The Citizen Agreement for an Inclusive Barcelona is the explicit adhesion of a number of bodies, associations and organizations in the city to the principles of the Municipal Plan for Social Inclusion. It is a further step forward in the joint collaboration between Barcelona City Council and the city’s association sector to construct a space for dialogue and joint work.

The Agreement is aimed to be a commitment as to the wish to work and form part of the network and, together with others, make the city more inclusive within the limits of each organization’s capacity.

Barcelona: an Inclusive City. The Agreement is an effort to achieve unanimity on how the city and citizenship should be understood to be inclusive; how the commitment of the city’s organizations should be seen to be based on its principles and how the values that inspire these principles should be disseminated.

The people and organizations that sign this document want to work together towards a more inclusive, more supportive city; a city that promotes the values of equality, recognition of diversity, personal independence and ties of peaceful coexistence. A city that develops public policies to favour processes of social inclusion and that depends on citizens’ active involvement through social and community networks.

Barcelona has been a pioneer in that it has gone further than the social-welfare paradigm and assumed a reflective, practical preventive and proactive model that promotes conditions of human development with the aim of enabling everyone to carry out their individual life projects in real conditions of equality. Barcelona City Council has implemented this change in perspective through the Municipal Plan for Social Inclusion, which inherits the baggage of the past and situates it in the new complex, dynamic context that characterizes the social reality of the 21st century.

Barcelona wants to be a city that works intensively towards social cohesion and peaceful coexistence in diversity. What it proposes is therefore to take action against all forms of inequality and against the dynamics and situations of exclusion, poverty and marginalization. We aspire to a fully inclusive and supportive Barcelona: in terms of values, institutional practices and public policies, with the commitments of the social sector and citizens.

To advance in this direction it is necessary to substantially reinforce participatory factors, involve a wide range of social players and activate networks for inclusion, which should all be considered to be indispensable factors for a fully coherent and supportive city. Consequently, this proposal of the Citizen Agreement is promoted within the framework of the Municipal Plan for Social Inclusion, while fulfilling the strategic approach of promoting the community and relational dimension of social policies.

The Citizen Agreement for an Inclusive Barcelona aspires to be a qualitative step forward in the collaboration between Barcelona City Council and the city’s association sector. We want to implement a space for dialogue, harmonious cooperation and action; we want to work in unison on how the commitment of an Inclusive Barcelona should be understood and put into practice.

By signing the Citizen Agreement, we formalize the Inclusive Barcelona Network and undertake to work on the basis of shared goals. We will do so to the best of each one’s ability and by searching constantly for areas of collaboration.

The Agreement is intended to be a tool that is permanently open to social organizations and associations that want to join and participate. The Citizen Agreement for an Inclusive Barcelona is therefore renewed every year, with the formulation and adoption of new commitments by all signatories.

The commitments are therefore EXPRESSED as follows:

• To work to the best of our ability and in cooperation with other agents to make Barcelona a more inclusive, supportive city in accordance with the principles set out in the 2005-2010 Municipal Plan for Social Inclusion.
• To extend the values and principles on which the Agreement is built and to give maximum visibility to the processes and practices for the participatory construction of an inclusive city.
• To create the Inclusive Barcelona Network and to make it a dynamic space for the contribution and exchange of initiatives, mutual awareness and learning, and an area for reaching commitments on shared action.
• To support thematic networks of action for social inclusion with the aim of studying the work shared by the different players involved and orienting it towards common strategic and operating goals.