The new mayor Jaume Collboni’s clean-up City Council is ready to turn the care of Barcelona’s public space into one of its hallmarks during the first months of its mandate. A new step in this direction was taken on Thursday by the government commission with the tender for a contract that consolidates and expands a service that has been operating for ten years. This is the “continuous inspection of the state of the public space”, a task that consists of collecting the necessary data to deal with them later, in short, a kind of permanent audit of the city.
The contract for the last months of this year, 2024 and 2025 has a tender budget of almost 1.8 million euros. The workers of the awarded company, based on previously established itineraries and items, will comb the streets, squares, parks and gardens to transfer the data within 24 hours, which will be processed later.
The complete tour of the city is guaranteed every fortnight and in certain spaces and times of the year the frequency will be seven days. One of the annexes to the basis of the contract marks as a priority area of ??action the central section of the Eixample district, the Quadrat d’Or bounded by Diagonal Avenue, Passeig Sant Joan, Gran Via and Carrer Aribau .
The data collected are classified into four areas (cleaning, elements, social and vehicle abandonment) and foresee 105 different types of incidents, 25 related to the cleaning of the city, 57 elements susceptible to being audited, 19 phenomena classified as social and 4 of vehicle abandonment).
The tracking of the city by the contracted teams makes it possible to have extra eyes and antennas that complement the action on the public space of other Barcelona City Council workers, such as agents of the Urban Guard, municipal inspectors or social services staff.
Those in charge of reviewing the state of the city from top to bottom are given work. The list of elements to be inspected is very long. In many cases, these are pieces of urban furniture: broken-down escalators in a steep neighborhood; a broken, dirty or damaged public bank; Berlin cushions (to reduce the speed of vehicles); some bike lane or bus lane dividers that have been moved or knocked down; a source that does not crack; a smashed phone booth; a lamp that does not light; a traffic light that doesn’t work; a mutilated statue; a terrace that exceeds the authorized space…
The team of auditors of the public space must also report different incidents, such as the presence of excrement, urine or vomit in a certain point, the undue pile-up of cartons in commercial areas, the appearance of syringes in parks or children’s play areas, damage to sidewalks, overflowing trash cans and containers, and bulky objects left on the public road, to name just a few of the many incidents expected. Likewise, those in charge of providing this service will report on practices such as begging, window cleaners who take advantage of traffic lights to try to get money, tinsmiths and even tightrope walkers.
