The debate about the role that the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB) should play has focused in recent years on a hypothetical territorial expansion. The discussion has revolved around the pros and cons of going from the 36 municipalities and 3.3 million current inhabitants to the entire metropolitan region, incorporating Maresme, Vallès, Alt Penedès and Garraf, where 5.5 million residents reside. people. With this issue still to be resolved, the mayor of the capital, Jaume Collboni, has opened another melon: that of the transfer of powers by other administrations to the supramunicipal to reinforce its capacity to act in areas that are key, such as housing. , economic promotion or social policies.
“There must be a transfer from top to bottom (Generalitat and central Government) and from bottom to top (municipalities) to respond to concrete realities,” Collboni said on October 3 at an event at Foment del Treball. The proposal from the president of the AMB also follows in the wake of Pasqual Maragall, who already defended something similar when he was in charge of the mayor's office in the 80s and 90s. And since then, all the first councilors of Barcelona have defended in one way or another a commitment to the metropolitan dimension, although, in recent times, neither Xavier Trias nor Ada Colau have done much for it. Collboni is the first socialist mayor to have access to the 2010 law, which provides the AMB with many of the powers that Maragall dreamed of years ago, with the capacity to deploy policies and manage services, directly or by delegation from the municipalities, in the which is the second largest local administration in Catalonia by budget, with 2,470 million for 2023.
To give shape to what are still words today, Barcelona City Council has commissioned various reports to help determine how to move towards greater exploitation of the AMB's scope of competence, as well as territorial expansion, according to municipal sources. Thus begins a path that arouses reluctance expressed privately by some mayors, but unanimity among experts.
“Municipalities should see the metropolitan dimension as an opportunity and not as a threat because it helps improve their public policies,” defends Ricard Gomà, professor at the Department of Political Science and Public Law at the UAB and director of the Institut Metròpoli, who is convinced that “the AMB has not developed its full potential.” For example, he explains, "with the metropolitan neighborhood plan, which exists, but is tenuous, and would be a good tool for social cohesion in the most vulnerable municipalities, which are the ones with the least economic capacity to cope." Barcelona can, but Sant Adrià or Cornellà are probably not in a position to do something similar.
Along the same lines, Oriol Estela, general coordinator of the Pla Estratègic Metropolità de Barcelona (PEMB), points out that “the amounts of social benefits of the town councils cannot be different in two neighboring municipalities, this generates unequal treatment with which "It must end, organizing the issues that deepen inequalities," he summarizes, convinced of the urgency of balancing criteria among all neighbors. Aware of the complexity of the issue, he urges to immediately address “issues as basic as the registry or the cadastre, which should be unified.”
Mobility is one of the issues that shows the potential that the AMB has already developed while evidencing the shortcomings that have existed until now due to a mixture of lack of political will and bureaucracy. Although many citizens are not aware of it, the metro and the Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) buses depend on the AMB, as does taxi regulation, to give two notable examples. Even the urban bus services of numerous cities around the capital have been transferred to the supra-municipal entity.
Instead, the metropolis has been unable to deploy a public bicycle service for the conurbation. The recent installation in the diffuse borders of the municipal area of Barcelona of interchange stations between Bicing and its counterpart in the first ring, AMBici, are the living image of the lack of overall vision. The process to make this new service a reality – still in the deployment phase – also demonstrates how an idea conceived from the supra-municipal level has then had to go through each plenary session of the town councils involved, which has caused an uneven pace in its implementation.
The circumstance is that it is another body, the Metropolitan Transport Authority (ATM), a consortium participated by the AMB, the Generalitat, which holds the majority, the Barcelona City Council and the Association of Municipalities for Mobility and Urban Transport ( AMTU) -those of the second crown and beyond- what is behind the action that has probably done the most to build the metropolis in the eyes of the citizens, according to Carme Miralles-Guasch, professor of the Department of Geography at the UAB. "Tariff integration has consolidated metropolitan integration. It makes us live in a city, especially in the first crown", says this researcher, who is part of the Mobility, Transport and Territory Study Group (Gemott), while defending not so much a reinforcement of supra-municipal powers as properly define its function, "how we organize the metropolis so that it is useful to the citizens".
The deployment of the low emissions zone (ZBE) delimited by the Barcelona ring roads, which covers the Catalan capital, L'Hospitalet and some areas of Esplugues, Cornellà and Sant Adrià, is another dysfunctional example. The ordinance with the regulations to make it a reality had to go through each city council, with their respective allegations, and there are even differences in the fine print of the regulations between one city and another. And although it is the AMB that manages the permit and exemption procedures, if a car circulates without a label, the fine will be sent to the city council. “The ecological transition is metropolitan, it would make no sense to implement a low-emission zone that is not metropolitan,” recalls Gomà.
Also in the field of mobility, the most immediate challenge that has been worked on since the last mandate is the extension of Barcelona's minute-by-minute rental motorcycle licenses to the entire metropolitan area. In January 2021, the capital's City Council approved the transfer of powers to the AMB to develop a model that regulates the number of vehicles and how they are distributed. Two and a half years later, it has not gone beyond some working groups that have debated and drafted proposals, but without becoming a reality.
Another area in which the AMB exercises its power is urban planning, in which it has extensive capabilities to plan, to set the rules of the game. The drafting of the Metropolitan Urban Master Plan (PDUM) is the most relevant example. The document, initially approved, is in public information. It lays the foundations for how this territory should be organized between now and 2050 and updates the drawing that was made in 1976, reflected in the General Metropolitan Plan (PGM), which accumulates some 1,600 modifications to adapt to the needs that have arisen. When the PDUM receives the definitive green light, the Metropolitan Urban Planning Plan (POUMet) will be processed, which will specify the urban qualifications on the map. “The great unknown of the debate that will take place then is the margin that the new instrument leaves to the municipalities; There are some more favorable to giving more power to the AMB and others to the municipalities,” Estela anticipates.
In contrast to the urban area, housing presents clear deficits. The AMB has powers in the matter but has not developed them to any extent. Housing is one of the most serious problems suffered by the Barcelona conurbation, with skyrocketing prices, which leads many citizens to not be able to reside not only in the city of Barcelona, but in the first ring of municipalities and even beyond. The metropolitan institution has its own business entity, the Institut Metropolità de Promoció de Sòl i Gestió Patrimonial (Impsol) and with a novel instrument, the public-private operator Habitatge Metròpolis Barcelona (HMB), shared with the Barcelona City Council and the real estate companies Cevasa. and Neinor, dedicated to the promotion of affordable rental housing.It had a complicated birth, but started at the end of 2021 with the challenge of building a park of 4,500 apartments in six years.
Housing is an example of how the metropolis transcends territorial limits. Actions can be deployed in the AMB but also outside it, in the surrounding municipalities. And here additional political conditions come into play since other administrations have responsibilities, for example, the Generalitat, in this case through the Institut Català del Sòl (Incasòl).
“What is the function of Barcelona with respect to its hinterland (area of influence), the area, the metropolitan region, an axis that goes beyond, the Mediterranean, Catalonia…?” asks Miralles-Guasch, who recalls that, today , “urban and rural are no longer so dichotomous.” This is “a delicate political debate,” he adds, “but it must be resolved. We have had it open since the 80s and we have to close it.” Gomà believes that the instruments already exist, but they must be activated. “It is not about expanding the AMB but rather about strengthening cooperation between municipalities. The deployment of the Vegueries law, which is pending, should help since the metropolitan region is a vegueria.” In that sense, Estela asks herself: “Where is the Generalitat? “It doesn’t say anything about it and it should.”
There is another deficit of the AMB, according to Gomà, that must be resolved: “Its democratic functioning,” he explains. There is no direct election of its representatives by the citizens nor of a metropolitan mayor like that of London. And it would make complete sense because this territory is actually a metropolitan city, without calling into question the municipalities that make it up.”
