In February 2023 Badalona will host a top-level sporting event. The top 8 teams in the ACB basketball league, accompanied by their respective fans, will play a four-day playoff game that will end with a Cup champion.
Those of us who have had the good fortune and privilege to experience one can be sure that there are few shows as beautiful, on and off the pitch. Badalona will host the Cup, and this fact should fill us with hope. Of desire and pride. It should also make us aware of what it stands for. Being in the shop window, for good and bad, exposes you. And we will expose the city, its organizational capacity and its presence in other cities of the State.
For this reason, Restarting Badalona has wanted to organize an event: it has proposed three relevant people from the city of Barcelona to take part in a round table this Wednesday the 15th at the new Hotel Marina Badalona, in the city’s port.
Organizing this talk has different objectives, which tie in with the reason for being of this entity. Restarting is a tool that, just as it has brought some relevant people in their professional fields to the city, has encouraged Badalona to be present at the Mobile Week organized by the Mobile World Congress (MWC) Foundation or has sought someone could be interested in filling disused municipal buildings, it aims to position Badalona as an attractive city and recipient of value-added activities.
The news that in Badalona we will host the Cup final made fit the idea of carrying out an activity in its favor to discuss how to take advantage of it, with the certainty that we would talk not only about a candidacy, but about a reality. Now we have the Cup, we think. And now is when we must get the city to think about how to take advantage of it and, above all, to start a debate about what is necessary for cities to attract events.
There is a progressive conservatism that promotes that nothing happens and a parochial fatalism that finds that everything is impossible to do
We dare to say, by way of spoiler, that there are a minimum of three elements that are needed to make an open city possible. The first, stability and institutional consensus. The second, a professional team dedicated exclusively to the objective. And the third, that the private sector and the public sector support each other, and not shadow.
That said, which we will see to what extent it coincides with what they will tell us tomorrow, the three visitors are very powerful. Aurora Catà, because she presides over an organization, a private entity, that advocates attracting investment to the city of Barcelona, and that has recently been the protagonist in winning the America’s Sailing Cup for the city in 2024. However, her visit is important so that, as we expressed to its general manager a couple of years ago, we would like Restarting and Barcelona Global to be able to carry out joint projects, to the extent that Barcelona, as a city and as a whole, exceeds the specific limits of your municipality. To understand each other, in the eyes of the world Badalona is Barcelona and, for us, being one is an opportunity that, without giving up our badalonity, we must be able to take advantage of.
An old friend will also join us. The person thanks to whom we were able to bring Mobile Week to Badalona: Carles Grau. As director of the Foundation, he has been a key figure in the success of the MWC in Barcelona. And we want you to explain why and how we have been able to host this event. Finally, the figure of the director of Fira de Barcelona is not minor. Constantí Serrallonga is the one who can best explain to us how the extension of the Fira to L’Hospitalet has had an impact, and we will also be interested in knowing what the future projects of the Fira are, key for Barcelona but also for Catalonia.
We stopped a trap for the three of them –positive–. We are taking you to Badalona to discover it, if you know little about it, and to see the magnificent hotel that was launched a few weeks ago in an environment full of opportunities, ranging from the 3 chimneys to the Polígono Sur of the city , passing through our unfinished port. That they know us, that they keep us in mind and that we get to know them to make the city go beyond its own borders and modify the vision of those, at home and abroad, who think that being close to Barcelona is a problem or that the city has so many deficits that there is no possible remedy or capacity to solve them.
Cities are their people and their governments. And have the absolute conviction that there are no conspiracies that make some go further than others. There is a progressive conservatism that promotes that nothing happens and a parochial fatalism that finds that everything is impossible to do. Both have loudspeakers in Badalona, although lately there has been a desire –everywhere– to change dynamics to relaunch the city with new projects. Our wish is that the Cup, and through its celebration the dialogue about the city that we must build, reinforce the will to open Badalona and make it braver, more educated, freer and happier.
Ferran Falcó, member of the Restarting Badalona association
