Cuidem Barcelona x Javirroyo

The Barcelona City Council has promoted a new model plan for cleaning the city called Cuidem Barcelona, which was presented last Saturday, February 19. In order to make it known to the neighbors of the city, together with the collaboration of Airun, a series of activities were organized, of which we curated one of them that aimed, through a participatory mural by the Basque artist Javirroyo, to make visible this new paradigm shift in the city. This was one of the first artistic interventions of this year.
Through a process of listening to the needs and intentions of the project, we decided to contact the artist Javirroyo to create a large format mural on Avenida Lluís Companys where he figuratively represented the city of Barcelona as a woman lying down and changing colors: from the green of Montjuïc to the blue of the Mediterranean through the ochre of the sand that represents the city. All of it, full of life, people, plants and animals that inhabit it, take care of it and try to keep it clean. This mural, in short, embodies the spirit of the new model of city cleanliness that will be implemented gradually from these months in the streets of Barcelona.
With this innovation Barcelona, a pioneering city in sustainability and technology, has wanted to go a step further and not only facilitate the recycling service and green points, but has also made an active listening process with the neighborhoods of the city in order to design, jointly and integrating citizens in a participatory process, a strategic plan to improve the service. The results have been clear: more staff and more investment to be able to reach everywhere without leaving anyone behind. There is also another novelty that creates a historical precedent: the new model will also incorporate low-emission cleaning vehicles in order to continue to be environmentally friendly.
The icing on the cake of last Saturday’s artistic intervention was provided by the pedestrians who passed through the space. Whoever stopped and felt challenged by the mural could say theirs by taking white markers and adding their vision of how they would like the new model of cleanliness to be, inclusive and sustainable. At the same time, it was also a space to present the different novelties of the Cuidem Barcelona plan.