The Barcelona City Council is publishing ‘Barcelona: My City’ by Marina Luz García (text) and Neus Caamaño (illustrations), and ‘The City of the Future’, by Anna Miracle (text) and Julio Antonio Blasco (illustrations), co-published by the Zahorí publishing house, two children's book with the city as their common thread whose goal is to create social awareness or develop a sustainable city.
How big is our city? How many children live here? Where do they come from?
Barcelona: My City is a book written for children with the goal of showing the city from both the inside and outside from different vantage points so that they feel part of a diverse society that we’re all responsible for, because we’re all key pieces in the complex machine that is Barcelona.
This tour through the city is taken by Laia, an 11-year-old girl who imagines that the city is like a big house with lots of people in it. With this premise in mind, Laia asks a variety of questions about different topics. To find the answers, she talks to the people around her: her grandfather, her parents, her teachers and her friends, but also people she finds along the way, like firefighters and the gardener.
The book comes with a workbook that contains the most important statistics on Barcelona in a very visual format through illustrations and graphs, an appealing way to make them understandable for children aged 8 and up. It also describes the importance of the quality of the air that we breathe and the situation we are currently experiencing, and it shows local shops, the city’s flora and fauna and urban gardens as factors of citizen co-responsibility.
In addition to the edition published for bookshops, 20 copies of this publication have been sent to all state and subsidised schools in Barcelona to be used in the middle and upper primary levels.
Libros del Zorro Rojo was the editorial coordinator of the project.
Let’s discover eco-sustainable projects around the world with Teresa
When Teresa has to do a school project on the climate crisis, she searches on the Internet to find an initiative created by Ecologists in Action, which works to lower waste and improve the planet with strategies designed as joint actions organised via the social media. She decides to embark on a journey around the most sustainable cities or those with projects being implemented, and from that The City of the Ruture, emerges, where she shares projects from around the world so they can be implemented in her city. We offer a summary of these projects in the press kit.
One of the goals of both the book and its main character is to raise social awareness, especially among young people, because they are the heirs of our mistakes and the ones who will be affected the most. Through this journey, Teresa sees that many of the projects she learned about are already being implemented in our city, but that many, many more actions could still be taken.
