Run a park network
“You will find a City Council that is open, interested, that will listen and facilitate initiatives as long as they are consistent with the general interest of the city”, assured the new mayor, Jaume Collboni, to the young people – all between 26 and 35 years old, active professionally and with work experience of more than five years– who for an hour and a half presented their conclusions in the Saló de Cent. It was not a new role for Collboni, who has already attended the sessions of the three previous promotions, as first deputy mayor and head of the Economy area, although this time he only came to close.
Yesterday, the person in charge of maintaining the dialogue with the new promotion was the fourth deputy mayor, Jordi Valls, who shared some diagnoses and challenges with the audience. He acknowledged, for example, “that we have a serious problem attracting talent” but stressed that “we have introduced innovative policies” in this field. Or that industrial growth is not possible without a metropolitan vision because “in the city we don’t have enough space”.
The Barcelona 2043 program has had group dynamics directed by Xavier Verdaguer, CEO of Imagine Creativity Center. In this way, the 37 participants, coming from all professional fields (researchers, lawyers, economists, computer scientists…) and committed to the future of the city, have had the opportunity to get to know each other. Building bridges between emerging local talent and between this group and already established executives and professionals who can speak first-hand about key aspects of the city is the main challenge of the programme.
The six working groups addressed the Barcelona of mobility and infrastructures; culture and sports; the entrepreneur and technology; the Barcelona of tourism; that of science, medicine and the pharmaceutical sector, and industrial Barcelona and architecture. In each field, they have identified the context, problems, opportunities and proposals by the hand of a host (for example, Michael Pellot, director of International Relations of TMB, in mobility; Valentí Oviedo, general director of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in culture, or the architect and landscape designer Enric Batlle in the design and architecture section), two speakers and a rapporteur.
From the diagnosis of each area, problems and opportunities were identified to draw one or several proposals. In mobility, in addition to the park
