Barcelona used to promise a future in which technology, sustainability, and urban life harmonized with Swiss watch-like precision. In the collective imagination, the Catalan capital came to represent a global model of smart city.
But beneath the shiny surface of sensors, energy efficiency, and connected transportation, a more humane, more mundane, and painfully real problem threatens to blur its achievements: growing housing instability.
«A city where no one puts down roots»
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
«The true face of a city is not measured by its buildings, but by the way its inhabitants live in them,» wrote urban planner Jane Jacobs in the mid-20th century.
In this logic, today’s Barcelona faces a structural paradox: while it boasts of its awards as a smart city (such as having been named the European capital of innovation in 2014), its population lives with its suitcase half packed.
Over the last decade, Barcelona has mutated into a city in constant change. A new study by the Barcelona Economic and Social Council (CESB) reveals that more than half of its inhabitants have changed or will change their home between 2018 and 2027. And they do so not out of desired mobility, but out of necessity or expulsion.
While urban innovation graphs continue to rise, everyday reality is fragmented: roots evaporate, communities dissolve, and technology, without stable housing, finds nowhere to anchor itself.
According to the CESB report, 50.7% of Barcelona residents will have changed residence between 2018 and 2027. The data is not just a figure: it is the expression of a city where the concept of «house for life» has become anachronistic. In 2022, 35.5% of citizens were already thinking of moving in the next five years, and 30.4% had moved in the previous five-year period. Even more striking is that 14.9% of Barcelona residents meet both profiles: they have already moved house and plan to do so again in a period of just ten years.
This phenomenon is not exclusive to the urban center. In the rest of the metropolitan area and the peripheral region the percentages are also high, but it is in the capital where the movement reaches alarming proportions, suggesting not mobility, but forced displacement. It is no longer a question of the desired upward social mobility, but of an internal diaspora that dissolves the community fabric.
«Technology without community: the contradiction of the smart city»
In the hegemonic narrative of smart cities, Barcelona has been a pioneer.
From installing sensors to manage traffic to apps that monitor air quality, to opening up public data and boosting electric transport, its urban brand has been built around efficiency.
Architect and theorist Carlo Ratti, one of the most influential thinkers in the field of the connected city, sums it up like this: «A smart city is not only a city full of technology, but a city that leverages technology to improve the lives of its citizens.»
But what happens when those citizens cannot remain in the city that expels them? What is the value of an ultra-connected transport system if half of its users do not know where they will live in five years’ time? What is the use of a smart urban infrastructure if the population loses its roots and is forced to move continuously, with the stress, insecurity and loss of ties that this entails?
The problem is aggravated when it is found that the main cause of the exodus is not aspirational mobility.
The CESB points out that 24.5% of removals in Barcelona are due to economic reasons or force majeure: termination of contract, evictions, demolition.
The desired mobility, associated with improvements in the home or the environment, represents only 34.7%. The rest is divided between family (28.2%) and work (less than 10%) reasons.
The smart city fragments when citizens can no longer form lasting communities. And urban intelligence cannot be sustained without cohesive communities, which learn to use, care for and actively participate in the digital systems that surround them. As Saskia Sassen, sociologist and author of The Global City, warns, «the expulsion of the middle and popular classes for economic reasons breaks the possibility of a democratic city».
«A housing storm: tourist pressure, fleeting contracts and micro-housing»
Barcelona is experiencing a perfect storm in terms of housing. In addition to the pressure of holiday rentals, which make the supply for permanent residents more expensive and reduced, there is contractual precariousness and the proliferation of micro-housing.
According to data from the CESB, 15.9% of the flats on offer are less than 45 square metres, and 31% of households are occupied by a single person.
On many occasions, that person is forced to accept tiny, expensive homes with no guarantees of permanence.
The situation has not only generated an increase in moves, but also an emotional and economic wear and tear for those who live in the city. Joan Ramon Riera, municipal commissioner of Housing, said that these conditions show an «inefficient» use of the housing stock.
However, the term falls short: the lack of structural housing policies threatens to undermine decades of urban planning.
The City Council’s attempts to regulate tourist flats (such as the recent restriction of new licences) show an effort to curb speculation, but the strength of the market and the weakness of the public supply of housing weigh more.
According to a study by the Metropolitan Housing Observatory, Barcelona barely has 1.5% of its stock as social housing, a far cry from the 15% recommended by the UN.
Cases such as that of the Raval neighbourhood, where removals have doubled in the last decade, illustrate how gentrification and tourism drive out historic residents.
In the Eixample, young families struggle to find affordable flats. And in Nou Barris, temporary contracts and abusive rent increases are multiplying. Each neighborhood, a different symptom of the same disease: the city becomes a transitory place, of passage, closer to a hotel than to a home.
In conclusion, Barcelona, a smart city model, faces an unavoidable contradiction: it cannot be truly smart if its population lives in housing uncertainty. Forced mobility, fuelled by unaffordable prices, unstable contracts and tourist pressure, dilutes the benefits of urban technology. Without citizens with roots, there is no community that sustains or technology that reaches. Innovation, without equity, becomes a simulacrum.
References
- Barcelona Economic and Social Council (2025). Report on the Barcelona Residential Park and the Metropolitan Region.
- Jane Jacobs (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
- Carlo Ratti (2014). The City of Tomorrow.
- Saskia Sassen (2001). The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.
- Metropolitan Observatory of Housing (2023). Estadístiques de l’habitatge a la regió metropolitana de Barcelona.