Tag: .barcelona

The third City and Science Biennial is here

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The City and Science Biennial is set to turn the city into a space for debate and reflection from 21 to 26 February, with a programme based around living: on the planet, in the city, human life in general and the scientific community in particular. You’ll find all the activities to be enjoyed on the website biennalciutaticiencia.barcelona.

Round tables, debates, lectures, theatre, art installations and more make up the programme for this edition, which is grouped into four topic areas:

  • Living in the city: at a time when over half the global population lives in urban environments.
  • Living in equity: with options for moving forward in equal rights and opportunities in all spheres.
  • Living with science: to explore and understand the daily work of scientists.
  • Living creativity: the points where art and science meet open up new doors for us to find solutions for today’s needs.

Activities for the biennalciutaticiencia.barcelona are being held around ten spaces close to each other in the Raval neighbourhood in Ciutat Vella. In addition, and as with previous editions, the event is complemented by the activities in the +Biennal, organised by local municipal facilities, cultural centres and other organisations and institutions promoting scientific knowledge and reflection among the general public.

Neighbourhood commerce in Barcelona goes digital with .barcelona

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Here at the .barcelona domain we’re working to help small shops and businesses in Barcelona go digital. From the end of May to mid-November we promoted the project “El meu comerç .barcelona”, where establishments were able to get a professional website with a .barcelona domain in a fast and simple free process.

The initiative meant that besides getting a new website, commercial establishments were able to link their digital identity with the city and form part of the .barcelona digital community.

“The digital environment is everywhere today, and for all ages”, notes Noelia Setó, the owner of noeliasllar.barcelona in the Sants neighbourhood. “I’ve got one because Victor, who’s about to turn four, sometimes says to me: ‘Mummy, search Google to see what Ladybug’s friend is called’, for instance. Amazing! So even if you’re a business with on-street premises, you need to move with the times and use all the resources which allow people to know about you and your product”.

As a society we’re experiencing a digital transformation. The arrival of the internet on our phones and in our homes means the way we consume and find information has changed, not just among the younger generations but even among people who are not digital natives.

A Google search is usually the first thing we do when we need something, as Noelia remarked. That’s also the case when we look for a shop or business, even in our own neighbourhood. “On the website, simple though it is, there’s valuable information about the business: where we are, the products we have, some images, opening times…all that means that people who don’t know me are comfortable enough to come and look around! Young or old, there are more and more ‘mature’ people gradually getting into the internet and the digital environment, and they surprise you!”, adds Noelia.

At lambicus.barcelona, an establishment specialising in Belgian beer and located in the neighbourhood of Sant Antoni, they were also clear on how having a website would give their business added value. “It helps bring us new customers, young and not-so-young. On the website we can tell people about the activities we have (tastings, presentations, festivals etc.) and the latest news. They can also contact us and it’s a quick way to know where our bar and shop are located”.

The last campaign for the project “El meu comerç .barcelona” saw fourteen commercial establishments in different Barcelona neighbourhoods sign up, all of which opted for a .barcelona domain. “Barcelona is a brand. It’s an identity. It nourishes collective activity. It makes you part of something. Puts you under its wing. So, everything linked to Barcelona is a plus for a business in the city. It’s like an exchange. We build all the values it conveys into Noelia’s llar.”

The application period for “El meu comerç .barcelona” is over for the moment. You can find more information about the project on the information page.

These are some of the websites created with the programme:

Renovation means savings!

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Now’s the time to renovate your home thanks to Europe’s Next Generation funds, with subsidies to reduce energy consumption and save on bills while improving the comfort and value of your home. The only requisites are to be a home owner and to use the funding to improve your home’s energy efficiency and make it more sustainable.

On the website rehabilitaresestalviar.barcelona you’ll find full information on the four types of subsidies available, which can cover up to 80% of your investment:

  • Building renovation: subsidies for work on communal parts of buildings, whether individual homes or residential blocks, which achieve a saving of at least 30% on primary non-renewable energy consumption and 25% on the demand for heating and cooling. 
  • Home renovation: subsidies for owners wishing to improve the energy efficiency of their home through measures such as replacement windows, insulation of façades, replacement of heating and cooling systems etc.
  • Drafting of building books and projects: subsidies for communities of home-owners for buildings constructed prior to the year 2000 who wish for a technical study with usage and maintenance instructions to lengthen the useful life of their building and avoid it falling into disrepair, as well as the development of technical projects for the complete renovation of buildings.
  • Renovation of neighbourhoods: subsidies for joint renovation projects with energy efficiency criteria for buildings included in the sphere of the Neighbourhood Plan.

This website with the .barcelona domain will also enable you to contact the Municipal Renovation Office to learn more about and apply for subsidies. 

Around the world in five domains

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GeoTLDs promote local identities on the internet thanks to geographical domains. This makes them the perfect way of getting to know cities all around the world without leaving your home. We’re proposing a trip around the world by visiting five city domains. Are you coming along?

Our journey begins with .barcelona, a domain which has been operating for six years now and has more than five thousand registered addresses. Browsing the various types of .barcelona domains offers us a first-hand look at some of the city’s most typical and iconic sectors. For instance, through cultural domains such as the one used by Park Güell; gastronomy, such as the domain used by La Boqueria, or meet.barcelona, as a way of getting to know the city and what’s going on there. In just a few clicks you can tap into the city’s heartbeat. But we already knew about this domain, so let’s pack our bags and move on!

Our next stop is .stockholm, one of the most singular city domains in that it is limited only to websites relating to the City Council in this city. A good example is start.stockholm, where we can find general information about the city and a clutch of .stockholm websites for the various services which the City Council offers its citizens.

Changing continent, we visit the geographica domain with the most registered websites in the world, at over 302,000! This is .tokyo, the domain for the Japanese capital. Here we can find the website marathon.tokyo, for international runners, along with visit-chiyoda.tokyo and visit-minato-city.tokyo to discover neighbourhoods in Tokyo, or japanfreak.tokyo, for those interested in curious aspects of Japanese culture.

From here we hop over to one of Australia’s cities with its own domain, which is .sydney (the other is .melbourne if you’re wondering). This city domain has over seven thousand registered sites, including cycleways.sydney, a website with maps and routes for getting around the city by bike.

Our journey continues with one of the most visited cities in the world, as we stop off at .nyc. The city that never sleeps has over 68,000 registered domains. We can find sites such as greenwichvillage.nyc, with everything that’s going on in the neighbourhood, and newyearseve.nyc, for those wishing to recreate the legendary New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square, so often seen in films.

Finally, the last stage of our journey takes us to .capetown. The domain for the South African capital has over four thousand registered domains. These include wanderer.capetown, to discover various routes around the city, iseeyou.capetown, a project seeking to give visibility to different collectives and fight to eradicate the discrimination and inequalities that still exist in a city as complex as Cape Town.

Combatting illegal tourist lets with fairtourism.barcelona

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The Fair Tourism BCN campaign is back this summer to raise awareness among locals and visitors alike relating to the harm caused by this illegal activity. The website, with its .barcelona domain, enables users to check if a specific building has flats without tourist licences, notify the City Council and help combat the phenomenon, as well as clear up any queries.

The flat search on fairtourism.barcelona makes it easy to check if there are illegal tourist lets in a particular building in the city. Users simply fill in the fields with the address, and if it doesn’t appear in the database it means that any tourist let in the building is unlicensed. The site also allows users to notify the City Council if they believe there is an illegal tourist flat operating in a building. 

The site for the Fair Tourism BCN campaign also includes a questions and answers section to clear up any doubts over what constitutes a tourist let, what conditions legal tourist lets must satisfy or what happens if an unlicensed flat is reported when there are people staying there.

Towards sustainable and respectful tourism

Barcelona has a wide array of tourist accommodation so that all visitors can enjoy the city as if they were just another city resident. Yet for visitors to benefit from their experience while respecting local people in the city, they also need to steer clear of any type of tourism which allows illegal flats to flourish in the city.

Over 2,300 tourist flats have been closed down since the shock plan to tackle illegal tourist accommodation was introduced in July 2016. Besides fines, a team of over a hundred inspectors and spotters continue to work to confirm that flats do not resume their activity, to detect new unlicensed accommodation and pursue organised networks managing more than one flat.

In parallel, work is ongoing with the holiday rental platforms through the joint working group which already included Homeaway, Booking, TripAdvisor, Rentalia, Apartur and Airbnb. 

“Barcelona has got an international reputation in the world of graphic design, which we wanted to link to our website”

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Minsk is a graphic design studio which started life eight years ago. The studio has evolved over time, its members have recycled their knowledge, and little by little Minsk has become specialised in audio-visual projects using video, animated graphics and digital design. With the creation of the domain minsk.barcelona the studio has been able to link its website with its values and those of its clients. We spoke to Pere Gómez Gavaldà, a member of Minsk, about design and the .barcelona domain.

What sets you aside from other graphic design and audio-visual studios?

Even though we’re a small studio (there are five of us), the thing that specifically sets us aside is that we are multi-disciplinary and flexible, meaning we can take on all types of projects with the advantages of working with a small studio, offering personalised service and dealing with clients directly.

How important is it for a company in the graphic design sector to have a website?

In our case it’s essential, as precisely one of the services we offer is the design and layout of websites, so we need a website which meets the expectations of what we offer our clients.

Of course, it also acts as a showcase where we can publish our outstanding projects and create our own discourse (you can get the idea if you read the texts on the website). That said, and as people know, when you get on with things your own website sometimes ends up at the back of the queue, and admittedly we often don’t have the site as up-to-date as we’d like to.

How do clients relate to you when they discover you through your website? What differences are there when dealing with them personally?

In our case the website tends to be a tool we direct clients towards when they want to see examples of what we do, as the site features some of our most notable projects. We’ve also got clients who contact us for the first time because they’ve found our website (the truth is that without being experts in SEO, we’ve got it well positioned), and with these clients the advantage is that they’ve actually seen what we do and they’ve actively contacted us, meaning part of the work is already done.

Even so, personal treatment for a small studio like ours gives added value, and once we get a mail from a client who contacts us via the website we try to get together or call them to be able to speak to them directly, as that’s what enables us to work in a more agile and personalised way.

Why did you choose a .barcelona domain?

One of the main reasons for changing the domain is that although the .es domain is shorter, we felt that as a brand we preferred the idea of linking our company to Barcelona, which ultimately is our city and has an international reputation we wanted to link to our company.

What differences did you notice in the everyday activity of the company after launching the website minsk.barcelona?

Most of all, the fact of linking the brand to new values which are much closer to us, our values and those of our clients. It mainly helped us to avoid misunderstandings. We opted for a change in strategy and communications, leaving behind Minsk Disseny (our commercial name up until that point) and becoming Minsk.barcelona. On the one hand, because design is now just a small part of our work, and on the other, because we wanted to link our main name (Minsk, the capital of Belorussia and the imaginary world we associated our brand with) to Barcelona (our real city, with values which we sincerely identify with much more at present).

As a graphic design company, what do you get out of linking yourselves with the city of Barcelona?

A lot. Barcelona has long been associated with design in general (not just graphic). It was important for us to be able to link these ideas. In addition, the contraposition between Minsk and Barcelona also helped us create a friendly word combination which has been useful for playing with the dissociation we usually use as a communication value in our branding.

How much clout does the name of Barcelona have in the world of graphic design and audio-visuals?

A lot. I think on an international level people continue to see Barcelona as the national leader when it comes to design. The same applies with audio-visuals, although here it’s more spread out.

L’Orgullosa’s got the dot!

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L’Orgullosa gets Barcelona celebrating between now and the end of June, in an event which also conveys a message. As a pioneering city and a leader in LGBTI struggles, the programme has been put together with the intention of bringing the reality of LGBTI groups closer to everybody in Barcelona. The programme can be found on the website orgullosa.barcelona.

Various city museums such as the MACBA, the MNAC, the Picasso Museum and the Maritime Museum are offering activities to reflect on LGBTI matters through different visions of their collections, guided tours and other specific projects. Elsewhere, city libraries and community centres are organising workshops, exhibitions, book presentations, talks, theatre shows and film screenings to give visibility to the plurality of visions of this collective. A series of round tables is also planned at the Barcelona LGBTI Centre on 30 June, to rethink museums from a queer point of view.

L’Orgullosa culminates with a grand musical gala for everybody, to be held at the Olympic Ring in Montjuïc on 28 June and featuring a line-up which will have everybody dancing, travelling and defending LGBTI rights.

An explosion of colour and symbolism

The poster for L’Orgullosa was created by the illustrator Javier Navarro, better known as El Dios de los Tres, with text by Javier Alcaraz. The design is full of LGBTI motifs and references to Barcelona, such as the cat sculpture in El Raval, one of the freshest and most effervescent of the city’s queer spots.

If you would like a hard copy of the poster, get along to the Sala Ciutat, at Carrer de la Ciutat, 2, or download it in digital format from the website orgullosa.barcelona.

Meet Barcelona’s got the dot!

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The meet.barcelona website has been renewed to emphasise professional perspectives, investment and study opportunities for people visiting the city or wishing to do business here. The revamp comes as part of the ‘Barcelona with you’ campaign.

The communication initiative was launched to coincide with the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2021, which went ahead again having been cancelled last year due to the pandemic. The campaign targets people from around the globe, the idea being to attract talent and investment and strengthen the Barcelona brand.

The initiative uses local and international media, including influential channels such as the Financial Times and The Economist, as well as social media, to generate an impact in different professional spheres. For those visiting the MWC in Barcelona, outdoor digital supports have been set up at strategic points around the city such as the airport, Sants station, the metro in Plaça d’Espanya, the Europa Fira station and other places.

Available in four languages, the meet.barcelona website is aimed at strengthening the city’s international position. It features reasons for visiting Barcelona, working or doing business here, as well as full information on services to help people have a positive experience of the city. 

Got your .barcelona?

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The .barcelona domain is open to all individuals, organisations, businesses and administrations with links to the city. Domains are now available at a unique price of 15 euros for any new registration, renewal or automatic renewal using one of the registration companies taking part in the special offer.

Anybody interested in a domain should check its availability, make sure it complies with the conditions of use, that there are no negative effects for third parties and that it can support content in any language.

Existing domains can be renewed at any time before the registration period ends, without having to wait until the renewal date. The registration company will give the option of automatic renewal and provide instructions on how to do so.

This promotion expires at 10 am on 31 May.

For any queries, please check the FAQs or contact domini.barcelona.