8. Case: Barcelona
8.1. The Changing Smart City Building in Barcelona
8.1.1. The Start of Smart Barcelona
In contrast to the other cases discussed above (Chapter 5.-6.), political contestation and different political dogmas have significantly affected Barcelona's smart city evolution (see below), resulting in two distinguishable periods with each different projects and objectives.
The first wave of Barcelona's smart city evolution was started in 2011 during the central-right Catalan-nationalist government (2011-2015) and served mainly as a laboratory for multinational tech companies to introduce smart city solutions for urban governance that provided to enhance the efficiency of the city operations, leading to a better quality of life (March & Ribera-Fumaz, 2014). The plan was a part of a broader city development strategy (Strategic Metropolitan Plan – Vision 2020) to reform Barcelona's development path and transform the post-industrial city into an attractive and internationally competitive global site that pulls talents, capital, and businesses which eventually leads to economic growth (The Place Brand Observer, 2015). The broader vision included, for example, the construction of a new business-innovation district called 22@Barcelona, located in a former industrial area near the city center. The regeneration plan aimed to transform the district into a concentration of intensive knowledge-based hub that generates 100,000 new jobs and will be the engine of Barcelona’s further development (Leon, 2008); (Urban Sustainability Exchange, sd).
Nevertheless, critics highlight that the entrepreneurial strategies from the government seemed to be pursued based on the interest of multinational corporations, the flow of global capital, and real estate developers rather than the city's residents (Charnock, et al., 2019), prioritizing growth and the establishment of Barcelona's modern image that has been designing by the city-elite since the '80s and '90s (Bua & Bussu, 2021). The incarnation of the careful image building was apparent with the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, which sought to portray the city as a vibrant, modern cultural and business center; and stimulate urban development processes (Chen, 2015). This symbolic event perfectly shows the government's strategic intentions discussed above, which were further reinforced with other developments such as the 22@ Barcelona Plan and, later on, the Vision 2020, which includes the Barcelona Smart City.
In the first smart city period (2011-2015), Barcelona established many partnerships with leading smart city companies, such as Cisco, Schneider Electronics, and Accenture, to create network infrastructure, build innovation centers, and develop intelligent tools (Monge, et al., 2022) (March & Ribera-Fumaz, 2018); (Nesti, 2020). Until 2015, the city developed 22 smart city programs in various areas, encompassing 83 individual projects (Adler, 2016). One of the primary outcomes of smart city development was the establishment of the ABM (Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona), the new integrated supra-municipality and public administration web service that unified the 36 municipalities' roles and services in the Barcelona metropolitan area, in which more than 3 million citizens can reach the region's all public services (ABM, 2015). Besides the integrated online service, on the newly designed municipality website, citizens can also reach various open data and reports about the previously disconnected 36 municipalities.
Figure 17.: Smart City Projects in Barcelona between 2011-2015
Key Projects Smart Dimension
Goals Ecological
Sustainability effects Smart Beaches Smart Living • Application of smart sensors on the beaches to reduce
waste and improve rubbish management. Weather and occupancy conditions about the beach online.
• Public Address system also provides information about safety and emergencies, the condition of the sea.
• The Public Address system provides free-wifi
No carbon emission reduction
Key Projects Smart Dimension
Goals Ecological
Sustainability effects Smart Parks and
Smart Irrigation Systems
Smart Governance, Smart Environment
• Application of smart sensors to improve quality control by providing tools. IoT technologies can remotely sense and control park irrigation and water levels in fountains. Thus, it can be determined how much irrigation is needed.
No carbon emission reduction.
Yet, it reduced water
consumption in parks.
Smart Mobility Smart Mobility, Smart Governance, Smart Living
• Aim to improve public transportation system and provide necessary travel information for the users. To achieve a satisfactory public transport system the city implemented 450 ‘dynamic information panels’ at bus stops; 4,500 sensors that offer service data to the
‘AMBtempsbus’ application.
• In addition, the inBus System that provide real time information about their journey.
No carbon emission reduction
Zero-Emission Mobility Program
Smart
Mobility • 12 electronic vehicles and 102 electronic bicycles were given to the Metropolitan Councils.
• installation of 10 quick charging stations for electric vehicles.
• 1 totally electric bus and 107 buses with hybrid technology
No significant carbon emission reduction, yet a good start to delivering changes
Smart Mobil Phone apps
Smart Governance, Smart Living
Informations about various areas of the city: beach conditions, buses, city-bikes, taxis, deals about industrial buildings, parks.
No carbon emission reduction Open Data
Platform
Smart Governance
The role of open data is for third parties to be able to use the data to generate applications, to facilitate the management of public administrations, and to permit data access to the public. Thus, with its new portal the AMB fulfills two of the fundamental principles of open government through its actions of transparency and collaboration.
No Carbon emission reduction
CityOS Smart
Governance
CityOS gathers data on urban activity thanks to sensors and IoT around the city. Thanks to the data, the City Council is organising its infrastructure based on open-code Big Data technology, City OS.
No carbon emission reduction
As the Figure 17. displays above the main smart city projects, it can be noted that between 2011 and 2015, the projects had mainly an initiatory function without offering any complex resolution to urban issues and carbon emission reduction. However, the projects provided necessary smart instruments for citizens required in a modern urban site, such as weather conditions about beaches and parks and information about the public transportation.
In terms of ecological sustainability, Barcelona's smart city projects are not particularly aimed at reducing the city's carbon footprint; instead, the priority was to modernize urban management systems and services that improve citizens' daily routines. Nevertheless, the willingness to transform the city's mobility has been demonstrated by turning to electronic vehicles in the public sphere and installing EV charging stations on a relatively small scale.
Due to the small scale, the intentions presumably did not have any carbon emission reduction effect in this period due to the scale of the development.
Among the smart city projects, the Smart Park Irrigation System needs to be highlighted, which has been cut down 25% of the city water bill by reducing water usage in public parks (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2014a). This result was a significant achievement, especially in Barcelona's Mediterranean climate, which tends to be more vulnerable to extreme droughts and water scarcity – in 2006 and 2008, Barcelona was hit by extreme droughts that made the municipality import drinking water from France (Keeley, 2008); (Forero-Oritz, et al., 2020).
8.1.2. The Second Wave of Smart City Building
A significant shift occurred in 2015 regarding Barcelona's development when a new political platform emerged (Barcelona en Camú) from social activism to a winning political party without any ties to the existing political actors (Monge, et al., 2022); (Burgen, 2016). The movement identified itself as a sort of inevitable response to the existing establishment's lack of intention to solve crucial social issues; it also a rebellion that ‘wins back the city for the people’ (Barcelona En Comú, 2016, p. 4).
This political rebellion is the inherent characteristic of the party's definitive goal to transform political parties' traditional structures and create a new form of democratic political participation based on the idea of ‘radical democracy’ (Zelinka, 2018, p. 2). Therefore, the party's intention is more than winning the election and rule. It wants to change the status quo and alter Barcelona's political participation and, ultimately, the concept of democracy.
According to advocates, the ideology of radical democracy offers alternative governance to representative democracy and to the dominant neoliberal capitalist society, that has been failing to cope with pressing issues such as increasing social inequalities, racism, and climate crises (Horwarth & Roussos, 2022); (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). Instead, it proposes a different form of democratic politics, accentuating direct participation, horizontality, deliberation, equality, and inclusivity (Horwarth & Roussos, 2022, p. 2); (della Porta, 2020).
The new government and its radically different political incentives significantly changed the direction of Barcelona's smart city building by introducing in 2016 the 'Beyond Smart Cities:
The People's Roadmap Towards Technological Sovereignty' agenda18 (Monge, et al., 2022);
(Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2016a). The roadmap aims to deliver a digital transformation and create an innovative city but seeks to accomplish it with the priority of social inclusion and the empowerment of the citizens. Therefore, the government vigorously countered the previous administration's procedure that left the city exposed to multinational companies in the conviction of profiting from the smart city building. Notedly, the Plan declared as the central principle of smart city building the need to establish the city's digital sovereignty by pivoting the control towards the grassroots and civic sphere from private interest (Charnock, et al., 2019); (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2016b). The creators of the program view the Barcelona model as an alternative narrative that substantially differs from 'the surveillance capitalism of Silicon Valley and the dystopian Chinese model' (Graham, 2018, p. 1) by offering participation in decision-making to the fullest degree, which actually serves the people instead of technology adaption pushed by specific economic or political incentives (Charnock, et al., 2019); (Tieman, 2017); (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2016c).
The Barcelona Digital City Plan is founded on three fundamental elements that strongly influenced Barcelona's overall smart city program: Digital Transformation, Digital Innovation, and Digital Empowerment, which plan is expected to create a smart, open, equitable, circular, and democratic city (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2016c, p. 5).
The first pillar of the Plan is the Digital Transformation of the City Council and the City, which aspires to develop an open and distributed public data infrastructure that involves various actors in the decision-making participation. It is expected to improve the overall governance performance while making the government more transparent and participative (Ajuntament de Barcelona, sd); (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2019). The Figure 18. displays that the Digital Transformation runs around 3 sub-categories that determine the diverse project palette.
First, to improve the governance, the decision-makers consider city-data as a common good that should be open-sourced and transparent. In 2016, the City Council created the Open Budget platform, where users can get detailed information about the government’s budget and expenses to enhance accountability, which is considered to be a crucial aspect of an open
18 Part of the Barcelona Digital City Plan (2015-2019)
government. Besides that, the government provides access to all the algorithms that the city uses to make the smart city transparent and subject to scrutiny (Ajuntament de Barcelona, sd).
Moreover, to fight against corruption, citizens can report unethical, corrupt processes through the Ethical Mailbox, which is open-source software that guarantees anonymity for the individual (Ajuntament de Barcelona, sd).
Second, the Digital Commons initiative aims to secure the citizens' increasing sized digital footprint. For example, the DECODE project19, open-sourced, decentralized, privacy-aware, and right-respecting blockchain data platform, enables the citizens to complete control over their private data (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2019). It guarantees data sovereignty and privacy.
Figure 18.: The projects in Barcelona’s Digital Transformation Agenda
Sub-categories Projects Effects on carbon
reduction
Beneficial for the overall Sustainability For a Better Government • Open budget
• Digital market
• Ethical mailbox
• Digital Identity
• Progressive web apps
• Open-sourced software
None No
Digital Urban Infrastructure • 5G Barcelona
• Internet4all
• Superblock
• T-mobiltat (mobility management system)
• Sentilo
Yes (Yet, only the Superblock initiative has a somewhat positive impact on carbon reduction)
‘Superblock’
significantly improves the social and ecological sustainability of the city.
Data Commons • Open-data portal
• DECODE
• Municipality Data Office
None No
Third, Digital Transformation requires an intelligent infrastructure that is able to improve the services provided to the city residents and enable the city to tackle immense urban challenges (Ajuntament de Barcelona, sd). Barcelona's urban infrastructure technology is called 'Sentilo,' which monitors 68% of public places and records 3 million interactions per day, including traffic lights, parking places, containers, the flow of people, vehicles, bicycles, and air quality
19 DECODE was funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme
(Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2019). Another noteworthy project that is part of the digital transformation and aspired to improve Barcelona's urban environment, making it more ecologically and socially sustainable was the creation of Superblocks (Superilles). In this project, Barcelona redesigned the city's streets to limit traffic and increase green and recreational spaces for citizens to protect neighborhoods from traffic accidents, strengthen pedestrian rights and enhance social cohesion (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2016d), which provide a better quality of life. The plan also had a significant effect on noise and air pollution reduction (WHO, 2020). It was an indispensable move for Barcelona, which has relatively low green spaces, about 7m² of green space per inhabitant, whereas for example, Berlin and Vienna have 60m2 green spaces per person (Laan & Piersma, 2021). Thanks to the Superblock initiative, the green spaces will be significantly increased in the city. For instance, in the Eixample neighborhood, the green spaces were estimated to be increased to 19.6% from 6.5%
(Mueller, et al., 2020).
The second pillar of the Digital City Plan is the Digital Innovation and Development of the Entrepreneurial and Social Innovation Ecosystem, which elevates Barcelona's digital economy and innovative ecosystem and strengthens the local entrepreneurs by encouraging cooperation (Ajuntament de Barcelona, sd). The City Council introduced several projects that can be beneficial for Barcelona's entrepreneur network. For example, it established the MediaTIC Incubator, open innovation space specialized for work and projects with disturbing technologies such as AI and the Internet of Things. Furthermore, the city attempts to encourage innovators with different workshops, and programs as well as established many ‘innovation centers’ (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2019, p. 10).
The third pillar, the most socially progressive aspect, is the Digital Empowerment of Citizens, which aims to nurture the citizens' capabilities and prepare them 'for the future of work’ in order to create an adequate talent pool. The city seeks to empower its citizens through three aspects: digital training, digital inclusion, and digital rights. The Figure 19. below displays the main projects of each sub-category concerning Digital Empowerment (Ajuntament de Barcelona, sd).
Figure 19.: The projects in Barcelona’s Digital Empowerment Agenda
Sub-categories Projects Effects on carbon
reduction
Beneficial for the overall
Sustainability Digital Education and
Training • Fab Labs
• STEAM BCN
• Cibernàrium
None Socially beneficial
Digital Inclusion • Connecting Barcelona
• REC (social currency)
• Vincles BCN
• Digital education
• Technology and Gender
• Women in Tech
None Socially beneficial
Rights and Democracy • Decidim.Barcelona None No
Barcelona's leaders want to empower its citizens by training and education in cutting-edge technologies. For example, the STEAM BCN initiative offers resources and tools for teaching staff and families to foster science and technology knowledge, which was successfully provided to more than 6000 children by 2019 (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2019). Another important initiative is the Cibernàrium, which offers 180 types of technological education from coding to basic IT knowledge for citizens. Until 2019, more than 39,000 participants took programs that aimed to improve the participants’ digital skills (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2019). In addition, the ‘Barcelona Active’ helps citizens find work, lunch projects, prepare a business plan, and look for funding (Ajuntament de Barcelona, sd).
Digital Empowerment also puts a considerable emphasis on social inclusion since it defines the digital divide as a new type of social fracture in cities that need to be addressed.
Therefore, the Plan aims to reduce the digital gap by facilitate skills, abilities, and access to new technologies in a broad social spectrum (Ajuntament de Barcelona, sd). Correspondingly, the Plan provides high-quality internet access and tools to vulnerable households (Connecting Barcelona program) and delivers solutions with technology for elderly people who often feel lonely and left out (VinclesBCN). Another project focuses on gender inequality and try to encourage women in tech-related professions and education.
Lastly, Digital Empowerment means access to participation in decision-making and assessment of Barcelona's public projects. For instance, 'Decidim' is an open-sourced platform for citizens to actively participate in city governance with planning and ideas (Charnock, et al., 2019). Until 2019, the platform had a successful undertaking with more than 40,000 registered
participants, which resulted in 13,000 proposals. Out of the proposals, even 9000 had been incorporated into public policy, leaving 70% of the government decisions co-produced by citizens (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2019).