The endreçador City Council of the new mayor Jaume Collboni is willing to make caring for Barcelona's public space one of its hallmarks in the first months of his mandate. A new step in this direction was taken last Thursday by the government commission with the tender for a contract that consolidates and expands a service that has been operating for ten years. It is about the "continuous inspection of the state of the public space", a task consisting of collecting the necessary data for its subsequent treatment; in short, a kind of permanent audit of the city.
The contract for the last months of this year, 2024 and 2025 has a bidding budget of almost 1.8 million euros. The employees of the winning company, based on pre-established itineraries and items, will comb the streets, squares, parks and gardens to transfer the data within a period of 24 hours for processing.
The complete return to the city is guaranteed every fortnight, and in certain spaces and times of the year the frequency is seven days. One of the annexes to the bases of the contract marks the central section of the Eixample district, the Quadrat d'Or delimited by Avenida Diagonal, Paseo Sant Joan, Gran Via and Aribau street, as a priority area for action.
The data collected is arranged in four areas (cleanliness, elements, social and vehicle abandonment) and includes a total of 105 different types of incidents, 25 related to the cleanliness of the city, 57 elements that can be audited, 19 phenomena classified as social and four vehicle abandonment.
The combing 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 City Council workers such as agents of the Urban Police, municipal inspectors or social services personnel.
Those in charge of reviewing the state of the city from top to bottom will not lack work. The list of items to inspect is very long. In many cases, they are pieces of street furniture: damaged escalators in a neighborhood with steep slopes; a broken, dirty, or damaged public bench; some Berliner cushions (to reduce the speed of vehicles) or some displaced or collapsed bike lane or bus lane separators; a dry fountain: a smashed phone booth; a street lamp that does not turn on; a traffic light that doesn't work, a mutilated statue; a terrace that exceeds the authorized space...
The team of public space auditors must also report incidents such as the presence of excrement, urine or vomit at a certain point; improper stacking of cardboard in commercial areas; the appearance of syringes in parks or in children's play areas; damage to the sidewalks; overflowing bins and containers and bulky objects abandoned on public roads, to name just a few of the many items planned. Likewise, those in charge of providing this service will report practices such as begging, window cleaners who take advantage of traffic lights to try to get money, lateros and even tightrope walkers.
