Smart Barcelona: the gap between inspiring rhetoric and lackluster implementation in transformative approaches

ABSTRACT

Barcelona is championed as the exemplary radical smart city, and yet scholarly understandings are typically limited to its theoretical approach and policy rhetoric. This paper, however, interrogates the extent to which Smart Barcelona has been implemented. It deploys a novel method of thematically analyzing 51 public talks by Barcelona’s first Chief Technology Officer, cross-examined with policy documents – to unpack the smart agenda. This agenda is then contrasted with insights into the ‘actual smart city’ implementation via interviews with 10 key informants. Findings reveal a lackluster progress including limited citizen input, ongoing reliance on ‘Big Tech’, and missing integration capacity.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart city
• digital
• Barcelona
• bottom-up
• governance

Introduction

Existing urban research has provided strong critique of the prevailing neoliberal manifestation of smart city policies and governance worldwide, generating interest in alternative approaches. Specifically, scholarship has scrutinized the dominant discursive rationales deployed to support technocratic policies, and systemic imbalances in power relationships between government, private sector actors, and ordinary citizens (or the public) (Hollands, 2008; Joss et al., 2019). Therefore, much emerging scholarship focuses on exploring the potential for alternative smart governance formations to resist neoliberal capture and re-center public interests, advocating for bottom-up, grassroots approaches that empower citizens in shaping smart cities (Cowley & Caprotti, 2018; Cardullo et al., 2019; Kitchin, 2021).

In stark contrast with neoliberal smart city manifestations, Barcelona has been championed as an alternative, citizen-centric governance approach. It has been described as a shift from a technology-focused top-down approach to a people-first smart city that has ‘reversed the [smart city] paradigm completely’ (Tieman, 2017). In power since 2015, Barcelona’s current political leadership (Barcelona en Comú) has been called an exemplary of ‘municipal feminist-socialism in times of crisis’ and lauded for its radical, democratic experiments in grassroots issues (Charnock et al., 2021, p. 582). Barcelona is praised for repurposing the conventional top-down smart city agenda to address bottom-up urban challenges through a focus on the public’s right to open, transparent, and participatory decision-making aided by digital technology (Monge et al., 2022). In addition to rights-based policy narratives, key governance promises such as technological sovereignty aim to enact theoretical notions (Haché, 2014) into actualised policy mechanisms that can challenge the domination of global private sector interests and facilitate the prioritisation of local public interests. This rethinking of smart city politics and principles has been welcomed by scholars (Kitchin, 2019; March & Ribera-Fumaz, 2019). While Smart Barcelona has been represented as an important frontier experiment in alternative governance to inform international approaches, scholarly understandings are typically limited to policy rhetoric and theoretical potential of its principles.

This paper’s research question asks to what extent Barcelona’s radical smart city agenda has been actually implemented and what key challenges the implementation has faced. The findings advance smart governance research beyond normative policy realms, providing important governance insights into the challenges of actualising a transformative bottom-up urban agenda. The learnings from this important frontier case are valuable for informing how ambitious bottom-up policy strategies internationally might better navigate or account for the political, institutional, and procedural challenges identified. The first part of this paper establishes the key tenets of the Smart Barcelona agenda represented through the public discourse of Barcelona City Council’s (BCC) first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) from 2016 to 2019, Francesca Bria. In the four-year period following 2015, there was a lively discussion of Barcelona’s bottom-up digital city agenda evidenced through copious public talks, policies, and media engagements. The office of the CTO was created to manage the design and implementation of the city’s new digital strategy. Hence, the CTO’s media presence was representative of Barcelona’s digital transformation, portraying its discursive core and the city’s socio-political ambitions. The paper, hence, presents a thematic analysis of 51 of Bria’s public talks, cross-examined with official government policy documents (D-CENT, 2016a; Barcelona City Council, 2019; Bria, 2019f, 2019g; March & Ribera-Fumaz, 2019; Mann et al., 2020; Monge et al., 2022; UK Government, 2022). The second part of the paper contrasts this policy rhetoric with insights into its implementation informed by 10 interviews with key Smart Barcelona informants. Beyond conventional policy analysis, this method enables a richer understanding of the major policy goals, including public sector understandings of their political contexts such as key stakes, actors, and risks. These elements are critical to answering the research question at the core of this paper, gauging the nature of gaps between smart city political ambitions and implementation in Barcelona.

Research approach

In this paper, multiple data sources were used in a multi-step analytical process to answer the main research question and understand the extent to which Barcelona’s radical smart city agenda has been actually implemented. These steps were designed to first capture the core smart Barcelona agenda, and then to gauge the gaps between the proposed agenda and actual implementation and involved 1) searching YouTube to identify videos of the CTO’s speeches, downloading and filtering video transcripts, 2) using NVivo software for parsing the transcripts to identify and analyze key themes, and finally 3) conducting and analyzing interviews with Smart Barcelona informants to discuss the project’s execution. Across these stages, an ongoing literature review on the Barcelona case and its key identified policy concepts, as well as cross-examination of official Smart Barcelona policy documents were undertaken, both assisting in identification of key themes and phrases, and confirming claims. This method deploys a ‘convergent parallel structure’ of data triangulation and analysis (Creswell, 2008) to verify the findings through cross-examination of multiple sources (Snelson, 2016).

As previous studies of Barcelona’s smart transformation acknowledge Bria’s prominent role in shaping the city’s digital strategy (Ribera-Fumaz, 2019; Mann et al., 2020; Monge et al., 2022), her public talks were examined to understand Smart Barcelona’s policy agenda. YouTube’s extensive video database represented a rich source for viewing these public talks, also facilitating temporal analysis of data over several years (Sui et al., 2022). An initial YouTube search for ‘Francesca Bria’ generated a list of 106 unique public talks from June 2013 to November 2021 (the end of the data-gathering stage of this study). Of these 106 videos, only English language talks and those pertaining to Bria’s presence in Barcelona from 2016 to 2019 were retained, and panel discussions with more than two panellists (where Bria did not receive dedicated speaker time) were excluded to avoid misattribution of content. This filtering process resulted in a shortlist of 51 videos (representing 32 hours of content) from which auto-generated transcriptions were compiled.

Transcripts were thematically coded in NVivo 12 Plus software to identify and analyze key themes in the talks. The Five-Level Qualitative Data Analysis method (Woolf & Silver, 2017) was used, first establishing research objectives and an analytic plan (levels one and two), then deploying iterative stages of analysis informed by emergent results, translating analytic tasks into NVivo tool selection and construction (levels three to five). Major themes were identified both through prior identification in the literature and policy documents, and through analysis of frequently occurring keywords in the transcripts and their context. The validity of findings was strengthened through cross-checking keywords and project names in multiple Smart Barcelona information sources, such as the Digital City Plan (the official government policy document) and the Barcelona City Council Technological Sovereignty Guide (hereafter referred to as the ‘Technological Sovereignty Guide’). Technological sovereignty, reducing Big Tech reliance, and the role of the European Union (EU)/European Commission (EC) emerged most prominently as the main themes behind Barcelona’s digital transformation. Other keywords included D-CENT¹ (D-CENT, 2016a, 2016b), DECODE,² Decidim², bottom-up, H2020², GDPR,³ and data governance.

Once the key concepts of the Smart Barcelona agenda were understood, the research team contacted key actors from Barcelona’s technology industry, government agencies, and social activism scene for one-on-one interviews. Ten interviews were conducted to understand both the external voices from civil society and the internal voices from within Barcelona City Council (BCC). Interviewees included senior BCC officials tasked with the execution of the Digital City Plan, leading smart city experts and critics who have published on Barcelona and worked with private and public sectors in the digital domain, activists at the helm of the bottom-up digital movements in Barcelona, and industry experts working alongside BCC on its technological sovereignty and data ethics goals. The findings from Bria’s online talks (cross-examined with Barcelona’s digital policies) were shared with the interviewees to capture their perspective on the success of implementation. The interview questions were framed around the execution of the flagship projects, and the ambitious ideas mentioned in policies and public talks. These interview recordings were then transcribed, and thematically analyzed to unpack the complexities in the translation of rhetoric into implementation.

The emergence of the Barcelona Digital City

As background context for the research, this section outlines the four major stages of the historical development of Barcelona’s smart city agenda and demonstrates the shift from top-down smart city development to a citizen-led approach through the emergence of techno-activism in Barcelona.

Top-down development of the smart agenda, and tokenistic citizen inclusion

In the wake of Barcelona’s 1992 Olympics success and growing concerns about economic recession, the city rebranded itself as a knowledge economy to improve its global competitiveness (Albet & Garcia-Ramon, 2000; Charnock et al., 2014). Barcelona’s first digital strategy, ‘La Ciutat Digital’ (The Digital City) was launched in 2001 (Charnock & Ribera-Fumaz, 2011).

Following the 2008 economic crisis, Barcelona adopted a smart city agenda based on learnings from its past projects such as the 22@⁴ (Ignasi & MatíMatíAs, 2015). In 2011, the city became one of the first in Europe to embrace a ‘smart citizen’ approach (Ferrer, 2017; Calzada, 2018; Ribera-Fumaz, 2019), and the government entered into strategic alliances with Cisco, IBM, Schneider-Telvent, TelefÛnica, GDF Suez, and Accenture, among others (de Hoop et al., 2018; Monge et al., 2022). For a long time, however, top-down initiatives such as Sentilo⁵ (Barcelona City Council, 2019) and 22@ remained underdeveloped (Ribera-Fumaz, 2019) with their execution involving limited efforts to engage with the broader public (Gianoli & Palazzolo Henkes, 2020).

Policy vacuum and threat of private sector capture catalyzed grassroots techno-activists

The failure of Barcelona’s top-down approach in various aspects of governance, combined with wider capital mismanagement and rising inequality, led to the ‘Indignados’ movement (also known as the 15 M), which witnessed 80,000 people marching to demand ‘real democracy NOW!’ (Charnock et al., 2012, p. 3). This context catalyzed a plethora of grassroots social digital innovation initiatives laying the foundation for rethinking the city’s digital vision (Ribera-Fumaz, 2019).

Left-wing government: institutionalization of democratic rebellion?

In 2015, activist Ada Colau (a key figure in the 15 M movement) from the Barcelona en Comú party – a citizens’ movement organization – was elected mayor of Barcelona. In response to the negative reputation of the previous smart city policies, the new government began to adopt a more democratic digital agenda based on bottom-up local governance, technological sovereignty, transparency and open data (Smith & Martín, 2021; Monge et al., 2022).

A citizen-first smart city agenda

Following her outstanding role in the D-CENT project and the conceptualization of DECODE while at Nesta (Monge et al., 2022), Francesca Bria was appointed the first CTO of Barcelona. The ideas of citizen-led digitalization advocated by Nesta and its European pilot projects aligned well with the people-first approach endorsed by Mayor Ada Colau. The City of Barcelona’s brief on the new political agenda – using Bria’s words (2017b) was to: ‘ [open] up the government … to integrate the collective intelligence of citizens, fight corruption and make sure that governments are not opaque black boxes that do not respond to what citizens need, but really integrate citizens into it through a bottom-up approach’. In this brief, technology was to be used to amass the power of collective public intelligence and address real-world problems (Bria, 2018b).

The Digital City Plan was, then, launched in October 2016 aiming at transitioning to free software and open standards, enabling a more citizen-centric digital transformation, and reducing dependencies on infrastructure and service providers via introducing more transparent procurement processes to allow SMEs to access public contracts (Barcelona City Council, 2016). The Plan also stood for technological sovereignty and digital democracy principles, acknowledged EU funding as crucial in complementing Barcelona’s smart city efforts.

Following the release of the Digital City Plan, the city promoted public debates on digital commons and technological sovereignty by inviting critical voices such as David Harvey and Evgeny Morozov to Barcelona. This period of Bria’s leadership from 2016 to 2019 marks the major focus of analysis in the following section.

Core themes of Smart Barcelona discourse (2016–2019)

With the historical political context established, we next elaborate on the three major rhetorical cornerstones of Barcelona’s promised agenda – derived from the Digital City Plan and elaborated in Bria’s public speeches:

Big Tech: a major threat to citizen-centred approaches

Bria (2021e) describes data as the ‘raw material of the digital economy’; as the Big Tech extraction of social behaviour data (the ‘datafication’ of society) is widely considered an urgent threat to public interests (Van Dijck, 2014; Bria, 2019c; Frost et al., 2019; Calzada & Almirall, 2020). In her online talks Bria speaks against the ‘business model of the digital platforms which is based largely on the manipulation and monetization of personal information and data’ (Bria, 2021a) and the spread of misinformation including conspiracy theories, and hate speech (Bria, 2019g) by exercising an ‘algorithmic power that undermines the foundation of liberal democracy’ (Bria, 2021f). Bria has expressed that Big Tech corporations create a power asymmetry in the economy (Bria, 2017a, 2021g): ‘Big Tech can own the digital infrastructure underpinning the marketplace, and then through data, algorithms, flexible prices mechanism discriminate [against] competition’ (Bria, 2021a) – accelerating political and economic crises as funds are extracted from local economies (Bria, 2017d, 2021d).

In line with the critical smart urbanism research (Morozov, 2017; Barandiaran et al., 2018), Bria raises concerns over ‘citizen groups, … using tools like Facebook, or Twitter or… Google’ (Bria, 2016b) to mobilize as these tools operate on a capitalist policy of ‘data extractivism’ (Bria, 2019g), and ‘are not designed for … meaningful democratic participation’ (Bria, 2019a). Bria frequently points out the negative influence of corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter on the labour market as well as pointing out that the sharing economy drains workers of job security, health care benefits, and pensions (Bria, 2018c). In her discussion of the gig/sharing economy, Bria notes that it is ‘outsourcing a lot of the cost and the burden to the workers [who] are freelancers, and so basically lowering down the labor standards’ (Bria, 2019g).

A major smart city criticism is the overdependence of governance systems on public–private partnerships through which private corporations establish monopolies over the urban data (Barandiaran et al., 2018; Smith & Martín, 2021). Bria argues that the traditional smart city approach is technology-heavy, pushed by a Big Tech agenda with a lack of clarity around data ownership, algorithm transparency, and public needs (Bria, 2019e, 2020, 2021b). This raises critical social, ethical, privacy, and economic concerns for technology-based projects, especially in the sphere of artificial intelligence (AI), developed outside public interests and regulatory frameworks (Bria, 2018c, 2019g). In response, Bria has been a strong advocate for a new citizen deal on data focussing on citizens’ rights, empowering them to direct the use of their data towards planning public services (Bria, 2016a; Monge et al., 2022).

Technological sovereignty: citizen ownership and self-governance of data

The notion of technological sovereignty as a way of enabling citizen control against forms of top-down data extraction (such as surveillance), is increasingly gaining favour among techno-activists and advocates of digital democracy (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2019; Couture & Toupin, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). More specifically, Bria (2021f) emphasizes the disenfranchisement of citizens from public institutions and politics, especially as a result of the surveillance technologies deployed by governments; and advocates to ‘take back citizen data’ (Monge et al., 2022, p. 2) to empower informed citizens choices, rather than adopting surveillance-based mechanisms (Bria, 2018b, 2021f). Provocatively deploying the notion of ‘technological sovereignty’ seeking to reshape democratic participation through positioning data as a public good, Bria (2021g) advocates for ‘public institutions to become more open, more transparent and better tailored to actually listen to what people really need’.

Although the concept of technological sovereignty has not been explicitly defined in any of Barcelona’s public documents (March & Ribera-Fumaz, 2019), the Technological Sovereignty Guide lists (1) prioritization of open-source software solutions, (2) interoperability of systems and (3) use of open standards as ways to achieve it (Bria et al., 2017). Some of the key principles of technological sovereignty in Barcelona’s discourse are:

Data for good

Empowering citizens to make informed choices on urban issues facilitated by data-rich evidence bases (Bria, 2021e), such as using digital technologies to transition to renewable energy, democratizing energy ownership, increasing public space, and implementing smart mobility, health, and education (Bria, 2016c) and ‘mak[ing] sure that AI and data will be serving the public good’ (Bria, 2018a).

Privacy by design

Embedding data privacy into the business models and new platforms used by the city (Bria et al., 2017). The GDPR (Wolford, 2018), approved in 2016 and enforced in the EU in 2018, was key to the creation of a Municipal Data Office (MDO) and the appointment of a Chief Data Officer (CDO) as the MDO’s leader and a Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) to make the city’s operations GDPR compliant (Bria, 2018c) and elevate the role of digital technology beyond conventional IT (Monge et al., 2022).

Data commons

Barcelona aimed to create a ‘data commons’ of shared resources from which the city and its citizens can democratically build urban infrastructure and services (Bria, 2018a; Barcelona City Council, 2019). In doing so, the city has acknowledged the challenge of embedding technology within public sector systems and as Bria (2019a) says:

It is an organizational and cultural change. Can you put technology and data at the service of the people but [at the same time] are you also able to change the way that public administration work[s] with technology? and, I have to tell you, this was my biggest challenge.

Echoing the challenges associated with incorporating technological sovereignty, March and Ribera-Fumaz (2019) have cautioned against the over-optimistic stance put forward when the concept itself is fluid and is subject to varying interpretations. While a noble ambition, they emphasize it is crucial to reflect on the limits of bottom-up strategies and understand the challenges of implementing (Ribera-Fumaz, 2019). These concerns are revisited later in this paper.

The European Union (EU) and European Commission (EC): key financial resources for transformation

Under the EU recovery plan, the European Commission (EC) has committed to invest 140 billion Euros in Spain through its Horizon 2020 program (H2020), of which 29% would be allocated towards digital transformation (Bria, 2020; Reuters, 2020). H2020 was an EU-based research and innovation funding program that ran from 2014 to 2020, with an estimated total budget of 80 billion Euros (European Commission, 2020). Halpin and Bria (2015) acknowledge the major contribution of the EC’s funding on digital social innovation in allowing citizens to pave an alternate path out of economic crises through self-developed solutions – not reliant on the private or public sector. The EU provides about 200 thousand Euros per project for human-centric technology that serves communities (Bria, 2019d).

Barcelona has been a testbed for many of the EU’s digital projects and H2020 funding has led to the development of major public-led projects such as Decidim and DECODE. Piloted in Barcelona and Amsterdam and bringing together a consortium of cryptographers, technology experts, policy experts, economists, and sociologists, DECODE aimed to bring decentralized technological infrastructure into the mainstream governance of Barcelona by creating tools that put people in control of their personal data (Bria, 2018b; DECODE project, 2019). Decidim, one of the tools developed by D-CENT’s partners, was an open-source online platform for participatory democracy (D-CENT, 2016a; Barandiaran et al., 2018) used to receive citizen inputs that made up 70% of the city’s Municipal Action Plan 2016–2019 (Bria, 2019b, 2021c) and in Bria’s words (2017c), ‘40,000 citizens … have written the Digital Plan. 70% of their proposals are integrated into the government agenda’. The Decidim platform was also used to integrate a module of the DECODE project that dealt with data privacy (DECODE project, 2019).

The gaps between the Smart Barcelona rhetoric and the implementation

This section contrasts the ambitions and claims in Smart Barcelona’s rhetoric with gaps in its implementation, drawn from informant interviews. Although this section primarily draws out the shortcomings in the delivery of the Digital City Plan, the authors consider the development of the plan itself as the first step towards actioning Mayor Colau’s (and by extension, Barcelona’s) vision of creating a bottom-up digital city.

Citizen engagement and technological sovereignty

The first major gap between rhetoric and implementation expressed by the interviewees relates to the depth and reach of citizen inputs into smart city strategies. The claim in Barcelona’s discourse that 70% of the city’s Municipal Action Plan 2016–2019 and major sections of the Digital City Plan had come from citizen inputs is questioned by both BCC officials and activists. Many felt citizen input into the Barcelona Digital City Plan was shallow as it only attempted to assimilate inputs derived from the broader Municipal Action Plan 2016–2019 which related to IT and digital, and even then, these were generic and aspirational high-level goals. Interviewees noted that the implementation strategy did not attempt to engage with BCC staff or the broader civil society to chart the roadmap towards realization of visions and goals. Quoting a BCC official interviewed, ‘[those] who have been in Barcelona before Bria know that even though the strategic plan may be perfect, you need to make an effort to ensure that the whole house is following you’, emphasizing the need for bringing the institution along in the journey towards change and that ‘there needs to be a list of agreed short- and long-term strategic projects to ensure transparency in measuring the progress of these high-level goals’.

Another serious flaw in the Plan appears to be the introduction of the nascent concept of technological sovereignty into policy documents for implementation. In the words of an industry expert interviewed, ‘BCC decided to focus on the ownership of data, data commons, self-managed public spaces, bottom-up approaches in its understanding of technological sovereignty, but could not achieve it to the extent envisaged in the Plan, probably because it existed as a concept even at the EU level at the time but is not clear to-date on what its practical implementation constitutes’. A BCC official and an activist interviewee both explain the failure to achieve technological sovereignty as a ‘resourcing gap in the public sector’ making it challenging to recruit and retain highly skilled staff to support such a massive undertaking. As such, this strategy failed to establish trust within the institution and was hence unable to convince those in the system to adapt to the change. This lack of trust appears to have strained working relations at both ends of the spectrum. An activist interviewee noted that in the case of Bria ‘sometimes, it was also difficult for her to recognize who can be trusted, and who cannot’.

Despite these power tussles within BCC, interviewees pointed out that grassroots projects such as Bústia Ètica and Decidim, both of which rank high on democratic citizen participation, were well-received and offered a measure of success to the government’s technological sovereignty goal.

Vision and goals

Extending from the previous criticism of limited citizen input, the visioning of the digital strategies has been critiqued as a top-down, rushed process. An activist interviewee explained, ‘people were fascinated by [Bria’s] discourse’ and ‘knew her from the social movements’. However, our interviewees unanimously agreed that the Digital City Plan, released in October 2016 merely 4 months after the CTO arrived in Barcelona in June 2016, was a hastily compiled document that largely rehashed projects from the former government’s tenure, with a few others that Bria had led prior to her appointment. This observation is supported by March and Ribera-Fumaz (2019) highlighting technological sovereignty initiatives retained from previous administrations.

Nevertheless, Barcelona’s smart city discourse has been critical in enhancing the city’s branding. Our interviewees noted that ‘many of the ideas in the Digital Plan around data management, data-driven city, and privacy by design are absolutely hers [Bria’s]’. This is further corroborated by a recent working paper (see Monge et al., 2022) released by the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose – co-authored by Bria – acknowledging that many of the city’s digital ideas have been derived from Bria’s past contributions to D-CENT and DECODE. In her role as the CTO, Bria inherited the legacy of Barcelona’s new-age digital movement and added her own ideals of technological sovereignty.

Big tech reliance

The Smart Barcelona rhetoric has included an emphasis on the fight against Big Tech, but interviewees pointed out that the City Council was heavily reliant on Big Tech during 2016–2019, as some potential conflict of interest may have slowed down any real action to remedy this. An activist interviewee stated that ‘[Bria] was doing politics very tough against the Big Tech, but [in her role] as the government, she has had agreements only with Big Tech so that is really doubling her discourse’. For instance, in 2017 the City Council signed the ‘Barcelona Declaration for Digital Social Inclusion’ with an alliance of telecom giants comprising the Vodafone Foundation, Orange Foundation, Cisco, and Lenovo (Barcelona City Council, 2017). Such an alliance contradicts the city’s rhetoric of reducing reliance on Big Tech.

A BCC official interviewee pointed out that considerable funds are spent annually on the renewal of Microsoft product licenses for council use. Although the former CTO had proposed to undertake migration of systems from Windows to Linux to curb reliance on Big Tech, she was faced with considerable resistance internally from the 14,000 council staff. The proposed change failed to materialize, and the forecast associated savings could not be achieved, demonstrating the undesirable effects of internal tensions between the CTO’s office and the rest of BCC during the implementation stages.

Most of the interviewees felt that this internal resistance was inevitable due to the significant leap that the Digital City Plan envisaged, as change is likely to be met with unwillingness and friction if expectations are not managed appropriately and apprehensions are not alleviated along the way. As an activist interviewee phrased it, ‘the CTO was in a very big ship which is Barcelona, and she was trying to turn a particular way, but the rest of the staff did not want to go along with her’. This underscores that both political will and institutional buy-in need to go hand-in-hand for successful outcomes. The gap between discourse and action concerning Big Tech raises critical questions about the capacity to protect and centre the public interest and citizen sovereignty in action – despite being publicly outspoken against fuelling money into digital corporations.

Although reliance on Big Tech still is prevalent, some of our interviewees argued that the debates and discussions have led to more widespread awareness of data ethics. As a result, better reporting and monitoring systems are being introduced to manage dealings with Big Tech and improve transparency within the government. Interviewees also noted that due to this rising awareness and against the backdrop of the GDPR, Big Tech has begun adapting its language to Barcelona’s discourse and has displayed more willingness to share data than before.

Integrated governance of digital transformations: limited power, coordination, and continuity

The progress report published on the Digital City Plan (Barcelona City Council, 2019) documents the mandate to ensure that 70% of the city’s coding is based on Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). However, this was challenging to implement in the short-term due to resistance from the City’s clients and business partners accustomed to existing use of proprietary software. While some interviewees felt that the FLOSS target was too unrealistic to begin with, others argued that such levels of change require greater internal coordination and sufficient powers granted to IT departments to integrate new technology, a system that was not present in Barcelona. Bria links the underwhelming progress with the internal resistance to change within government and concerns regarding the sustainability of free software to meet the city’s needs (see Monge et al., 2022). Interviewees, however, pointed out the insufficient legal and economic incentives for businesses and organizations to share data and adopt non-predatory economic models, and that ultimately Barcelona has suffered due to such implementation issues.

Interviewees also argued that legal and technical legacies – such as locked-in long-term pre-existing contracts during Bria’s tenure – coupled with clashes with the civil society due to differences in methods despite common end-goals were detrimental to the transformation process. As a further insight into the gap between rhetoric and action, interviewees questioned the lack of structure for strategic coordination. Barcelona’s governance is divided into two different organizational levels: the political which is responsible for policy making, and the executive which is responsible for implementation. The political and executive structures operate at two distinct levels creating divisions between plan-making and implementation. Interviewees argued that in the current structure, the massive and challenging task of coordination between these disjointed government agencies falls to the staff (perhaps beyond their official duties).

There was a consensus in our interviews regarding the lack of alignment between Smart Barcelona leadership and the rest of the directors in the Council. This led to the inability to function in an allied manner, taking the entire council alongside and towards the path of implementation. Monge et al. (2022, p. 15) document the challenges of ‘organizational inertia’ and slow bureaucratic processes during the delivery of the Digital City Plan in Barcelona. Furthermore, our interviewees believed the delivery plan lacked clarity, especially with regard to the direction for the public sector, i.e. long-term and short-term accountability and ways to measure progress. A senior BCC official interviewee suggested that the then CTO being an outsider and lacking sufficient insight into the inner working of the public sector contributed to the lackluster implementation of the Digital City Plan. The relatively short tenure of the positions in the smart city leadership, especially that of the CTO (4-year term), was flagged as a major barrier to implementation leading to a lack of continuity and the dilution of long-term vision. It was noted that the short tenure impeded trust-building within the public sector exacerbating the alienation of government agencies and civil society from the overall vision. In addition, our interviewees argued that the city is still grappling with defining the responsibilities associated with the CTO position, which leaves room for interpretation and can result in major gaps (such as a focus on vision only versus implementation). Calzada (2018, p. 16) analyzes Barcelona’s smart city policies from an ‘exploratory and prospective’ lens indicating the somewhat conceptual nature of the Digital City Plan that has largely remained as a body of literature even towards the end of its cycle in 2019.

The major gaps in Smart Barcelona discourse and implementation have been described as ‘unethical’ by an industry expert interviewee referring to undeliverable ambitious goals promising much higher levels of citizen control. Over time and with the new CTO in Barcelona since 2019, however, interviewees have noted a vision change and downsizing of the technological sovereignty ambition. The new goals are scaled back and supportive of more public–private partnerships, in their opinion. An interviewee goes on to add, ‘the new CTO has come in under a new political party, so their ideology is reflected in the current implementation of the digital transformation’.

Conclusion

While Smart Barcelona has been celebrated as an example of a radically bottom-up urban governance vision (Charnock et al., 2021) helping to bring ‘right to the smart city’ ideals (Kitchin, 2019, p. 194) ideals into mainstream discourse, this paper – contrasting the public rhetoric with its initial period of implementation – has revealed key governance gaps and tensions that require critical attention. The authors acknowledge Barcelona’s contribution towards re-politicizing the smart city concept by introducing formerly theoretical ideas into its Digital City Plan and initiating EU-wide and global cities networks centred around equity and justice in digitalization. Nevertheless, positioning Barcelona as a pioneering case, the findings deepen the conceptual understanding of smart city governance and implementation, bringing to the foreground the governance capacity to deliver on promises such as integration and private sector detachment. This study has sought to go beyond assessment of the powerful rhetoric and city-branding of Smart Barcelona to identify some of the core challenges that continue to plague public-centred smart city implementation. What emerges, however, is a personalization of the technological sovereignty policy on the world stage due to the mediatic prominence of Bria, while shading the growth of more bottom-up, grassroots, and collective efforts in realizing something new and challenging.

Our investigation has identified gaps in four key areas of limited meaningful citizen input, rushed visioning and policy-development process, persistent reliance on Big Tech, and major governance issues integrating digital technology into public administration. We have shared insights on the lack of clarity around the responsibilities of the CTO’s office and the relatively short tenure of this position which hindered building institutional support for change. There appear to be missing links between the role of leadership in drafting the digital strategy and subsequent responsibility of seeing it through to completion/implementation. This may necessitate embedding roles and responsibilities of government agencies and leadership to ensure accountability in achieving goals that extend beyond the political agenda and individual tenure of positions. It may also require inclusion of more determinate timeframes and target-setting to ensure accountability. Enforcing mandates and regulations without a strong implementation strategy to follow could potentially result in institutional resistance. The internal resistance seen in Barcelona was a reality check exposing this gap and a strong cause of many underwhelming outcomes.

While Barcelona has been successful in receiving extensive EU and EC funding for pilots and digital innovation-based projects, much of the learning from these experiments is yet to be embedded within governance structures. While experimental e-participation projects are essential for pushing the boundaries of knowledge, policymakers need to exercise caution while including them as flagship projects in plans and policies that typically have set specific timeframes and targeted objectives. Barcelona also showcases a mix of overpromising and underdelivering regarding the technological sovereignty goals, which points toward the need for procedural change in defining concepts more clearly from an implementation perspective.

In conclusion, despite witnessing a certain level of success in a few Digital City projects in the intervening years from 2016 to 2019, the implementation of Barcelona’s inspiring rhetoric remains incomplete raising serious questions about the leadership’s role. As the internationally acclaimed expert with a strong vision of her own who had arrived in Barcelona to take up the position of the city’s first CTO, Bria entered an already-constructed political ecosystem which may have led to the tensions with the other actors, thereby undermining the progress of the Digital City Plan’s goals. Or perhaps Barcelona, like many other smart cities, was plagued by what Kitchin et al. (2017) defined as a ‘last mile’ problem of delivery, that is failure to achieve adoption of the high standards of the goals set in theory. The adoption gap overall presumably exists because Barcelona has not been able to disentangle itself from its neoliberal trajectory despite the change in government in 2015 which may be a topic for further investigation.

Beyond Barcelona, this study has primed a platform for future research to examine other cities with advanced smart city programs, building on the gaps identified here. We encourage more smart city researchers to critically focus on the gap between rhetoric and implementation. This area remains a relatively underexplored characteristic of smart city development, especially in geographies where major advancement has been achieved in terms of the discourse.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment .

Notes

1. D-CENT was a 3-year, pan-European project that began in 2013 and aimed at bringing together citizen organizations for the development of ‘open source, distributed, and privacy-aware tools’ for digital democracy and citizen empowerment. With Francesca Bria as its EU coordinator, it is regarded as the biggest European initiative on digital democracy.

2. More information on the DECODE and Decidim projects, and the H2020 program is included later in the paper in ‘The European Union (EU) and European Commission (EC): Key financial resources for transformation.’

3. The General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR is widely regarded as the toughest data privacy and security law globally. It applies to organizations anywhere that target or collect data related to EU citizens.

4. One of Barcelona’s first innovation districts.

5. Sentilo is an EU-funded project comprising a network of sensors transmitting real-time city-wide data.