The serious damage caused by the staging of a Louis Vuitton fashion show on protected stairs in Park Güell is the cause of an unpublished letter from the former mayor of Barcelona and leader of Barcelona en Comú, Ada Colau, to the current mayor Jaume Collboni. In a new clash between old municipal government partners, Colau reproaches her successor in office for the situation that took place and asks her to avoid “privatizing public space” and for the city to give an image of a “theme park.”
In the letter, which the community members have published through social networks, the former mayor demands that Collboni give an “immediate response” to the residents of the park for the “series of serious incidents” that have occurred, in her opinion, following the aforementioned parade that is being prepared for next May 23. After judging the destruction of the wall of the stairs in the Plaza de la Natura as a “serious” and “unprecedented” event, she lists other situations that she also considers reportable due to the preparations for said event. Namely, she points out that the passage of boys and girls from the Baldiri Reixac school has been altered or that the residents of Can Baró and Carmel cannot use the bus parking lot once it is closed to visitors.
Colau maintains that it rains in the wet because the neighborhood already suffers from notable “tourist saturation” and also considers that the regulations are being breached to “perform an act of extreme luxury” that gives an image “inappropriate to the city, of a theme park and not a city of architecture.” In his opinion, “public space is being privatized for the benefit of very few.”
The former mayor defends a city model that promotes “acts and events that adapt to the city” and not the other way around, and regrets that in the current municipal government led by Collboni we are beginning to see “an obsession with imitating models that do not suit us.” They are convenient, which we do not need.”
At this point, Colau directly demands that Collboni listen to the neighbors and “rectify everything that is necessary to guarantee their free movement” during future events in the city, as well as “the conservation of the architectural heritage.” . Likewise, it expressly asks not to return to “an old and outdated model” in which “events are used to privatize public space,” in reference to the aforementioned parade or the announcement that Collboni himself made to pass off a Formula 1 exhibition as Passeig de Gràcia.
