Applying a heavy hand does not seem to the liking of the new mayor of Barcelona, ??at least from a lexical point of view. Jaume Collboni prefers to spin finer. He has been insisting for days that his great objective for this mandate is to straighten the city. And the truth is that this very Catalan expression lacks an exact translation. At the time of endreçar we think about ordering with good taste, in harmony. The expression put in order has harsher connotations.
But in the end, the ways to achieve one thing or the other are more or less the same. Mayor Collboni is determined to give a twist to the safety, cleanliness and care of public space. He is aware that the data is as important as the impressions of each citizen. And that one of the reasons for the defeat of Ada Colau was the discouragement of many people.
And somehow chance and the calendar make the popular Sant Joan celebrations this Friday the first litmus test of this era that the new mayor intends to open. “This festival is the gateway to a summer season that is expected to be complicated,” Albert Batlle, the renewed deputy mayor for Security in this city, said yesterday at the presentation of the municipal device aimed at guaranteeing citizen coexistence on the shortest night of the anus-. It is very likely that we will have a tense and intense summer, characterized by the massive arrival of visitors. We will have to manage this flow of people. The City Council’s priorities will be the fight against multiple recidivism and street vending”. The departure of the commons of the executive facilitates this subtle change in tone of the municipal discourse. Colau and his people never liked to target street vendors without permission. When they did, it was reluctantly. And Collboni, on the other hand, when he looks back, one of the main reasons for his pride is the banishment of pedicabs. Few thought he would make it.
The night of the firecrackers is not what it was not so long ago, in terms of revelry, excesses and lags. The forecast is that some 60,000 people come to the city’s beaches. Once this record exceeded 100,000. But in recent weeks, the Catalan capital has finished recovering the visitor records prior to the pandemic, and the unwanted effects of these increases have been looming over the daily coexistence of the most central neighborhoods for weeks. We are talking about crowded streets, friends of aliens, a saturated public space, street vendors without permission, terraces with unauthorized tables, uncivil and loud drunkards, urine and noise…
Batlle was also the person in charge of security in charge of these preparations in recent years, and the truth is that the special device designed for this Friday night is very similar to the previous ones. More than 400 agents of the Urban Police, some in uniform and others in plain clothes. They will pay special attention to the warehouses of the lateros and to the clandestine parties. The drones, which they always wear, will fly through the skies. Safe itineraries will be reinforced, so that no one is spoiled for the party back home, on the way to public transport. Once again the lilac dots will lend their help. Access to the Barceloneta neighborhood will be restricted so that the comings and goings from the beach do not unsettle the residents. The beach bars on the coast will be forced to close at the usual time, around three in the morning, and on top of that they will not be able to organize special parties, just like last year. Alcohol and drug controls will ensure safety on especially busy roads. The fact that Sant Joan falls on a Friday will cause many to leave the city and many others to come.
And at dawn, as is traditional, municipal and regional police, as is traditional, will proceed to evacuate the sandbanks, so that they can clean them before the bathers arrive. More than 1,200 cleaning workers and some 600 vehicles will be dedicated to this. 5,000 bins and 56 additional containers will also be deployed.
