On the first day of confinement, I sent a cartoon on WhatsApp to my friends in health – about fifty contacts – to say good morning, say “here we are” and thank them for risking their lives to save ours. The response was so unanimous and excited that I continued to do so. After a week, I included my friends from the hospitality industry in the list, to thank them for their hospitality at a time when they were risking the future due to the consequences of the pandemic. “Here we are and we want you to come back soon.”
It is not frivolous to mix toilets with restaurateurs, because while doctors have turned our healthcare into an exemplary organization, chefs have made their silent revolution placing the gastronomy of this country among the first in the world. In addition, with this they have made life happy, and have made Barcelona a desired city. With their time, their effort and their money, how the health workers make our health possible by working for ridiculous salaries.
Civic entities and the City Council, united so that welcoming and vital Barcelona is also safe
Shepherd Parakeet
(parakeet)
Our health is important and from today it needs many more resources: the applause is good, but it is time for the effort of these years to be rewarded. Let us not now abandon to their fate those who have also taken care of us with their ingenuity and their trade. The hospitality industry is in a situation of extreme fragility: few can endure three months of inactivity followed by a recovery at idle. If they close, it will be very expensive, very slow, perhaps impossible, to recover the current level of excellence: a tragedy for them, another catastrophe for the country and for our city. Barcelona is much more than a city of tapas and innovative restaurants, but without them it will no longer be the place where everyone wants to visit, for a congress, or to stay and for their children to grow up with ours. The quality and variety of visitors and new inhabitants –researchers, investors, entrepreneurs– depend on this lure, who are the greatest and best source of wealth, material, intellectual and cultural, of Barcelona.
Today is nine weeks of confinement, there are more than sixty drawings sent and more than five hundred contacts. About two hundred watsaps every morning on my mobile: more than two hours a day to reply, even briefly, to messages of encouragement or thanks for the detail, and in those messages from people who work in all imaginable fields, the heart of the city, the pulse of its people imagining, thinking about how they are going to get out of this, lighting ideas; disciplined but eager to go out, to continue, to lean on the shoulder.
The restaurateurs have not fallen asleep, the City Council has addressed their concerns, but they are not the only ones: many of us will need a tailored suit for the return. The city needs to be able to hear us, to feel us all, a legion of experts cannot replace our voice, and now is the time to speak, not in a while, when things go back to your site . Because they will not return: Alimentaria, postponed to October in a display of prudence that now seems very optimistic, will not be like the previous one. If it is true that the Mobile stays, the next will not be like those of other years, but as we begin to design them now. We have an uncertain time ahead, but if today we begin to imagine all these events including the uncertainty in the design, then the time will be shorter, the place where things will return will be better, life better, the city better.
Barcelona can respond to this challenge, seduce once again the will, enthusiasm and experience of its citizens and make all efforts a single will, a single desire: to imagine a better future. The most effective method of attracting and listening to the citizen is a campaign, as in the days of the “Barcelona posa’t guapa”, which changed the color of our streets. As in the Olympic Games. But now there are no scripts or models to imitate, and the objective is much more ambitious: to redesign the fabric of the city so that the happy, vital and creative Barcelona that attracts, the welcoming city, is also the safe city.
That dense network of civic entities that is the great wealth of Barcelona can and should help the City Council, immersed in the daily management of the crisis, offering an instrument similar to the COOB, a BDB ( Good day, Barcelona ), with a person of consensus at the front, capable of directing it as Josep Miquel Abad did then. Responding to the City Council, and recreating the magical synergy between public and private that has always been so successful here, obtaining precise and precious information on the capacities and needs of its citizens, reviving the Barcelona Metropolitan Strategic Plan so that 2030 Barcelona It will be ready in 2021. It would be an instrument of motivation, but also of marketing: we must spread this image of the city in the world, because the first one to do so will have a long lead.
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