise it have been superseded by a reality that now includes nearly 200 municipalities and more than 5 million inhabitants. In the document presented this Thursday, Foment argues that the scale of Barcelona's five million inhabitants "facilitates a better response to common challenges in an area cohesive due to the constant interaction between the different cities." The existing, constant relationship between the cities that make up this metropolitan region is key to Fomento's thesis, which argues that daily life already allows us to "understand metropolitan functioning not only as a hierarchical organism nor as a simple sum of municipalities, but as a network of relationships in which solutions emerge from the solution itself." In other words, the employers' association calls for addressing the metropolitan debate not only from its administrative dimension—usually a factor that blocks this discussion—but from a "connectionist approach" that recognizes that "urban behavior" is expressed through interactions between nodes of citizenship, institutions, and economic and social dynamics. "These connections allow us to identify patterns and promote a culture of political action based not so much on who governs the cities as on how things happen, and on how and with what intensity changes in the ways of inhabiting the metropolis affect them."

From this premise, the report states, it is easier to develop metropolitan responses to the challenges of demographics, housing, mobility, security, tourism, culture, healthcare, and technological innovation, among others. For all these reasons, the Ministry of Public Works (Fomento) believes that the metropolitan area now finds itself in "the need to redefine itself," and calls for "progress in the opportunity to develop an open metropolitan vision and mission that allows for a clear definition of the Barcelona metropolitan region." It also proposes doing so through "less vertical and more relational metropolitan governance, where knowledge comes not only from quantitative indicators, but above all from a deeper understanding of what is happening in the lived metropolis."

Demographic Evolution

The report also emphasizes the importance of the metropolitan area in the face of the "challenges posed by demographic changes" emerging in Catalonia. In this regard, the employers' association argues that the demographic challenge requires promoting a social pact to define policies and actions to address such relevant issues as population aging, immigration, emigration, migration, housing, education, infrastructure, birth rates, business competitiveness, and the fight against inequality. Other areas where a metropolitan perspective should be key, the report highlights, include mobility—with a view to the entire region; security—with better coordination between police forces; tourism—with new cultural centers that allow for a more even distribution of activity across the territory; and housing.