The Barcelona imaginaries: a decade of digital politics

Over the past decade and a half, Barcelona has been widely recognized as a ‘smart city’. Since 2015, it has also gained attention as a ‘rebel city’, with an alternative imaginary to that of the corporate smart city and, more broadly, others launched from Silicon Valley. This article analyzes a decade of opposing imaginaries around digital politics in the Catalan capital. It illustrates how Barcelona moved from a narrative of smartness to one of technological sovereignty and, from there, to one of technological humanism. These shifts went hand in hand with institutional innovations that reinforced, successively, the centrality of public-private, public-common, and, finally, public-private-community partnerships (with this latter model representing a return of the centrality of the public-private axis). Drawing on fieldwork and desk research, the article systematically maps numerous visions and projects associated with these three imaginaries. Finally, the study uses the case of Barcelona to understand recent changes in digital capitalism.