Barcelona Metropolis

Three decades of neoliberal deregulation from the wild side of the market have impeded and disfigured opportunities for urban democracy and have seized the city from its people. In spite of their meagre forces, some recent municipal initiatives have worked to strengthen the role of cities in fighting inequality and in bringing democracy back to the public sphere.

Cities and sovereignty, sovereign cities, citizen sovereignty; these words bring up extremely persistent questions on how to deal with 21^st-century dilemmas. All this in a context of social degradation and the global erosion of democracy, where state sovereignty and market sovereignty no longer have much to do with the dignity of individuals and the sovereignty of peoples. This is especially true in the absence of any institutions for global governance that aren’t aimed at accelerating neoliberalism. Not even the mirage of the EU —which loudly boasts about the fundamental values that, in truth, it hacks away at day after day— is a formally democratic space. The Parliament has little say, the ECB is outside of public control and the Greek, Italian and Spanish situations of 2011 make Europe’s basic opposition to sovereignty very clear: it deposed a Greek president in order to convene a referendum, used a technical coup to impose an Italian government without elections and (miraculous miracle!) it reformed the unreformed Spanish Constitution one August night. All of this was done in the name of ceding sovereignty to the markets, markets that take away social and civil rights or impose their views when it comes time to make decisions on protecting rights, freedoms and guarantees.

In controlled, co-opted, weakened or semi-failed states, can municipal politics protect from the bottom up what others are trying to dismantle from the top down? Can cities, as Saskia Sassen would say, take on a new role, fight the metastasis of inequality in urban areas or bring democracy back to the public sphere? With varying success, many recent municipal initiatives are trying. From square one, however, they’re faced with a significant barrier: the system is designed to perpetuate itself, not to be transformed—even from within. There’s also a second barrier: accelerated mercantilism. Capitalism has discovered that cities are the pivot points for global business, and while mercantilism cruises along at full steam, its alternatives can only hoist a few sails. Plus, it’s important to remember that the class system is permeated by a translucent, parallel reality: the power of certain individuals grows day by day, beyond local institutions and without being subject to elections or accountability.

Who’s truly in charge in cities, who’s pulling the strings? Who ends up really running things, and who puts them out of kilter? Does anyone have power beyond the power of money? If the city that’s no longer filled with marvels is still a global brand, what price does it have to pay (in terms of social segregation and exclusion) to play in the global league? What kind of consequences —displacement, insecurity, substitution— do its citizens face? If a decade ago we were already talking about an unfortunate “delocalized democracy” (where many decisions were made, de facto, from the outside), and if for years now our neighbourhood movements have been talking about the behind-the-scenes power of the G-16 in Barcelona (the city elite that almost always gets its way through economic orthodoxy), what can we say now? Have we moved forwards or backwards? How sovereign are our cities, really? Who shapes them, who plans them, who decides? Who’s stronger, Uber or striking taxi drivers? With failed consumers and constant price changes, what do we care about more: the global power of boutiques or the tenuous survival of unlicensed street vendors? Why do the fairy tale of progress, the mirage of unlimited growth and the myth of continued progress continue to overcome each new resistance like methadone?

Perhaps we first need to consider the film set that encourages us to believe that we live in a democratic system with representative, fairly distributed political and civil power in spite of constant proof to the contrary. There’s very little democracy when reality reveals that we’re living under basically plutocratic political regimes —be they European, national, regional, local— with a thin veil of polyarchy. Those that have the most make the decisions, they let us choose which fraction of the elite will run our lives, and we only vote once every four years when full democracy means quite a bit more, and involves quite a bit more work, than just submitting a ballot once every 1,500 days. Three decades of neoliberal deregulation from the wild side of the market (direct or subtle, visible or disguised) have impeded and disfigured opportunities for urban democracy and have seized the city from its people. Without the connection between the two, nothing is possible. Or rather, anything is possible: any sort of mercantilist dystopia of accumulated dispossession can materialize in a “smart city” that’s half shopping mall, half military barracks. A mercantilist drive and an authoritarian drive, hand in hand.

Sure, we’re talking about Barcelona, but how many Barcelonas are there? How many kinds of political segregation, cultural elitism and social exclusion are they under? How many other faces of the moon are there? Barcelona may be a global capital on the world’s trading floors and in the glossy brochures for each big event. But since there’s never history without counterhistory, we can’t explain the Mobile World Congress without the modern slavery of big corporations’ subcontracts or the all-powerful law of silence on coltan mining or overexploitation in the factories of Shenzhen. Can we explain the tourism industry without Les Kellys or toxic social, occupational or ecological side effects? Can we eat whatever we want in a smart city at the cost of instability on wheels? What purchasing level do we need in order to consume in cathedrals of culture? Who are cities of design designed for?

From very different points of view, a broad range of adjectives have been applied to the uncluttered irrationality of 21^st-century capitalism: “suicidal”, according to liberal economist Miquel Puig; “senile” according to critic Miren Etxezarreta; “zombie” according to Anton Costas of the Cercle d’Economia. Or even “sadistic”, in the words of Kaurismäki: “capitalism is no more, now there is only sadism.” “We are all in danger”, wrote Passolini. The corrosion of democracy marches on, eating away at the few good things that should be preserved. In fact, it has gone so far that it’s no longer about going someplace better. Rather, it’s about escaping the worst possible place to which we’re being herded. Cities should be the dams that sovereignly hold all this back. In this strange meanwhile —without global governability, with atrophied rule of law— any resistance will be local. Will there be enough, and will it be in time? There’s no way to be sure, but standing up to, dismantling and turning around anti-democratic regression, antisocial backtracking and authoritarian involution will require multiple efforts, shared struggles and reclaimed sovereignty. And all of this before the concept of an open city comes to refer only (in the military vocabulary of a severe defeat) to a city that no longer offers resistance, that no longer has the strength or the means or the sovereignty to defend itself, and that has decided to commit hara-kiri in the face of the voracity of its tormentors.