There are plans for this model to become operational in a total of 60 superblocks in 2021 and 2022. The goal is to extend it throughout the city, replacing the traditional model. The pilot projects provide the necessary learning process for dealing with subsequent scalability, always taking into account the particular features and needs of each area. They are an important innovation exercise because they break away from the logic used to organize this service in recent years.
Community Action to Foster Co‐Responsibility and Social Capital
The second line of action concerns innovative community interventions that are deployed by the Barcelona City Council in the area of care and mutual support. It is based on the following theory of change: interventions based on the creation of social capital (Portes 1998; Patulny and Svendsen 2007) and the dynamics of solidarity – not charity – help to make people more resilient to the impact of situations that happen to them and expose them to social exclusion and poverty. This type of intervention prevents social isolation, fosters social cohesion and interdependence – where people can be co‐responsible for caring for each other – and helps to create a feeling of belonging and to diversify resources in order to ensure the sustainability of life and social and health policies (reducing dependence on resources and care services). It helps to make life as dignified as possible for people living in situations of great vulnerability or with a need for care (elderly people or people with disabilities, unemployed people, poor workers, children and adolescents, single‐parent families, migrants, adults and minors who are homeless or in insecure accommodation, victims of violence against women, non‐professional caregivers, etc.). It is important to emphasize that the premeditated activation of these dynamics is considered to be vital for combating loneliness, one of the structural problems that is characteristic of contemporary societies and especially affects elderly people (Mansfield et al. 2019; Yanguas et al. 2019). This challenge cannot be taken on by the administration exclusively, but the latter can facilitate or promote community solutions that help in this direction.
Radars Project: Mobilizing the Neighbourhood for the Care of the Elderly
One of the most outstanding community initiatives in this sense is the Radars project, promoted by social services since 2008. The project is especially for senior citizens over the age of 65 who live alone or with another elderly person, as well as those who have a limited support network and/or autonomy, which can make them feel lonely. A network of ‘Radars’ is created (neighbours, shopkeepers, neighbourhood associations, etc.) who watch over the elderly people in their area and informs social services professionals if they detect potential risks. This detection also involves neighbourhood health centres and pharmacies, who intervene as ‘specialised radars’, as they also help to resolve problems. Furthermore, the Radars project is geared towards developing actions in coordination with neighbourhood organizations and local facilities (neighbourhood and civic centres, libraries, etc.), which foster a connection between senior citizens and their neighbours. It is a way of helping to create social connections and combat social isolation.2
Radars can be interpreted as the activation of dynamics that return to what had previously existed in a natural and plentiful way in nearly all the city's neighbourhoods, influenced by values, social norms, and needs that gave local relationships a central role in everyday life. People counted on the support of the community, of their neighbours. To a lesser or greater degree, this way of living the neighbourhood, of experiencing and feeling it as if it were a small town – as indeed the old centres of many modern‐day Barcelona districts were – has been progressively lost. However, one of the risks of the Radars project – or of any strategy that promotes mutual aid – is that it does not explicitly include mechanisms that foster equity in care, which means that the burden of neighbourhood co‐responsibility continues to fall on the shoulders of women (Moreno‐Colom 2018). This is one of the challenges that has to be faced up to henceforth.
B‐MINCOME: Exploring a Minimum Income Scheme Together with New Community Interventions
From a wider perspective, and beyond the Radars project, there is the idea of progressively implementing social actions based on methodologies that have a very territorial approach and which are aimed at developing significant community intervention experiences with people in situations of greater vulnerability. This would mainly divided into three aspects. Firstly, it means working with people from the same area in order to collectively detect material and non‐material needs (in education, housing, nutrition, care, coexistence, culture, etc.) as well as skills, abilities, and concerns. Secondly, it involves supporting them in channelling what has been detected through collective projects (based on principles such as self‐sufficiency, self‐organization and the inclusion of diversity), which can create a feeling of belonging to a group of diverse people but with similar needs and strengthen trust and reciprocity ties. Thirdly, the idea is to promote the connectivity of people with local facilities and services (healthcare centres, educational centres, social services centres, public libraries, civic centres, etc.), local associations, and the rest of the neighbourhood, but also with other neighbourhoods, in order to foster territorial transference, prevent segregation, and create a feeling of connection not only within the neighbourhood but also with the city as a whole. These three aspects help to generate social capital of various kinds (specially bridging and linking social capital, which are open and inclusive), although the third is especially important for obtaining access to resources and opportunities that are to be found outside the most close relational circles, thanks to the new relationships and connections that are established (Granovetter 1973). The combination of various types of social capital can contribute to improve people's socio‐economic position and their participation in political and civic life.
This type of intervention was explicitly put into practice between 2018 and 2019, as part of the B‐MINCOME pilot project, which was co‐funded by the Urban Innovative Actions programme (Laín et al. 2019). It was an innovative project aimed at 1000 households in a vulnerable situation and living in the Eix Besòs, one of the most disadvantaged urban areas of Barcelona. Its main objective was to test the effectiveness and efficiency of a comprehensive two‐year policy that combined an economic benefit (a guaranteed minimum income) with inclusive active policies such as a programme of professional training and employment, a policy to foster social entrepreneurship, and the promotion of local community participation. The latter was mostly based on the community perspective defined in the previous paragraph. In accordance with its experimental design, the project sought to provide data on the effects of perceiving the benefit as being conditioned or not conditioned on carrying out one of the policies, and perceiving them as being limited or not limited to additional income. Various analytical strategies were developed which took into account the various ways of participating (one of them inspired by the concept of Universal Basic Income), as well as a comparison with a control group. All in all, the aim of the project was to provide participants with more tools to embark on their own strategies for getting out of the vulnerable situations they found themselves in. It also put into practice a way of doing social policies aimed at reducing dependency on public subsidies and private aids, promoting new collaborations with the third‐sector organizations located in the Eix Besòs area and to focusing on an integrated, community, and territorial perspective.
What we have described up to this point illustrates new practices for coordinating the social and territorial reorganization of care as part of local welfare systems. The challenge lies in recognizing its quality, often considered to be secondary, as being equally decisive