The mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, and his London counterpart, Sadiq Khan, met this Tuesday in Madrid, within the framework of the Bloomberg City Lab forum, and called for “recovering the city centers for residents.” The two mayors showed political and personal rapport and expressed interest in sharing and learning about two projects: the transformation of La Rambla in Barcelona, and Oxford Street in London, as examples of interventions “that have in common the intention of recovering them for residents,” in Collboni’s words. In July, explained the mayor of Barcelona, there will be an exchange between the technical teams of the two cities.
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“We have shared with Mayor Khan the challenges that large European cities face regarding housing (such as rent regulation and the closure of tourist apartments) and climate change to make them more comfortable,” explained Collboni, who specifically defended “the right of citizens to stay in the face of speculation, gentrification, and uninhabitability of the city.” “These are new challenges that force us to apply innovative policies that had not been done until now,” he added.
In his turn, Sadiq Khan, who leads the C40 network of cities against the effects of climate change, stated: “One of my ambitions is to learn from Barcelona.” Khan also referred to “challenges that become opportunities, citing the case of traffic or housing, citing the transformation of La Rambla. The Mayor of London celebrated the good “personal and political” relationship he has with Collboni and advocated for cities to “not compete, but rather collaborate and work together.”
In the morning, during the Bloomberg City Lab forum at the Teatro Real, Collboni highlighted the importance of the Mayors for Housing network, launched by Barcelona two years ago, and to which other cities such as Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Athens, Dublin, or Munich belong, to put housing on the European agenda. “Thanks to our collaboration, for the first time the EU has a Housing Commissioner, and we are fighting for resources to build affordable housing. Defending housing is defending democracy,” Collboni stressed, he said, against disinformation and authoritarianism.
The event, in which the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, acted as host, became an improvised ideological battleground where PP and PSOE championed their management models. The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, cited Barcelona and Vitoria as examples, both with socialist mayors and with housing policies, pedestrianizations, and an increase in green areas. Sánchez lamented how the adoption of denialist ideology by the Génova party is consolidating in “the formation of governments that deny the effects and nature of the climate emergency.”
The mayor of Madrid defended having created the necessary conditions to expedite the construction of homes to address the lack of supply. Almeida intends to double or even triple the number of 150,000 homes currently planned for construction in the various urban projects already proposed and approved. Collboni, on the other hand, starts from a different perspective to combat housing scarcity. The mayor of Barcelona detailed the measures he has promoted in his first term, which are based on two pillars: capping rent price increases and the decision not to renew any tourist apartment licenses from 2028 onwards. “Airbnb will no longer be able to operate in the city, which will mean making 10,000 homes currently used for tourism available to the city’s families,” he noted.
The PSC mayor highlighted that the City Council is building more protected housing and already has 10,000 in project. Collboni also explained the innovative housing rehabilitation project in Barcelona, using artificial intelligence to facilitate information, reduce bureaucracy, help with financing, and create consensus in communities, awarded by the Bloomberg Foundation.
During the Bloomberg City Lab forum, Pedro Sánchez took the opportunity to contrast the model he represents with that of the right on two very sensitive issues for citizens: housing and immigration. The President of the Government defended the regularization process for half a million people in an irregular situation and the intervention of a rental market “that does not work” as a remedy for the exorbitant prices that have made access to housing the major problem of the legislature.
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