Barcelona Metropolis

Barcelona Metròpolis takes on a new era with a new format, a new design and a new digital space. The new Barcelona Metròpolis wants to be a tool for promoting and stimulating citizen debate on the big questions affecting our future.

In this, its 109^th edition, Barcelona Metròpolis takes on a new era with a new format, a new design and a new digital space. Our experience up to now has been positive, but we’d like to reorient our content and strengthen its reflective aspect. The new Barcelona Metròpolis wants to be a tool for promoting and stimulating citizen debate on the big questions affecting our future. We want to help provoke thought, and in doing so encourage citizens to help make the decisions that affect their lives.

Proper democratic deliberation requires both time and knowledge. In the confusion and post-truth politics of the present, it isn’t information that’s lacking. Sometimes, there’s even too much of it—but information doesn’t always equal knowledge. To understand the complexity of these fast, turbulent times, we need spaces for careful reflection, for thoughts to be slow-cooked, where citizens can form their own free, judicious opinions.

We know that the future will be decided in cities. Barcelona has shown that it has the creativity and the strength it needs to be a metropolis open to the world. However, for the same reason, it also suffers from the harmful effects of a globalization that often places the interests of certain segregated minorities before those of the community. We want to contribute to the debate on how to build both city and citizenship, and how to improve the quality of our democracy.