As Barcelona’s City Mayor, I am pleased to welcome all the participants to this European Congress: “Cap a on va el nostre temps? Escenaris de futur” Where is our time going? Future Scenarios. Barcelona’s City Council organized it together with the Equality and Citizenship Area from Diputació de Barcelona.
This meeting is framed on the works initiated in Barcelona in the year 2006 with the celebration of the 1st Time Politics International Congress, “Time and Municipality,” where different experiences and time politics being developed in different European cities were presented together.
In response to one of the main conclusions of the 1st Congress, we organize this Congress to take a step forward and think about the future challenges of social time uses.
It will be a place to think about the daily time evolution in Europe as well as identify the keys of the future needed to improve the harmonization among work, family and personal life and time organization in our cities. For this reason, we will depend upon wide academic, political and civic participation, with the aim to debate about the short and long term changes that will take place in our cities.
I am sure that from this exchange, new referents will emerge to help us move forward in the promotion of actions and good practices which will allow us to make possible the idea that time becomes a right for all citizens. This will generate more social cohesion, wellfare and equality in our city. In this framework, we will recognize a group of companies that are working with new time organization, as a compromise with Barcelona’s City Council who are working towards improved city time management.
Jordi Hereu
Barcelona's City Mayor
This European Congress must help us to imagine future cities, where the time needs of the individual will guide the time needs of the social oranizations. On February 4th and 5th, we will start working for a future where time is distributed in an equitable way among people.
The knowledge we have today (from different scientific areas) about social uses of time allows us to plan this future. And it allows us to state that by using the advancements made in the Information Technology (IT) and communication fields, many people will benefit from managing time in a different way, according to their specific needs in each moment of their lives without it affecting the enterprise’s competiveness and even improving it. It also allows us to plan for less polluted cities because less vehicles will be on the road at any one time because daily travel will be better distributed throughout the day. We will plan for cities where services and deliveries will be organized according the the neighbourhoods where they are located and by the needs of the people who live there.
During the our meeting, we will start to draw up a plan to make our city, Barcelona, a better city for its residents by allowing them to manager their time more equitably.
Imma Moraleda
Barcelona's City council, city councillor for the Use of time Department, and deputy from the Equality and Citizenship Area from Diputació de Barcelona