Joan Clos

The Barcelona Strategic Plan was an instrument that featured citizen and social participation to develop ideas and proposals for the years after the Olympic Games. We wanted to launch an initiative based on collective reflection in order to avoid what had happened in other Olympic cities, in other words, that after the Games a lack of initiatives of proposals would end up in a major depression. Similarly, many Olympic cities had experienced phases of great economic depression and chronic deficits that Barcelona wanted to avoid. That was why the Strategic Plan was launched three years before the Games were to be held, looking out for the next phase of Barcelona’s evolution. Thus, the Port, the Fira, the trade unions, the universities, the Zona Franca Consortium, the neighbourhood associations and all our residents were called upon to participate actively in order to force all the relevant institutions into forward thinking. Now, 30 years on, many of the concepts of the Strategic Plan are common culture. But at that time they represented a real innovation in the culture of relations between institutions and even in the development of a new language.

A new exercise in economic, social and territorial foresight would undoubtedly be very useful in light of the new realities, at all levels, in the first half of the 21st century.