A new aura

Bogged down in a problematic industrial conversion and hit by an unemployment rate of almost 22%, Barcelona in the early 1980s was not the influential European town it was to become twenty years later, largely as a result of the organisation of the 1992 Olympic Games. Spread out over the metropolitan area, the organisation of the Games was partly inspired by the recommendations of the Metropolitan Strategic Plan for Barcelona (PEMB), which even today uses the same public-private partnership model to stimulate the development and international influence of this zone of 3.15 million inhabitants.
Located between the mountains and the Mediterranean, Barcelona and the surrounding municipalities form an indissociable unit. “A corner of the Spanish Catalan football club stadium is in Prat and the cages are in Cornella, both neighbouring towns to Barcelona,” says a spokesman for the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (AMB), an organisation resulting from the first regional planning projects in the mid-20th century, and which is now at the head of three independent branches: transport management, the environment (waste and water) and a Community of Municipalities (Mancomunidad) that brings together 36 municipalities in the area. Since forming a group is voluntary, municipalities take a joint decision on the budget to adopt, contributing 9% of the budget allocated them by the State. Taken together, the three budgets represent 1.5 billion euros, the third biggest in the region, behind that of the Catalan government and the City of Barcelona.   
The towns form a unit that is particul-arly coherent since the outskirts of Barcelona have been nicknamed the “red belt” after the political colour of the municipalities that go to make it up. Today, the powerful regional government is also directed by a left-wing alliance, which facilitates the creation of the synergies essential for the smooth running of a structure caught in a vice between the different regional levels. Experience has shown, moreover, that metropolitan coordination, ill-defined at national level, could prove fragile: it was the Catalan government, directed in the 1980s by the sovereignist conservatives of the CiU Party, that dissolved the ancestor of the AMB and divided it into three branches. Today, a centralist consortium centralising its three branches is being recreated with the blessing of the political powers this time.
In 1988, with the AMB decapitated and the 1992 Olympic Games approaching, a Strategic Metropolitan Plan for Barcelona (PEMB) was founded to draw up a strategy for the future. This private, not-for-profit association has officially covered the same metropolitan area since 2003 as the AMB, which is a member, moreover. According to a report of the French Association of metropolitan CCIs (Report by the Brussels consultancy Ramboll), the PEMB benefits from “an exemplary implication of civil society,” with more than 300 institutions from the public and private sectors as voluntary members.
It is financed in part by the regional government, local government and the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce, as well as by big organisations such as the port and airport of Barcelona, and by donations from its other members. “The plan has no executive power, but puts forward guidelines,” explains Francesc Santacana, its coordinator.
After the boom produced by the organisation of the Games, Barcelona was looking for its second wind at the end of the 1990s, notably by launching the Forum project, an area of hotels and conference halls, and was also seeking to improve its logistics platform with the port, airport (32 million passengers in 2007) and the free zone. More recently, the Plan inspired Project 22@, the conversion of a former industrial zone into a district specialising in new technologies and concentrating on the biotechnology and media sectors alongside infrastructure projects (development of the metro lines and high-speed trains, etc.). The metropolitan area also wants to occupy a central position in Mediterranean relationships.
“Barcelona obviously has a great deal of influence over the group as a whole,” says Francesc Santacana. “But a very good understanding exists between all the municipalities, a result, perhaps, of their well-defined identities. None has a complex vis-à-vis the capital.” The PEMB is now seeking to establish a new model of public-private partnership. “We would like our members to progress from participation to management.”