Hospitalet 6.0 is the partnership between the City Council of Catalonia’s second biggest city and the Mobile World Capital Barcelona foundation to fight for digital inclusion in the densely populated city adjoining Barcelona. Although it had been planned for some time, the agreement to fight against digital divides was officially signed one year ago. After a somewhat more theoretical than practical beginning, in which a detailed analysis of the situation in the city of 256,444 inhabitants was carried out, this year its promoters intend to take more action so that the effects can begin to be seen.
During this year and next year, a shipping container especially refurbished in collaboration with the local association Contorno Urbano will travel around different locations of the city. It will be a learning point on new technologies. Its objective will be first to clear up doubts in situ about aspects related to the digital sphere. It also aims to channel the population toward the city’s catalogue of training possibilities.
The container will visit streets, parks, squares and markets to attract the groups that are not organized, those that are on the margins of associative movements and that it is always more complicated to reach. Contorno Urbano, which began painting graffiti to give colour to grey spaces of the metropolitan area, has already restored one container in Hospitalet. This was a pioneering idea that succeeded in converting what was then a totally degraded space and neighbourhood trouble spot on the outskirts of La Florida neighbourhood into a flourishing social meeting point. The transformation of the former rubbish dump earned it one of the awards of the La Caixa foundation for social innovation.
This is not the only initiative about to start. Another is a training programme for the over-55s in which the teachers will be people from the same group in an attempt to create local benchmarks closer to the population than visitors from outside. The MWC is the moment chosen to give guidelines to the trainers. The subjects to be addressed will be defined by the community itself based on its needs. A pilot project will also be presented during the MWC devised in collaboration with Bellvitge Hospital, the aim of which is to improve the life of certain patients through technology.
A specific training programme for teachers in information management and misinformation will moreover be held until the end of the year. This is one of the main needs detected both by the managers of the Hospitalet project and in the Digital Future Society (DFS).
The actions are being defined after carrying out a study presented at the end of last year which, through 2,000 surveys, revealed that 45.5% of people over 75 resident in Hospitalet do not have Internet access at home. Normally, the majority of these studies place everyone over 65 together and do not break them down above this age.
“It was essential to carry out this analysis in order to understand the size and type of digital divide in the city, although in the end no important differences are observed in comparison with other cities and the same solutions can be transferred”, according to the promoters of the set of actions grouped under the name Hospitalet 6.0. This fieldwork led to the conclusion that there are elderly people who do not want to be connected and that it is important to understand this. For the rest, the aim is to progress with the digitization of the city in the fairest manner possible, without leaving anyone behind.
