Competing discourses on urban mobility in the context of climate change

In this work, we analyse the polarized debate about whether or not to restrict the use of private cars in the city of Barcelona, which took place between February 2023 and February 2024, a period in which municipal elections were held and the new city council was formed. We analyse, first, fragments of declarations, published in the local media, of two politicians from left-wing political parties, the current mayor, Jaume Collboni, from the Socialist Party (PSC), and the spokesperson of the main opposition party, En Comú, an environmentalist party. Secondly, the declarations of the spokesperson of a group of entrepreneurs in the city centre, who were opposed to any kind of restrictions on the use of cars, and those of two citizens’ platforms in favour of a more sustainable city. Using a methodology of Discourse Analysis, we describe the most important formal devices that show how two opposed cognitive frames are activated: the right to the unrestricted use of the car (based on the ontological metaphor “the car is a right”), as against the rights of citizens to have a more sustainable city (using lexical elements referring to the negative attributes of cars). The frame defended by the current mayor (the third) is nearer to the former, although he does formulate it in a more subtle and implicit way.The work also includes a brief reflection on the differences between the discursive analysis of this type of discourse and the content analysis carried out by other social disciplines.