Is Barcelona a Smart City?

In this panel we're focusing on the host city, on Barcelona. Barcelona was one of the first cities in Europe to implement smart city technology. It was even named European Capital of Innovation in 2014. But in recent years, in which city authorities have focused on citizen driven initiatives, the Spanish city seems to have been falling behind. The previous government had focused on partnering with large companies and large technology players and deploying smart city technology, but it has all become very political and many of the projects are pilot and limited to the city centre, so as a Barcelona resident myself, I do wonder, is Barcelona truly a smart city? I'm joined by Maria Galindo Garcia Delgado, board member of the Climate Neutral and Smart Cities Mission at the European Commission. Maria was previously manager for the Smart City Business Development at the City of Barcelona and Director General for Digital Nation and Urban Agenda of the Government of Catalunya. And Esteve Almiray, you are an Associated Professor at ESADE and Director of the Centre for Innovation in Cities in Barcelona. you are passionate about AI and digitalization so Esteve what can you tell us about what a city needs to have to be a smart city and does Barcelona tick those boxes well smart city is probably a very difficult concept because it's very poetic there is not such a definition of what a smart city is it has many different views smart city in general is that we use the in order to improve our cities but you can use the technology in many different ways you can use the technology to make cities more efficient with garbage collection with mobility with security but you can also use the technology to plant cities and you have cities like the 15 -minute city full of grain and you can have the walkable livable cities so smart city has many many different visions of what smart cities that's why saying this city is smart or this city is not smart. It's almost impossible if you don't define well first which is your vision of a smart city because there are very different visions, probably conflicting ones. Just to highlight the three most common ones, if you go to this, you will have the technological city. You will have the Chinese technological city full of cameras, full of sensors, full of all these kind of things. If you go to America... probably you will have cities dominated by companies, by big enterprises, where you have lots of self -driving cars put inside the city, and so on. And if you go to Europe, probably you will have more cities interested in participation, in liberal cities, in green spaces, and so on. Very different visions is to summarize the three main ones. All of them are a smart city, so it depends very much on the vision. So it depends on the city. You can be smart in very different ways. Maria, do you think Barcelona nowadays, nowadays, 2022, is it a smart city? Okay, so long story short, Barcelona currently at least is not as a smart city as it was in the past because of what Esteban was saying. To me, a smart city is a logic city in the sense that it uses the resources that are available in the most efficient way. So that being said, in order to become a smart city, you need a consistent vision, and you need leadership for this, and you also need a plan. And usually the plan... needs to be long-term with this vision, so setting up a long-term vision, but then also bearing in mind that you have a day-to-day project to deploy and you have the day-to-day needs of the citizens and of the cities. And so sometimes the true challenge of a smart city is how do you plan long-term with your short-term needs. So Barcelona... Barcelona used to be a smart city, and I was in the Barcelona team at the time when Barcelona was awarded the iCapital Prize, the capital of innovation in Europe. And at the time, Barcelona was awarded the prize because we had a consistent vision, a long -term 2050 vision, and we would work together with the different elements of the ecosystem. It's basically impossible to deliver or to build a smart city if you do it on your own, just, you know, with the city managers, but you need everyone in the ecosystem. So you need to work together with the academia, you need to work together with universities, with startups, and also with large companies, because at the end of the day, smart city means deployment of technology. not just not not for for deploying technology for itself like maybe a system I was saying at these Asian cities that have like a lot of technology deployed, but Why is technology helping me to be more efficient to be more and you know to manage better traffic waste to improve the quality of life of citizens to Reduce the digital gap So how technology is help? need to do that and this also implies a lot of investment and so right now cities or public bodies don't have the capacity to invest this huge loads of money into technology also because technology is advancing and accelerating very fast and so you need to keep up with the peace and sometimes it's it's not that easy for public bodies to keep up with private development and with industry developments so you need to incorporate the different visions of the ecosystem and that way is how the smart city is going to work so working together with the citizens with the universities with startups with large corporations and right now I don't think that Barcelona is doing that at least as much Yes, it was doing that before as it was doing it. So what projects have you been involved in and how are they doing now? Yeah, so I remember when I, and this is a personal story, when I quit the Barcelona City Council, that was back in 2015, so seven years ago. And at the time we were negotiating and managing these huge collaborations with large companies. companies, multinational companies like Cisco, Schneider, with GDF, and so part of these agreements was that these companies would use Barcelona as a showcase of their solutions because we knew Barcelona, like everyone was looking at Barcelona, the rest of the cities in the world were looking at Barcelona, so we would use Barcelona as a showcase, and in turn they would be investing in the city, so deploying this. solutions in the city. And that was a win -win, right? But at the time, the government changed in Barcelona. Unfortunately, some of these investments, like, punished, basically, because the bet of the government of the city of Barcelona towards these large multinationals operating in the city was not as consistent as it was before. Esteve, what are the main changes you've seen in recent years when it comes to smart city initiatives in Barcelona? What are the deep reasons for the changes as well? May I answer the same question first and then I answer your question. Well I think it's very complicated many times to say this is a smart city or not because you can see a smart city is so povier, it has so many- things and that any city has components of being a smart city. It's like saying is this person fit? Well, yeah, in some cases, in some ways, it's fit. So let's try to answer an easier question, a probably more interesting question. How much effort put this person in being fit? How much effort puts Barcelona in being a smart city? This is an easy question to answer and because you can mention how much money do you put that? How many projects, how well they do evangelist advocacy to the cities, and so on, and this is pretty I mean, they are doing advocacy of smart cities, evangelist of smart cities, or not. How many projects are, what is the amount of money that these projects convey, what type of, what is the size of the projects, and so on. When you look at this, you can see a huge distance between what Barcelona was and what Barcelona is. presence of the smart city initiatives and the smart city concepts in the municipal policy in the effort to try to convey all these big and small companies around the world to the city, to the amount of money that you have in smart city projects, to the amount of companies, the number of companies involved in this smart city project. So this easier to answer question shows what Barcelona wants to be and it's a very concrete question I mean how much money do you put and why and where and so on and it's easy to answer. Barcelona has a huge municipal budget it's 3 .6 billion euros it's a huge amount of money for a city of 1 .5 million inhabitants not even that that doesn't have education neither healthcare inside the budget that is in the original budget So, there is plenty of money, there is plenty of civil servants, there is plenty of resources. Where these resources are directed, where are the initiatives of the city? Maybe I think this is an easy way to answer the question. I do, one of the questions I have, because with all the political problems that there have been, we have seen companies leaving Barcelona for other Spanish cities, and do tech companies have been discouraged to coming to the city due to what's been happening do you think well look nowadays we had cisco intel has been here all the time that they have been here all the time aws has amazon has labs here i don't think companies are so sensible to these political movements i mean the companies learned and adapt and companies are in China, until now they were in Russia, so companies are in a very complicated countries, way more complicated than anything that we can create, so companies are very, I don't think that this is what discourage companies, what really discourage companies is the lack of responsiveness of the city officials, I mean if you go there and everything it's very complicated, you have the... feeling that you are not welcome in the city and so on. This is what really discourage companies. Companies are used to work with dictators, some bloody ones, so you have dictators of any case, democratic governments, turbulent governments, all companies are in Italy and imagine how many changes do you have in governments in Italy and how many clashes of interest. So I think this What is really important is, do you have help coming to the city or not? The bureaucratic process is a nightmare that nobody can solve, or it's an easy one. Do you have the government backing you up here or not, or you have conflicts all day long and you have the feeling that you are not welcome. And this has probably had way more impact than the small political turmoil. It's more compared to what is happening in the world. I mean, we are not Ukraine. We have never been Ukraine and so on. That happened here. What do you think, Maria? I would say that, yeah, even though the political, you know, scenario, companies are still investing in Barcelona and in Catalonia. And in recent years, we've seen, I think, record numbers of investment of tech companies. of tech professionals coming over to Barcelona and a lot of companies are located here at their headquarters for Europe even worldwide headquarters and I think that's even though the government and but but I think that's problematic even and from from the government point of view because the government is is not really the government of Barcelona not really working or facility facilitating the establishment of these companies and even though we have record numbers because Barcelona has the brand because people want to come over to Barcelona because we have this trend of digital nomads coming to Barcelona even though they are working for American companies and Indian companies and but they want to be in Barcelona because of the leisure because of the climate because of the food because of the culture because of many other things but I think that we should we should use this asset I mean I'm worried that we're not using this asset as a city to even, you know, gain more recognition in the smart city arena and in the sustainable city field and in many other things that we could be doing together. Do you think there's a specific use case of smart city that Barcelona is still leading or no? Yeah, of course. I mean, it has been super years, this kind of... The Superblocks is something that comes from 30 years ago, it's nothing new, has been in the drawers of all the administrations that we had and so on. And they had some different implementations and so on. This is not so far away from the 50 -minute city of Paris or the microforest in Paris and so on. I mean, this is, this actual administration is very involved in this kind of. policy. I think very late, probably not in the best possible way. This is one line. Another line is all these tactical urbanism that appeared in 2009 in New York with Janet Kant and so on. All these tactical urbanism has been implemented in Barcelona in many different ways. Probably many times it was not necessary because with tactical urbanism you do two things. One experiment things that you don't know. you know it you don't have to experiment and the other one is to make changes in a very cheap way. Many times you have a feeling here that you use the tactical experiment for knowing things that we already know the answer because has been tried in 20 cities around the world since 2009 until now I mean come on it's almost 15 years and it has been tactical urbanism is not nothing that started yesterday not the case but well these are two direct where the city is smart. Also in this, there is another part that is the part of the fab labs, experimentation, citizen science and so on. Steve is there. It is probably not big, but Steve is there. And there are parts of the city that are very interesting that are not related to the government at all. I mean we have Barcelona Supercomputer Center, we have lots of AI in the city, and so on. This is not related at all in the city, but they do a lot in digital twins, many times not in the city of Barcelona, outside the city of Barcelona, and so on. They work a lot in all these areas, and this is also a smart city. What do you think? Barcelona is a very open cosmopolitan, very entrepreneur, very vibrant city. I think that it should use these assets to really gain, you know, again, a number one and top smart city worldwide. And not just a smart city, but the city you want to be, the city where you want to live, where people like you can come and leave the city and enjoy the city, really. And so Barcelona has the capacity to lead this, you know, the city's the next... face for the cities that are Mediterranean that are very open with these huge spaces for people to gather together where you can do things together with where universities are very close to startups or to technology to working together and and so I think that's in our DNA and that's always been like this we're innovative we're entrepreneur and so we should gain and build on that Bartholomew Barcelona has been one of the 100 cities that the European Commission has designated for the mission on climate-neutral and smart cities. And so its duty is to be climate-neutral by 2030 because there will be this first round of 100 cities and then every other city in Europe can follow up after this 100. And so we have seven years to go and we'll see whether Barcelona is capable of leading leading this first round of climate -neutral and smart cities in Europe or not, and I really hope to see Barcelona as the top city to do this. I would like to know, what is the role, like, does the role of the regional government have a real impact on the smart city agenda? Yes, I shall answer that, because I was an official at the government of Catalonia. two weeks ago, two weeks ago, and yes, yes, absolutely, they have a role, the government has a role, and the government has this kind of vision to see that Barcelona is the capital city of the region of Catalonia, but has an impact in the whole region, and that whether it grows or not has, you know, depends also and impacts what's happening in the rest of Catalonia. We're seeing that Barcelona is concentrating both people and also economic activity. And so the government was advocating for a more balanced and sustained growth in the overall. And so technology and the smart city, smart region concept was one to drive these kind of opportunities elsewhere. So through technology, through connectivity and through... operating, for instance, 5G areas across the territory so that different economic activity can arise in other areas too. Another question. Elections are coming up. What do you think will happen? So do citizens believe Barcelona is a smart city? And do you think things will change in six months with the elections? Well, citizens, I mean, you have a barack. It's a diverse group and so on. Probably some of them, a few of them, think of the Smart City concept as important for the city, particularly because of the Smart City Expo. I mean, this is a big event, 20 ,000 people coming every year and so on, particularly because of that. What is going to happen in the elections is the same thing that is going to happen all over Europe. I mean, it's not going to be a winner. It's going to be a coalition of groups that are trying to... get into the city so we will have one of these city governments like anywhere in Europe where you have at least two parties, maybe three, but at least two, and it will be this tension between the parties and so on. This is very important because this is our future and then if we want to survive that we need agreement between parties and we need a long-term mission. We are not going to make, not a smart city in Barcelona, a decent Barcelona, if everybody is fighting all day long about every small thing that happens in the city. And if we don't have a common vision, not only inside the government, but also with the industries, with the academia, with the society. City is something that we all have to build together. This tension and this lack of consensus is… probably the work that is happening in these last eight years in Barcelona. Do you agree? Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I mean, you need a shared vision that goes beyond political terms and political aspects otherwise. And I do think that Barcelona, from the point of view of citizens, ten years ago I think it was undoubtedly that Barcelona... was a smart city. At least Barcelona was leading, was doing things differently, was revolutioning the smart cities worldwide. I don't think it's doing it right now at the time, but I think there's still a way to go and to change things. Great. Thank you so much for answering our questions. It was great. And hopefully we'll learn about that new vision. We'll see what's going to happen in six months. Let's see if Barcelona becomes one of the leading smart cities again.