Barcelona's Neighborhood Budget: Hybrid by Design

Barcelona's 2020–2023 participatory budget dedicated €30 million to fund the most-voted neighborhood proposals in each of the city's districts, run on Decidim — the open-source platform the city itself birthed. Residents drafted geolocated proposals with budgets attached; 64,571 people participated digitally and 11,970 in person, through a pandemic.

The number worth studying is the second one. The process was hybrid *by design*: neighborhood meetings and street-level 'support points' — staffed tables where residents could learn, propose, and vote with help — fed in exactly the people a digital-only process filters out. The platform held the ledger; the folding tables held the democracy.

What it teaches: a city can run neighborhood-grained democracy on commons-licensed software it governs with its citizens — and the transferable practice isn't the platform config, it's the support point. Any block remixing a digital decision process should budget for its equivalent: a card table, a laptop, and a patient neighbor at the farmers market.

Details

• era: 2020–2023
• place: Barcelona, Catalonia
• illustrates: decidim, six-lessons-neighborhood-tech
• source note: Participation figures per Decidim's published case study.
• practice kind: story