The Barcelona’s town hall has taken stock of evolution of the population of the capital according to the figures of the municipal register at the end of the year 2021. The portrait it offers is that of an aging city, with a steadily falling birth rate and a trickle of population displacements towards other Catalan towns. Losses that in boom years are compensated by the continuous contribution of new neighbors coming more and more from all over the globe but that in boom years economic contraction (and even more so when the effect of mortality from covid-19 is added, still sensitive in 2021 although when it was decisive it was in the previous year) lead to decreases in the population, as has happened in the last two years. But in the Excel of the Barcelona population, not all the balances of all the columns have the same meaning.
population decline of the last two years (up to 1,639,981 inhabitants) falls within the oscillations already normalized of the last two decades: after the birth rate peak and internal immigration that made Barcelona touch the 1.8 million inhabitants in 1980 to the minimum that left it around 1.5 million in 2000, the number of registered citizens in Barcelona has maintained figures similar to those of 2021.
The fall of the birth rate On the other hand, it is a constant, eloquent and worrying trend. But in this case, symmetrical to that produced throughout Catalonia. The years of economic euphoria and the contribution of new young generations arrived with immigration fueled a second (albeit modest) ‘baby boom’ which reached its peak in 2008. But since then it has fallen steadily (to levels of civil war), both in the hardest years of the crisis and in those of the subsequent recovery and in those of the impact of covid. Something that says a lot about the limitations (in terms of job stability, purchasing power of salaries, possibilities of access to housing and compatibility of family and work life) of the model that allowed that recovery. The causes are general but the consequences are very specific: for example, in the difficult viability that it will entail for many educational centres.
But it is the incoming and outgoing movements of inhabitants, of external and internal migrations (between districts, with neighboring towns) that have had the greatest impact on the variations detected in the last year (and those that respond to specific characteristics of the Barcelona model ). A fluid and unsettled population (less than half of the people of Barcelona were born in their city; 829,000 have been in it for less than 15 years), with a dynamic of constant innovation and renewal (but at the same time making it difficult for continuities, traditions and experiences of community). At the same time, with a real estate nomadism that portrays some of the evils housing market in the city. If in previous decades the local popular classes in the process of social ascent left the city to be replaced by foreign immigration that relieved them in their work and residence spaces, part of these movements to other areas of the country have come to have another motivation ( the inability to sustain the cost of living in Barcelona and perhaps discomfort with many of its realities) and much of its replacement as well (with the arrival of well-paid professionals; 42.7% of foreigners in the city have university studies ). A dynamic that on the one hand, that of promoting innovation, must be nurtured, and that on the other must be counteracted with an affordable housing offer. Which model should respond to these needs will be one of the big questions that the candidates to guide the course of the city in the coming years will have to answer.