Shortly after winning the 2015 elections, Ada Colau grabbed headlines in virtually all the media that launched to offer a more detailed biography of who would be the next mayor of the city, under the shared description of “activist of the Platform of Affected by the Mortgage”.
Since then, many have focused on the trajectory of the mayoress with the right to housing. But what few noticed was the detail that Colau herself announced in her first biography on the City Council’s website: “Specialized in city law”.
That expression, which for some could seem superfluous, was not at all gratuitous, but rather prescient coming from someone who spent his university years in the Faculty of Philosophy.
What is known as the right to the city ( le droit à la ville ) is a term coined in 1968 by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, considered one of the intellectual fathers of May 1968. For Lefebvre, the city has been taken over by interests of capital and, faced with the privatization of urban spaces and the mercantile use of the city, it is necessary to recover it so that the citizen is once again the main element.
This understanding will probably help the reader to better understand, now with a certain perspective, what has been the vision of the city that has inspired the mayoress these last eight years; to the point that Yolanda DÃaz, today vice-president of the central government and already a candidate for the next general elections, congratulated Barcelona not so long ago “for being an international example in favor of the right to the city” (31/X/2021).
The city model will likely continue to be debated depending on the political prism through which it is viewed. But what there is no doubt about, according to the Elecciones Barcelona interactive, is the imperative need to improve security, cleanliness and access to housing, the three main problems in Barcelona according to the latest municipal barometer.
