Effort and creativity have aligned so that Barcelona is today a must-see destination for art lovers, whether they are people in transit or registered. There is no excuse to stay at home and repeat the infinite scroll of Instagram. From Picasso and Miró to Chagall or Nancy Holt; from the algorithm that travels through AI to the Patagonian dinosaur; from the art they didn’t want us to see to the artists at war…, the museum’s proposal is excellent. The quality of these exhibitions – most of them with a marked critical tone – is a weighty argument to rebut the chant that to see art you need to go to Madrid.

Barcelona improves in exhibitions and Madrid in pop concerts. The Catalan capital stands out as a leader in festivals and, Spain, in musical theatre. They are equal in operatic ambition. Money flows in Madrid and, in Barcelona, ??ideas that compensate for the lack of money. They are more complementary cities than you want to believe. Those who prefer not to see it, this is lost at the other end of the AVE. And they share very serious threats.

The competition between these and other capitals is experienced at many levels: GDP, foreign investment, sporting events, tourist attraction or talent… The ups and downs of these indicators, in short, have accompanied the lives of the boomers, generations that have valued the city as a conducive space for the aspiration to prosper in a system governed by stable and reasonably paid work.

But it makes less and less sense to limit yourself to classic indicators. More pressing problems have erupted in recent years that also need to be monitored. The contract of coexistence that was the city has gone to waste with the precariousness of work (there are already daytime employees who are homeless at night) and the sale of urban centers to the highest bidder with the replacement of neighbors by tourists. All in a framework of anxiety that is growing due to the aggravation of the climate crisis, the effect of AI on the labor market, the rise of the far right and the explosion of the geopolitical balances that were trying to save us illusion of a planet at peace.

There is a latent generational divide in the city that Azahara Palomeque (1986) relentlessly describes in Vivir peor que nuestros padres (Anagrama). He tells us about young people “forced to live with the perpetrators, in a large way, of the disaster, who we often love because they are our parents…”

Overwhelmed by problems for which they lack competence, cities could be entering an era in which the old indicators of well-being – the cherished rankings of the quality of life – are relegated to others that will assess the capacity to withstand disaster. They can only apply palliative policies. And it is in these areas that the two capitals should really compete. Barcelona, ??for now, has a certain advantage in terms of the fight against inequality, the brake on the ultra-right or the ecological transition. But the threat is capital.

There is no solution, the author tells us, without intergenerational dialogue: “At the end of the day, and recognizing the hole, building bridges is much more productive than, on the one hand, killing the father and leaving the corpse in the open waiting for the dwindling demography of the vultures to eat it, or to despise the young and call them the ‘glass generation’, addicted to series, partying and mobile phones, a collective educated on a promise of material abundance and capitalist values ??that, while it is the most prepared in history, has landed there with a scrambled script and a red flag that clearly says ‘short-termism’, refrain from drawing the slightest future because we have snatched the escape line …”

Far from being variants of escape, culture and critical exhibitions can fulfill the function of intergenerational bridges that Palomeque calls for, spaces where the draft of a new social contract is written. Let’s go see them. Those of Barcelona and Madrid.