Let’s do a memory exercise: how many times in the last year have you heard Pedro Sánchez, Núñez Feijóo, Pere Aragonès or Isabel Díaz Ayuso talk about the garbage collection system in your neighbourhood, the mess of scooters and bikes in the street or the frequency of the subway that he takes every day to go to work. few? None? Surely none.

However, for all of us, that the garbage truck takes the bag, that the metro runs at reasonable cadences or that the water that comes out of the tap tastes like water is more important than, for example, the umpteenth row about the renovation of the General Council of the Judiciary.

Without wanting to trivialize the big issues that seize it – even street sweepers need a justice that works – what is unquestionable is that politics – and, as will be seen later, particularly Spanish politics – has never had a special interest in that part detail of the public management that is the government of the cities.

And all this, despite the fact that 86% of the people who live in Spain live in urban areas, more or less extensive, more or less populated.

Actually, if you think about it, today the emptied Spain is more famous than the overpopulated Spain. It is a contradiction. But that’s how it is.

Rather. In Spain, the fact that urban power is a matter of little relevance is a tradition. A political tradition derived from how our parents and grandparents shared power in the re-foundation of democracy back in 1978 of the last century. On one side, the central government; to the other, the autonomous communities. And below and far away, the municipalities.

The municipalities worry. Do not forget an important detail of the transition: Tarradellas arrived in Catalonia before they let us elect our first democratic mayors. Narcís Serra in Barcelona, ​​Tierno Galván in Madrid. And so all.

But, over time, it has happened that today the cities have become the tractor -that we use this word that we associate with the rural world to explain an urban phenomenon is descriptive per se- of the countries. All over the world. Today more than a few decades ago, the future depends on what happens in them, how they are organized, how they grow, how they coexist and how their enormous contradictions are resolved. Like it or not, but that’s how it is.

Most European countries have long since realized this change. And they began to think about how their urban agglomerations should be governed. Italy, Germany, France did it… each one in their own way reformed their political maps. Spain, no.

That is what the book is about, which was presented in Barcelona on Tuesday afternoon by the political scientist Mariona Tomás –editor of the text in which fifteen other authors participate– and the sociologist Marc Martí-Costa.

Metropolis without government (Tirant, 2023) is a book that may be somewhat dense, but it addresses everything that has been written above. From the invisibility of that meticulous policy that addresses the things that happen in the corner of the house. And the urgency of organizing it better.

The central thesis of the book is that we have been stranded in an ancient conception of political geography. Anchored on the edges of a national map that no longer exists.

It would not only be better but possibly even fairer. Because transferring that common logic to a shared policy could lead to a more accurate redistribution of resources. Cultural, health, residential, environmental resources… Almost everything. That is what the necessary recognition of the metropolitan realities in Spain that the book deals with is about.

Postscript: if the idea has convinced you, don’t forget that May 28 – municipal elections! – is a propitious day to take sides with those who best defend this necessary innovation.