London-based urban planner Greg Clark, an expert in advising cities in crisis (he’s worked on 300 in his career), has a funny way of referring to cities that fall asleep on their laurels when the wind blows too long in his favor: he calls them “lazy cities”.
There are very obvious examples throughout history, such as that of Detroit, which was the motor capital and which, because it did not diversify its economy, collapsed while the automobile industry did. Manchester, Milan or New York also experienced their dark ages.
It is suggestive to ask whether Madrid or Barcelona can be associated with the adjective lazy, even if the result probably serves to raise new questions, rather than to provide conclusive answers.
Undoubtedly, if there is a city immersed in an expansive cycle and, consequently, liable to become lazy one day, this is the capital of Spain. Madrid leads today in all the excellence rankings. It has wrested from Barcelona and Catalonia (perhaps forever) the primacy in GDP; captures more foreign investment than anyone else; places its museums at the top of The Art Newspaper’s list every year; he enjoys one of the most vibrant nights on the continent and, to make matters worse, one of his teams, Real Madrid, walks around Europe with the halo of being unbeatable.
In this Madrid where no one disputes its dynamism, the debate on the future model is episodic, a feature, on the other hand, common in capitals that concentrate political and financial power. Why ask what they want to be, if they already are? However, if one day this reflection were to be opened in earnest, shortcomings would emerge that could diminish its potential in the future.
Madrid expands freely, apart from the trends in vogue in European urbanism, based on promoting greater social cohesion based on the idea of ​​the city of cities. And this has its advantages and disadvantages. In the scheme of metropolises that are built from a central nucleus that concentrates much of the wealth, growth is easy, but inequalities are accentuated. In fact, the Community of Madrid is today at the bottom of Spain in terms of balance between the richest and the poorest.
Public transport slows down and cycling does not take off (the city is also among the least attractive for cycling, according to the OCU). The urban model of the 20th century is not seriously questioned. Little is left of that Welcome Mr. Green Marshall that local authorities orchestrated in 2019, when they hosted COP25. Greta Thunberg left and carbon dioxide returned. It’s not a good cover letter for the volatile talent community, always in favor of fun but also attentive to the policies that make a city a healthy home.
Month. Madrid’s cultural offer is diverse and generous. It has everything: from the mainstream to the most alternative. The PP City Council itself hosts, at its headquarters, critical and irreverent exhibitions, such as the one dedicated to the Barcelona underground. But the recent dismantling of the Medialab Prado in its collaborative aspect (it was a citizen laboratory operated by the citizens themselves) to replace it with conventional exhibition halls (without great public success, by the way) is a worrying symptom. The city is not full of platforms of this collaborative profile.
Of course, Madrid’s risk of stagnation is relative. The capital also knows how to reinvent itself and money, creativity and determination – of which there is no shortage – help it to get on trains that seemed to have to pass long.
Barcelona is another story. Asleep in the post-Olympic nap, it was shaken like no other by successive global crises. But, especially, because of a political conflict that stripped it of thousands of companies and accentuated the feeling of economic precariousness. It was a bad awakening from the dream of the 1990s. Because of all this – and thanks to all this – he has been searching obsessively for years for the city model that will guarantee him a future. This is why urban debate think tanks are springing up in Barcelona. Reputational successes or failures, such as a laudatory editorial or a critical article in the international press, motivate heated discussions. And for three years he organizes an ambitious congress, React, which is a storm of ideas to get rid of lethargy. Something unusual in other cities.
One of the regulars of this cycle, the urban planner Clark, writes the epilogue of the collective book reBarcelona, ​​repensando la ciudad que viene, coordinated by Sara Sans, in which he maintains that history, for having denied him the benefits of capital that Madrid does have, has forced Barcelona to be a “restless” city, “with solutions” and even in a certain sense “excited”.
But the qualifier that repeats the most is that of intentional. In his opinion, Barcelona has always set goals that have served to project itself beyond its status as a relatively small city and forced to exercise soft power, in the absence of tools of power. And now, in the complex scenario that is approaching, its intention, he says, must be to become a permanent laboratory for new forms of urban life. In other words, to base (even more) on innovation its bet to continue growing. Now he just needs to act boldly to achieve it.
It is in the process of determining which are the weaknesses that Madrid and Barcelona must overcome in order to excel where these features emerge, naturally, that make them so complementary. Traits that invite us to explore a more intense cooperation between the two, even if we are generally too lazy to admit it.
