Barcelona

The council’s own IT is run by the Institut Municipal d’Informàtica (IMI), its in-house institute. In December 2025 the full council turned it into Barcelona Innovació i Tecnologia (BIT). Its budget has grown from €63m in 2021 to €113m, against a goal of €130m, or 3.5% of the city budget. Staff are to rise from 230 in 2022 to 300 by 2030. Jordi Valls, the deputy mayor for the economy, housing, finance and tourism, to whom the institute reports, calls the private sector an “essential part of the city’s digital project”.

Organisation in focus

Institut Municipal d'Informàtica (IMI)

Delivers municipal ICT services, drives digital transformation, and leads smart‑city initiatives across.

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Services the public touches sit in municipal companies and agencies. Barcelona de Serveis Municipals (BSM) runs Bicing, the public bike-share, and Endolla, the council’s charging network for electric vehicles. ASPB measures what street changes do to air, noise and health. Barcelona Activa, the city’s economic-development agency, trains people for technology jobs through its IT Academy.

The supercomputers in the city are national and European infrastructure. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) runs MareNostrum 5, a machine in the EU’s EuroHPC network inaugurated in December 2023 at a total cost of €202m. A contract signed in January 2026 adds AI capacity for about €129m, half of it from EuroHPC, the EU’s joint undertaking for supercomputing. The BSC also opened Spain’s first quantum computer built with European technology in February 2025. ISGlobal, a health research institute, models what the street programme could do for health.

Organisation in focus

Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)

Advances digital twins, climate modeling, and AI-driven urban sustainability solutions.

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Civic technology has an institution of its own. The Decidim Association, which looks after the participation software the council first commissioned, counts more than 500 installations. Its committee of public institutions includes the Generalitat (Catalonia’s government), the Diputació de Barcelona (the provincial council), the City of New York and Brazil’s federal government.

Private firms cluster in the city. ACCIÓ, the Catalan government’s business-competitiveness agency, counted 1,508 start-ups based in Barcelona at the end of 2025, out of 2,403 in Catalonia. Catalan start-ups raised €1,131m in 2025, or €834m without two very large rounds. The 22@ district in Poblenou, an industrial area rezoned for knowledge firms, counted 11,500 companies in the council’s 2022 plan; its job and housing figures for 2030 are targets.

Organisation in focus

22@ Barcelona Innovation District

Fosters smart urban innovation, linking tech, research, and businesses for sustainable development.

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Barcelona is also a city of trade fairs. GSMA, the mobile-industry body that organises the Mobile World Congress at Fira de Barcelona, the city’s trade-fair institution, puts its own estimate of the 2026 edition’s economic impact at €588m. The Smart City Expo World Congress drew more than 27,000 attendees in November 2025.

Jaume Collboni of the Socialists’ Party of Catalonia (PSC) has been mayor since June 2023. Xavier Trias of Junts, the centre-right Catalan nationalist party, won the most seats. Barcelona en Comú, the left-wing platform of the former mayor Ada Colau, and the conservative People’s Party (PP) voted for Collboni to keep Trias out. He governs in a minority, with 10 of 41 seats. The council rejected both his 2024 and his 2026 budgets, and each took effect automatically after he lost a vote of confidence. ERC, the Republican Left of Catalonia, has ruled out joining his government before the election of May 2027.

Under Colau, from 2015 to 2023, the council built its own digital agenda. Its Digital Transformation Plan, led by the chief technology officer Francesca Bria, committed 70% of the budget for new digital services to free and open-source software. No public account of how much was finally spent that way could be found. DECODE, an EU research project on residents’ control of their own data, ran pilots in Barcelona and Amsterdam from 2016 to 2019. The EU’s project record lists its aims and no measured results.

Collboni’s government has kept Decidim running and has turned more to companies. In March 2025, during the Mobile World Congress, the council signed a memorandum of understanding with Huawei on the city’s command centre, smart buildings, connectivity and IT training through Barcelona Activa. Public reports of it go no further than the signing. The IMI’s strategic plan for 2024–2030 lists digital governance, personalised services, a data-driven culture and hybrid cloud among its aims.

The council’s strategy for algorithms and data promised a public register of the algorithms it uses and clauses for buying AI. CIDOB, a Barcelona think tank, found both planned but not fully in place in December 2024. In March 2026 the council presented an AI strategy worth €9.4m over three years, with 37 actions.

From our library

Estudis de cas de marcs de governança de la IA urbana — Estudi de cas 1: Barcelona (CIDOB, Atles d'intel·ligència artificial urbana, 2025), Alexandra Vidal D'Oleo

CIDOB’s case study of how Barcelona governs urban AI, and what was still unbuilt in 2024.

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Money and rules also come from other levels of government. Barcelona has held the EU Mission Label for climate-neutral cities since March 2024. In March 2025 the European Investment Bank lent it €175m for its 2024–27 investment plan, the first Spanish city backed under the Cities Mission. The Generalitat has been led since August 2024 by Salvador Illa of the PSC, the mayor’s party. Its 2023 decree on tourist flats is the legal basis for ending their licences in the city by 2028. Collboni also chairs the AMB, the metropolitan area, which manages about €2.5bn a year.

On the streets, Collboni has changed course. In July 2024 he set aside Colau’s plan for large green axes through the Eixample, the 19th-century grid district, in favour of small works: 22 hectares across 71 sites by 2027, for €150m. In March 2025 Catalonia’s high court, the TSJC, upheld the annulment of the council agreement behind the Consell de Cent green axis, and the city is appealing to the Supreme Court.

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Collboni passa pàgina als grans eixos verds de Colau i aposta per petites actuacions (3Cat, 17 Jul 2024)

Policy shift unveils 71 green interventions covering 22 ha, costing €150 million by 2027.

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Superblocks (superilles in Catalan) close groups of blocks in the city’s grid to through traffic and hand the streets to people on foot. The first began operating in Poblenou in September 2016, followed by Sant Antoni in 2018. The health agency’s 2021 evaluation measured 25% less nitrogen dioxide and 17% less coarse particulate matter (PM10) in Sant Antoni, and daytime noise 3.5 decibels lower. In Horta it found no important change. In the first year of the Consell de Cent green axis, weekday traffic on four parallel streets changed by between −4.6% and +2.8%.

From our library

Salut als carrers: avaluació de l'impacte en salut de les superilles (Agència de Salut Pública de Barcelona, 2021)

The health agency’s 2021 evaluation of the superblocks: large gains in Sant Antoni, none of note in Horta.

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The gains come with costs and limits. Researchers at Pompeu Fabra and Erasmus universities, studying 573,000 rental listings from 2018 to 2024, found rents 12–14% higher nearest the green axes. ISGlobal’s modelled estimate of about 700 premature deaths avoided each year assumes that all 500 planned superblocks are built. In its original form the programme has stalled.

Decidim’s first big process, the 2016–19 municipal action plan, drew more than 22,600 registered users and 10,300 proposals. In the 2024–27 participatory budget, 48,796 people voted, up from 39,433 in 2021, and chose 76 projects worth €29.3m; by April 2026 the council put their delivery at about a quarter complete. The voters were about one resident in 35. On 10 March 2025, the first day of voting, the site was down for hours. The platform is still the council’s channel for participation.

Bicing, the public bike-share, has scaled. In November 2025 it counted 166,000 active users, 557 stations and 8,000 bikes, 5,000 of them electric, and expected 20 million journeys in the year. Eight in ten trips are made on an e-bike. BSM’s release counts use; it gives no figure for car trips replaced.

Lighthouse project

Bicing — Barcelona Bike-Sharing

The public bike-share run by BSM, with 166,000 active users in late 2025.

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Endolla, the council’s charging network, reached 1,000 points in March 2024. The council planned 2,000 more for 2024–25, but BSM counted 1,091 in September 2026. Use has grown faster than the network: 53,500 users and 17,000 charges a month in late 2025, up 40% and 13% on the year.

The low-emission zone (ZBE) inside the ring roads has applied since January 2020, with fines from that September. The courts annulled its first ordinance for lacking reports on its economic and social impact, and the council cancelled about 140,000 unpaid fines. A new ordinance from 2023 keeps the zone in force. It was suspended for two months in early 2026, while the regional rail network was in crisis. The health agency’s first assessment found a modest effect on nitrogen dioxide in 2020, hard to separate from the pandemic’s fall in traffic. In 2024 the city recorded its lowest nitrogen-dioxide levels yet, credited to more public transport and fewer polluting vehicles. The Eixample and Gràcia–Sant Gervasi stations would still exceed the EU’s 2030 limit of 20 µg/m³.

T-mobilitat, the contactless travelcard for the whole metropolitan network, has run years late. It was due in 2017, and its contract grew from €72m at tender to €116m. In January 2022 it had about 55,000 active users. Its website and app failed on 27 November 2023, the eve of the switch-off of two cardboard travelcards, though the gates kept validating. Single tickets began moving onto it in May 2025 at FGC, the Catalan government’s railway, and on the metro that October; no report that every operator has finished was found.

Lighthouse project

T-mobilitat — Smart Public Transport Ticketing

Fare capping guarantees lowest price, NFC cards track journeys, real‑time flow data guides service.

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Sentilo, the open-source sensor platform the council built, has gone quiet. Its last release came in December 2022, and its public code repository was last updated in December 2023. The council’s page on it gives no current count of sensors.

Climate shelters, public buildings opened as cool refuges in heatwaves, doubled from 200 in 2022 to 400 in 2025. The council has published no figures on how many people use them, and critics point to closures at midday and at weekends, and to rooms without air conditioning.

Decidim gives Barcelona’s residents a channel, and other councils trust its code enough to run it. In the city itself, the latest participatory budget drew a small minority of residents, lost its first day of voting to an outage, and a year later was about a quarter delivered. Residents still give low marks to their say in decisions.