Too much Barcelona for such a small city?

Let's imagine a Greek or Roman theater. The enclosed structure turns the interior into a pressure cooker. Spectators and actors are boxed in between the stage wall and the semicircle of the stands, with the only outlets being the evacuation vents and the side aisles. The words emanating from the stage expand through the stands and bounce, multiply, and condense. If it's summer, the high temperature heightens the ambient excitement.

Anyone who views Barcelona from the plane will also see a packed amphitheater. The stage wall is the sea; the stands, the Collserola mountain range. The evacuation entrance, the Sant Cugat tunnel. The side corridors, the roads that expand the city beyond the Besòs and Llobregat rivers.

Clark and Carlin agree: Barcelona is a very big idea for such a small space.

As you may recall, Barcelona attempted metropolitan expansion at the end of the 20th century, realizing that it could not prosper confined to its mere 100 square kilometers. Pasqual Maragall led that political project (the Metropolitan Corporation), encouraged by the establishment of his party, the PSC, in the surrounding municipalities. But Jordi Pujol saw this as a threat to his territorial power and decided, in 1987, to dynamite the legal instrument that would have placed Barcelona on a par with other world metropolises.

The lack of this agreement to articulate the real Barcelona has had a high cost for a city that remains global, but which alone is incapable of solving the shortage of new housing, with all that this entails.

This circumstance was highlighted in a conversation held on Friday between urban planner Greg Clark and writer and journalist John Carlin, organized by Turisme de Barcelona and La Vanguardia at the Palace Hotel.

Clark, who specializes in advising cities in crisis, often holds up Barcelona as an example of a global and creative city, but sees dark clouds on the horizon if the housing stock isn't expanded, thereby alleviating the pressure that tourism and expats exert on apartment prices, with the obvious gentrifying effect: "Barcelona is a very big idea, a big brand with powerful soft power, but it's also a small city. Small physically, but big in ideas, and the consequence is that Barcelona can be overwhelmed by visitors, and people can think this is a problem."

His prescription is to "embrace a metropolitan future with more transportation, more housing, more space, expanding the economy, and this must be conceived as a consequence of the city's success, not as a failure."

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Along these lines, Carlin refers to the spatial limitations of the "natural theater" that is Barcelona, ​​where "the emotion and indignation" that "define the Spanish are concentrated, from which, unfortunately, I cannot totally exclude the Catalans." "There is a discrepancy," he continues, "between the enormity of the Barcelona brand, which people here are unaware of and which is a much stronger brand internationally than that of Madrid, and the provincial mindset that many people have here, more than in Madrid."

"There's a desire for success in Madrid and a capacity to manage that success that's somewhat lacking in Barcelona," Clark says, referring to the real estate projects Madrid has underway in its metropolitan region.

John Carlin's decision Why this city and not another?

John Carlin settled in Barcelona after living in a dozen cities. Here's his revealing exposition: "What I've found here is a balance I haven't found elsewhere, in the philosophical sense, between understanding that you have to be efficient and have a functioning infrastructure, that you have to have a reasonably prosperous economy, and that you have to work relatively hard, on the one hand, and having a sharp, deep, and visceral conviction that life is short and you have to enjoy it."

Does Barcelona have time to reach a consensus with its community on a governance framework that will allow it to grow and overcome this pressure-cooker effect, thus avoiding a collapse of success? The political context isn't going to help. After Pujol's metropolitan demolition, the PSC, hamstrung by its own mayors, has been unable to promote a new Greater Barcelona project, despite the 2010 Metropolitan Area Law allowing it to do so.

And the future doesn't invite optimism. Far-right and anti-establishment parties like Vox and the Catalan Alliance could emerge strongly on the Catalan political map in the coming years, and for them, consolidating Barcelona as a thriving global city will be the last priority.