urbanism, culture n post-industrial city - challenging bcn model - balibrea

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Urbanism, culture and the post-industrial city: Challenging the 'Barcelonamodel'Mari Paz Balibrea

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To cite this Article Balibrea, Mari Paz(2001) 'Urbanism, culture and the post-industrial city: Challenging the 'Barcelonamodel'', Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2: 2, 187 — 210To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14636200120085174URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14636200120085174

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Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2001

1463-6204 print/1469-9818 online/01/020187-24 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1463620012008517 4

Urbanism, culture and the post-industrial city: challenging the‘Barcelona model’ *

MARI PAZ BALIBREA

In 1999, precedent has been broken to award the Royal Gold Medal to acity: to Barcelona, its government, its citizens and design professionalsof all sorts. Inspired city leadership, pursuing an ambitious yet pragmaticurban strategy and the highest design standards, has transformed thecity’s public realm, immensely expanded its amenities and regeneratedits economy, providing pride in its inhabitants and delight in its visitors.[…] Probably nowhere else in the world are there so many recentexamples, in large cities and small towns, of a benign and appropriateattitude towards creating a civic setting for the next century.1

The above quotation comes from a press release by the prestigious RoyalInstitute of British Architects (RIBA) upon the award of their Gold Medal to thecity of Barcelona in 1999. This text is paradigmatic of the dominant perception ofthe city as seen from abroad: a stylish and exciting metropolis, the perfect civicsite for the urban communities of the twenty-first century. The ‘Barcelona model’has gained official approval and is being copied on an international scale. Still ina British context, it is well-known that Barcelona is considered to be a privilegedurban reference point by Tony Blair’s cabinet. In 1999, the Urban Task Forcecreated by the Labour government and led by Lord Richard Rogers produced aplan for the regeneration of ten UK cities based upon the urban programme ofBarcelona. The Observer summarized the aim of the project as follows: ‘Each ofthe target cities will be encouraged to sell themselves as exciting and stylishplaces to live and work, mirroring the success of the Catalan urban regeneration.’(Wintour and Thorpe 1999).2

The view from inside is not much different. Whilst in the rest of Spain socialdemocracy has been showered with criticisms as a result of the corruption andspeculation condoned and fostered during the Socialist Party’s period in office,resulting in their being ousted from government in 1996, the majority of peoplein Barcelona remain satisfied with the way the local Socialist government hasmanaged things, particularly with respect to its urban and architectural projects,and continue to vote for them in local elections. Despite the economic recessionthat followed the 1992 Olympic Games, Barcelona has continued to enjoy anuninterrupted heyday of national and international prestige, as well as practicallyunanimous consensus with regard to the quality and beauty of its urbandevelopments and the habitability of a city seen as both Mediterranean and‘human’.

Of course, the absence of any notable dissent among the city’s people has

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188 Mari Paz Balibrea

been brandished as irrefutable proof of the virtue of the urban changes whichhave been implemented (RIBA’s opinion is just one of many examples). Forothers, however, this consensus is a sign of ‘la interiorización entre losciudadanos de unos criterios que coinciden con los intereses de los podereseconómicos dominantes’ and they therefore consider it to be ‘uno de los aspectosmás graves de los procesos políticos y sociales de los últimos tiempos’(Etxezarreta et al. 1996: 289). From an ideological point of view, the productionof consensus is the principal means of legitimizing domination and of co-optingpotentially critical citizens (Ripalda 1999: 30; Esquirol 1998: 113-30). Anyhegemonic ideology will seek to devise for its interpellated subjects arepresentation of reality that, while favouring its own interests, can at the sametime be presented as the only truth about that reality. This article correspondinglyassumes that the popular consensus on Barcelona needs to be regarded withscepticism and vigilance, particularly in view of increasing social polarization,the growth of a peripheral population which has seen its quality of life deterioratesince the 1980s, and the massive speculation accompanying the restructuring ofthe city (Roca 1994). In what follows I will analyse the urban changes that, sincethe early 1980s, have produced the seductive Barcelona of the 1990s. I willadditionally define some of the major mechanisms through which the perceptionof these changes has been hegemonically constructed, paying particular attentionto the role played by culture. My aim is to expose the ideological and politicalunderpinnings sustaining this consensus.

The city as ideological textAs soon as we think of urban spaces as texts, and therefore as vehicles ofideology,3 then urbanism and the production of consensus become interconnectedprocesses. Urban and architectonic development programmes constituteprivileged sites within which ideological interpellation takes place. To give shapeto the collective sphere through a urban regeneration project is to semanticize (orresemanticize) the former; like every signification process, this is intenselyideological (Ramírez 1992: 173-82). It becomes crucial to know what is beingbuilt in the city and how the newly built spaces are endowed with hegemonicmeaning, in order to understand how individuals and collectives are ideologicallyinterpellated as citizens. As Georg Simmel argued long ago: ‘The production ofspatio-temporalities is both a constitutive and fundamental moment to the socialprocess in general as well as fundamental to the establishment of values’ (quotedin Harvey 1996: 246). Fredric Jameson specifies:

the building interpellates me – it proposes an identity for me, an identitythat can make me uncomfortable or on the contrary obscenelycomplacent, that can push me into revolt or acceptance of myantisociality and criminality or on the other hand into subalternity andhumility, into the obedience of a servant or a lower-class citizen. Morethan that, it interpellates my body or interpellates me by way of the body[...]. (1997: 129)


Urbanism, culture and the post-industrial city 189

As soon as they come into being, buildings and urban spaces signify. First of all,because they change the structure of perception within the everyday urbanexperience of citizens. Let us take, for example, the recent opening of newavenues and arteries in Barcelona, such as the Rambla del Raval, the CarrerMarina and the extension of the Avinguda Diagonal and Carrer Aragó to the sea.In the Casc Antic, the longitudinal demolition of entire blocks of houses wasnecessary to make room for the Rambla del Raval; in the north-eastern areas ofPoble Nou and BesPs, which have been completely redeveloped and restructured,the changes have followed the closing down of local industries and therevaluation of the land they once occupied. Such spatial changes can generatepositive effects for the citizen, such as a new sense of cleanliness andrationalization producing pride and satisfaction with the current configuration ofthe city; or negative effects such as a sense of alienation and displacement at theloss of the original habitat (Terdiman 1993: 106-47; Benjamin 1973). The resultwill depend on the citizen’s previous relationship to the now transformed spacesand on the material and symbolic conditions under which she has experienced thechange, and will also be conditioned by the degree of persuasiveness of thedifferent discourses circulating and giving meaning to the changes. In the case ofBarcelona, these discourses have overwhelmingly, almost monolithically, beenfavourable to the urban changes implemented in the city.

Citizens are not the only targets interpellated in the process of resignifyingthe city. In accordance with the logic of the tourist industry – as we shall see, afundamental feature of the city’s current economy – the entire city turns into alucrative, luxury, fun commodity that can be rapidly consumed by the tourist, aleisure space commodified repeatedly in the purchase of a plane ticket, a book onGaudí, tickets for the opera at the Liceu or for a concert at the Palau de laMúsica, the booking of a hotel room or restaurant table. In each and every one ofthese activities, all of them marked by an economic transaction, the hypotheticaltourist ‘buys’ the city and constructs a private imaginary of it: one that, to a greatextent, is previously manufactured for her by multiple local and global practicesand interests. Even (or especially) in the case of those activities not involving animmediate act of consumption – for example, the following of recommendedtourist routes such as la ruta del Modernisme – the semantics and hermeneuticsof space have been constructed for the foreign viewer, and this construction hasnecessitated a previous political and economic intervention in the form of therestoration, face-lifting and rehabilitation of buildings, the equipment andstaffing of venues, the production of targeted bibliographies, etc. DeanMacCannell argues that the therapeutic quality of the tourist trip stems from thetourist’s desire to create a totality out of the visited space, one that saves her fromthe everyday fragmented reality surrounding her in the modern world (1976: 7,13, 15). Such a totality can be obtained in an alien environment because thetourist can reduce this new reality to a very limited number of experiences, andits past to a few visits to museums. Barcelona as a leisure and tourist site needsconstantly to produce a totalizing and coherent representation/meaning of thecity, one that is easy and pleasant to consume for this kind of visitor.



Not unrelated to this logic of resignification, sometimes the construction of anew space responds to an urban reconfiguration in need of new privilegedsignifiers that can be used to represent the city synecdochically. This is the casein democratic Barcelona with respect to architectural and urban projects such asthe Foster Communication Tower on Mount Tibidabo or the Port Olímpic wherea new leisure area is located. Due to the social function performed by these newspaces and artefacts, they become the signifiers best suited to symbolize orsynthesize the current dominant meaning of the city as a Mediterranean centre forleisure, communications and high-tech industry (I will return to this point later).Today, these sites figure on all tourist routes and their icons appear on everytourist map as well as on every visual representation of Barcelona financed bythe City Council, for instance in the paradigmatic work of Javier Mariscal.

The prominence acquired by these new signifiers in recent years worksagainst the symbolic status previously enjoyed by other urban and architectonicspaces in the city, notably those which allude to its industrial past. Most of theland that has been turned into service, leisure or residential areas since the 1980sis the result of the revaluation of old industrial land and the demolition of the oldfactory buildings previously occupying it. As these disappear en masse, somehave been salvaged and refunctionalized in their entirety – often as cultural,sometimes as residential spaces – while de-semanticized fragments of others havebeen preserved as monuments: for example, the chimneys in the Poble Noudistrict (old textile factory) or the Paral.lel district (former power station). Thesefragments not only lose any practical function, but in their new location theirsocially symbolic potential is also reduced. In theory, such fragments – forexample, a chimney formerly used to extract fumes – have the potential tobecome symbols of bygone socio-economic activity, an allusion to the city’s past.Or do they? These now monumentalized ‘objects’ undoubtedly refer to the past,but their spatial recontextualization disconnects them from the local history inwhich they originated. Isolated in the middle of areas now reconverted intoshopping malls, new residential complexes for the middle classes, or luxuryoffices for business executives, they can only be flat and mute citations, unable toconvey a sense of their own historicity to those ignorant of local history. Indeed,their disposition in space conceals the complexity of an industrial pastcharacterized by social struggles and human relationships that were lived out onthat spot, replacing it with a new configuration of space which promises theabsence of conflicts and equality through consumption and the market.4 Much thesame could be argued in the case of those old industrial buildingsrefunctionalized as cultural spaces. The potential allusion to the past that theirmere presence invokes has been restored, aestheticized, to the extent that the endproduct loses its capacity to refer to a memory of capitalist exploitation and ofthe role that this exploitation has played in the city’s current prosperity.

Under such conditions, the architectural quotation of the past5 paradoxicallypromotes amnesia and an absence of reflection on history. This newmonumentality turns the object from the past into an empty shell, a liberatedsignifier with a highly tenuous and malleable signified attached to it, whose



quasi-floating character can be easily appropriated both to justify the localgovernment’s interest in keeping the memory of the city alive and to serve as thelogo of a shopping mall. Thus its re-signification is, at the same time, a de-semantization. Those who favour this de-semanticized conservation-production-resignification participate in, and benefit from, the politics of history implied bythe conditions of possibility and existence of such objects from the past.

Finally, there is also a political or ideological dimension to aesthetics that isrelevant to the urban text. Architecture and urbanism are applied artsimplemented only when and if there is sufficient capital to finance the projectsand sufficient political power to back them. Urban speculation, via the large-scale real-estate business, is a classic phenomenon in the history of localcorruption sustaining every urban development process. But the production ofform and beauty – the terrain of the aesthetic – is also an intrinsic component ofthese disciplines as well. The presence of a mutual tension and interchangebetween aesthetic and politico-economic considerations can never be avoided inthe fields of urbanism and architecture. What is peculiar to democratic Barcelonawith respect to this tension is the resignifying of space, which has in turnproduced an intensification of the aesthetic component. One example comesimmediately to mind: between 1986 and 1999 the city council spent 6,923million pesetas on its campaign Barcelona posa’t guapa, intended to promoteand subsidize the face-lifting of key buildings located around the city. Accordingto ex-Mayor Pasqual Maragall, the embellishment programme promoted throughthe Barcelona posa’t guapa campaign ‘consolida la percepción del ciudadano delpaisaje público como bien común y público, contribuye a la mejora delpatrimonio colectivo y aumenta la comodidad, tranquilidad y sociabilidad en laciudad’ (Ajuntament 1992: 6). It should also be added that this campaign hasmassively benefited the modernist architectural patrimony of the city, mostlylocated in the Eixample district (Ajuntament 1992: 1996). It is not coincidentalthat this modernist heritage, dominated by the work of Antoni Gaudí, has becomeone of the pillars of the city’s touristic cultural provision and, more generally, ofits constructed image and personality. The proliferation of similar restorations,together with a policy of awarding the category of listed building to some ofthese restored properties (which means that they are considered part of the city’s– that is, part of a public – patrimony), has become an enormously successfulpolitical strategy, which brilliantly exploits the one communal, collective aspectof most of these buildings: the fact that their facades can be seen from the publicspace of the street.

The entire process of urban transformation in Barcelona has been carried outunder the technical supervision of a group of notable architects and urbanists. Tounderstand the quality and attractiveness of many of the urban projects thatnowadays constitute Barcelona’s urban space one has to take into account thisgroup’s achievements in the pre-Olympic period. But the exceptional mediaattention that the group has attracted is also a crucial factor in explaining whythis quality and attractiveness have become a universal focus of attention,popularizing the dictum that Barcelona is ‘the city of architects’ (Moix 1994a).



The quantity and quality of the work of these professionals has aroused muchadmiration for the city, to the point of becoming the only, or at least theprivileged, element by which it is judged and thus a decisive component of thecity’s seductive appeal. Until the mid 1990s, the rehabilitation and face-lifting ofentire key areas created new urban spaces and cultural facilities, many of thempublic, which without fail include an architectural project by a named architect.The presence, and convenient marketing, of work in the city by Foster, Meier,Viaplana, Calatrava, Isozaki, Moneo, Miralles et al. intensifies the aestheticsignification of these projects, turning them, by the same token, into privilegedsignifiers of what I have previously defined as a ‘designer’ city.

The constant tributes paid to the city’s beauty have helped to distract theattention of visitors and citizens alike from other fundamental, much lesssatisfactory, issues: employment, housing, public transport, or even thequestioning of the same urban projects whose aesthetic value is so intenselypraised. One could say, provocatively drawing on Walter Benjamin’s famousdictum (1969: 217-51), that the more aesthetics is politically used in Barcelona,the more politics is itself aestheticized, so that political consensus and theobedience of the masses are achieved by continually producing for them what isperceived as aesthetic or artistic gratification. It is clear, then, that the city is anideological text. Let us move now to a more systematic analysis of how this texthas been (re)written in key modes, how its forms have been filled with meaning,and how spatial changes have helped to shape a political ideology in democraticBarcelona.

Culture, urbanism and the production of ideologyIn my opinion, the most remarkable phenomenon in the process of urban change– that is, in the major transformations undergone by Barcelona’s urban fabric/text– is the extraordinary broadening of the material and symbolic terrain occupiedby culture. The most important changes affecting the social body and theeconomy have been justified in the name of culture, which becomes theirstructural axis. By invoking culture, the ideological continuity of the consensuswith regard to the city has been made possible. The connection between cultureand urbanism is established through the latter’s capacity to create public space: apublic space rhetorically defined as open to all,6 and therefore as a place ofencounter and of the production of collective culture. The new urbanism inBarcelona, at least up until the first half of the 1990s, is characterized by theenormous proliferation of cultural spaces (that is, spaces that house ‘Culture’with a capital ‘C’) and public spaces of great impact and visibility: squares andmonuments came first, then museums, theatres, sports complexes, avenues,promenades. The beginning of this trend dates back to the period of theTransición (Gomà 1997; Etxezareta et al. 1996; Bohigas 1985) during the officeof Socialist Mayor Narcís Serra and Pasqual Maragall after him; I shall refer tothis in more detail below. The discourse on the need to monumentalize andrehabilitate the city so as to serve its citizens, creating spaces of identification forthe community, and the pressure exercised on political leaders by important



grassroots residents’ movements in order to make things move in this directionare paradigmatic trends of this period. As Oriol Bohigas, the head of the SocialistCity Council’s urban planning department, famously put it, the task was to‘monumentalizar’ the outskirts, ‘donant-[lis] els valors significatius de lacol.lectivitat’, and to restore the historic centre reversing the process of decline ithad suffered, thus helping to ‘millorar la consciència col.lectiva’ (Bohigas 1985:20). The aim of this urban policy was to produce a greater uniformity in thecity in the sense that the residents’ cultural capital and collective memorywould be recognized within each neighbourhood. The homogenization whichBohigas aimed to achieve by intervening in the most socially deprived areas ofthe city was, in reality, an attempt to bridge glaring inequalities and to fostersocial reconciliation by allocating cultural and symbolic capital in the form of(among other things) monuments and public spaces of socialization andmemory.7

The continuities and ruptures in the discourse and implementation of urbantransformation in Barcelona throughout the democratic period must beunderstood, at least partially, in relation to this earlier stage. The major urbanprojects that would from the mid 1980s characterize Barcelona’s urbanism werelargely justified through a rhetoric which promoted construction as a publicservice designed to benefit the everyday intercourse of citizens, including thosemost disenfranchised. The logic and politics behind these earlier projects wouldget lost from view with the exponential escalation, in terms of quantity andquality, of the urban projects that followed. What triggered the change? Theextent of the social and economic transformations undergone by the city were aresult of the economic restructuring of the entire Spanish state that was beingeffected from the 1970s onwards. In the case of Barcelona, the transformationsbasically consisted in the dismantling of all manufacturing industry, which turnedBarcelona into yet another example of what has been globally come to be knownas a post-industrial city. Under these circumstances, it became imperative to lookfor a way to make the local economy sustainable. This signalled the beginning ofa shift in the city’s economy towards ‘clean’ culture and technology industries:8 alocal manifestation of a world-wide process in a global economy whereinformation and entertainment become the driving forces, necessitating theproliferation of sports infrastructures and large commercial and cultural centres(Cohen 1998: 110; Harvey 1996: 246; Smith 1996). For those with majoreconomic interests in the city, the urban transformation required by the projectsfor monumentalizing the outskirts and for regenerating the historic centre came atjust the right time, allowing the economic recession to be tackled. It was a firststep towards the reconfiguration of the city and the same economic sectors wouldexercise pressure in order to make the transformations more and more dramatic(Etxezarreta et al. 1996; Gomà 1997). The pressure exercised by big financialgroups over local governments or, eventually, the alliance of both translatedmaterially into the promotion of a mixed economy as the main way of financingpublic urban redevelopment. Politicians presented this as the domestication ofcapital through its harnessing to the priorities of the welfare state (Bohigas 1985:



63), or simply as an inevitable requirement in order to finance the publicspending necessary to transform the city.9 From the point of view of privateinterests this was a very beneficial, if not indispensable, alliance. The creationand improvement of the city’s urban facilities and spaces would allow the re-capitalization of their industrial land, devalued after the economic recession andnow very lucratively revalued and recycled; and would help to promote thecultural, technological and entertainment industries that were to become the coreof the new economy (Harvey 1989: 260). Pasqual Maragall expressed this veryclearly in 1991: ‘en la competitivitat entre ciutats hi compten també, cada copmés, factors com el medi ambient i les infrastructures educatives i culturals. Ensentit estratègic podríem dir que les ciutats són com empreses que competeixenper atreure inversions i residents, venent a canvi localitzacions avantatjoses per ala indústria, el comerç i tota mena de serveis’(1991: 99). The single mostinstrumental event triggering, encouraging and justifying all of these ‘necessary’changes was the nomination of Barcelona as a candidate to host the OlympicGames. I will come back to this.10

At this precise historical conjuncture – the beginning of the 1980s – theinterests of grassroots residents’ movements coincided with those of business andfinancial groups and those of local government. All of them, for differentreasons, were in need of more public space and improvements to the quality ofurban life.11 But the huge spatial redefinitions that were to be implemented in thecity ended up negating the original planning principles. The smallscale, detailedurban projects intended to respect and bring direct benefit to the most depressedneighbourhoods and their inhabitants had very little in common with the hugestructural transformations required to implement projects such as those of theVila Olímpica, Poble Nou, Diagonal Mar or Sant Andreu/Sagrera, all of thembuilt in what had previously been industrial and/or working-class areas. Eventhough the majority of these ‘zonas de nueva centralidad’ (Ajuntament 1991),labelled as priority targets for urban development, were located in very run-down, marginal zones, the new developments were not aimed at benefiting theexisting local population. The extremely lucrative revaluation of the oldindustrial areas – located next to marginal, working-class neighbourhoods –where most of the new cultural, sports, entertainment, commercial and residentialfacilities were built would end up producing precisely what the urban planningpolicy of Oriol Bohigas had wanted to avoid:12 the dislocation of the originalneighbourhoods. The proliferation of big shopping malls has accelerated thedestruction of the social fabric of small local businesses (Grup de EstudisTerritorials i Urbans 1999) and impoverished the quality and quantity of publicspaces, in favour of pseudo-public (but in fact restricted and private) consumerlocales. Many inhabitants of these neighbourhoods or their children have de factobeen expelled from their historic communities, unable to afford the escalatingprices of new residences in their now improved areas, or forced out of buildingsexpropriated for demolition.13 By working ideologically as a rhetoricalinstrument for generating consensus and consent on the part of the population,



the process of monumentalizing the outskirts and of improving public spacesaround the city has, paradoxically, facilitated the transition to a situation ofprogressive gentrification, privatization, and more and more restricted access topublic spaces.

In this new situation, we are witnessing the progressive erosion of themeaning of the term ‘public’ and, with it, a redefinition of the space occupied byculture. This is so, not only because culture is more and more radicallycommodified and dependent on private producers deciding who has access totheir – also private – spaces of consumption (Rifkin 2000). Culture is alsoredefined because those representing the public interest – local government –now understand culture as a key industry for the local economy, and not just asthe symbolic realm where ideology is produced or as the realm of aesthetics.According to Pep SubirPs, Head of the Olimpiada Cultural and also then Directorof the Centre de Cultura Contemporània (CCCB):

En la irreversible configuració de les grans ciutats com a centres deserveis, la cultura hi juga un paper fonamental. I no es tracta només detenir una bona oferta, una cartellera i uns museus de prestigi per alconsum interior o turístic; es tracta, també i potser sobretot, de tenirpermanentment la capacitat de rebre, de reciclar i d’exportar idees,sensibilitats, projectes que millorin la qualitat interna de la vida i quequalifiquin la ciutat en la concurrència internacional. I no hi ha ciutatamb una vida cultural rica que no tingui unes estructures i unsequipaments culturals consolidats en l’àmbit de la creaciócontemporània. (1989: 6)

According to this interpretation, culture – ‘idees, sensibilitats, projectes’ – is acommodity that needs to be produced in a competitive market, for which purposecertain means of production – ‘estructures i equipaments culturals’ – are alsonecessary. Pasqual Maragall himself published Refent Barcelona in 1986: a keybook for understanding his government’s political vision as well as its specificobjective of transforming Barcelona’s economy by gearing it towards the tourist,technology and culture industries. The then Mayor of Barcelona states thatBarcelona has the capacity to become the northern capital of the European south– ‘capital nord del sud europeu’14 – given its economic strength and its veryattractive, Mediterranean ‘art de viure’: ‘A partir de la realitat comuna de PaïsosCatalans, cal anar més enllà en la direcció del ‘Nord del Sud’ europeu i mossegaren el mercat mundial de la cultura, turisme, inversions econPmiques, etc. Lespossibilitats són grandíssimes’ (1988: 95).

This incorporation of culture into the economic realm becomes an even morecomplex issue when considered alongside that of Catalan nationalism at a timewhen the Spanish state was democratizing and starting to recognize the rights ofthe historic nationalities comprising it. Within this propitious climate, Barcelonahas been able to consolidate itself, politically and symbolically, as the capital of aCatalan nation without a state, in accordance with all modern Western nationalistprojects. Cultural facilities – those housing ‘Culture’ with a capital ‘C’ – have



played a key role here. The conception of the Museu Nacional d’Art deCatalunya, the reconstruction and extension of the Liceu, the building of a TeatreNacional de Catalunya, of a new Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, or of the Auditori,have been implemented by the autonomous and/or local governments asideological instruments in the construction of a nineteenth-century-stylenationalism. More specifically, these centres were conceived of as spaces whichwould organize culture from above and stockpile the cultural capital of the localelite while, at the same time, educating the masses in appreciation of this culturalheritage’s supposed public and community value (Duncan 1991). Other Spanishcities such as Madrid (Centro de Arte Reina Sofía), Bilbao (Museo Guggenheim)and Valencia (Institut Valencià d’Art Modern) have had a policy of embodyingtheir ‘state’ politics in one large cultural centre by a big-name architect, thecontainer being as important as its contents. Barcelona, however, has chosen todisseminate the politico-symbolic meaning projected by its cultural space inmultiple architectural projects. Of course, as in the other cities mentioned – theGuggenheim in Bilbao is perhaps the most obvious example – these centres, apartfrom consolidating the nation’s symbolic capital, are integral parts of the area’stourist appeal (Walsh 1995) and function as spaces where the national heritagecan be consumed. They are, as Neil Harris (1990) provocatively calls them,‘department stores of culture’.

This superposition of modern nationalism onto a ‘post-industrial’ economyand a postmodern cultural logic does not always produce the harmoniousconvergence of interests we have mentioned above. While Catalan nationalistdiscourse has supported every space which symbolized the intensification ofnational identity and collective memory in a global context in which the nation-state is being weakened and questioned, not all urban projects in the city haveserved to consolidate that particular nationalism. The long-standing rivalrybetween the local Socialist government of Barcelona (PSC) and the autonomousCatalan nationalist government (CiU) over who has most successfullyappropriated the meaning of Barcelona, and their disputes over the awarding ofcultural funding and prizes, exemplify two different responses to nationalism inpostmodernity. I have referred earlier to the Socialist Mayor Pasqual Maragall’sprojected definition of Barcelona as the ‘capital del Nord del Sud europeu’.Within the same paragraph he warns against the danger of Barcelona becomingassociated with European nationalities ‘de menys entitat que Catalunya’ orforming part of an ‘internacional de nacionalitats oprimides’. By articulatingthese ‘dangers’, Maragall seems to be dissociating himself from what might beperceived as a form of nationalist victimization or essentialism, making clear thatnationalist15 demands, even though at some points he invokes Catalunya and thePaïsos Catalans in his framing of the question, are not top priority in his politicalagenda. This is not at all surprising coming from the local leader of a Spanishpolitical party, the PSOE; but it seems to me that his anti-nationalist stance heredoes not obey a centralist logic conceiving of Spain as a unity with a radial centrein Madrid.16 Rather, I interpret it as a positioning with respect to a new historicalconjuncture in which the local urban unit is called upon to have a new



prominence, one not necessarily subordinate to any national framework – be itCatalan or Spanish – and therefore detached from its secular, political claims. Inother words, Maragall is appealing to a local-urban rhetoric that might be called‘nationalist’ only to the extent that it promotes a discursive interpretation ofsocial, cultural and political practices as characteristic and reinforcingconstituents of collective identity, which determine whether social consensus isreached or not. In this sense, the social-democratic local government haspromoted a ‘nationalism’ for the city-nation with its own organization andimaginary community, but one that ultimately aspires – and this is the keydifferentiating element with respect to earlier or current forms of localpatriotism17 – to become part of a broader community of cities not marked orlimited by state and/or national borders. While it is not clear from our historicalperspective that this form of imaginary community and economic framework aregoing to become dominant, we can certainly call it a response to a newpostmodern configuration of globalization in which, as the Royal Institute ofBritish Architects reminds us in the above-mentioned text: ‘cities as much asnations are in direct competition for jobs and investment’.

Cultural facilities such as the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona(MACBA) or the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB),regardless of their very different and contentious cultural politics, interpellatecommunity members as citizens of Barcelona, and not necessarily (though thetwo are not incompatible) as Catalan or Spanish. The CCCB is financedexclusively by the Diputació and the Ajuntament de Barcelona, and not by theGeneralitat de Catalunya or the central government, and it receives a smallamount of private funding. According to Josep Ramoneda, the Centre’s Directorsince 1989 and very close to PSC political positions, the CCCB ‘és un projectepresidit per una idea. I aquesta idea és la urbanitat com a verdadera tradició delmón modern’(1989: 4). And elsewhere: ‘El concepto que define nuestro perfil esla ciudad. La ciudad como lugar en el que se desarrolla la modernidad. Me pareceque ha llegado el momento indicado para una revisión crítica de la modernidad, ysi esta revisión busca forma, la ciudad le ofrece una’ (Moix 1994b). Theconnection made here by Ramoneda between modernity and the city is a veryfamiliar and widely accepted one. But it is at the same time a way of emphasizingone aspect of modernity – that of serving as a framework for urbanization – to thedetriment of another fundamental creature of modernity: nationalism and theemergence of the nation-state. Ramoneda’s emphasis favours a perception of thecity as a unitary and independent unit, rather than as part of another entity, andtherefore underplays the notion of Barcelona as capital of the Catalan nationwithout a state. In so doing, he is distancing himself and the Centre’s culturalpolitics and ideology from a nationalist position.

On the other hand, regardless of how much Ramoneda insists on remaining atall times within a modern frame of reference, the CCCB project fits an altogetherdifferent historical context. Together with the MACBA, the CCCB is a key urbanproject in the transformation of the city, located right in the centre of the‘restored’ Casc Antic and heavily implicated in the post-industrial shift towards a



service economy and gentrification of the city to which we have referred earlier.Moreover, the fact that the CCCB is recognized to be an imitation of thePompidou Centre in the Marais district of Paris – the ‘Beaubourg of Barcelona’ –indicates a desire on the part of the Socialist government to imitate their Parisiancounterparts, not only by converting the Centre into their cultural flagship, butalso by striving to make the Catalan city part of the tourist circuit of greatcultural cities – cultural capitals – of Europe.

The MACBA is another, albeit very different, case in point. Under thedirection of Manuel Borja-Villel, its chief Curator, it has also practised a policyof recognizing, assuming and defining its identity through its location inBarcelona – and not Catalunya or Spain – but in a resistant and provocativemanner. Unlike the CCCB and its institutional policy of raising Barcelona’sstatus to that of the great European cities, the MACBA has promoted Barcelona’speripheral, subordinate position in art circles as an opportunity to reflect uponmodern art and to rewrite its history and its present from the margins (Frisach2000). Be that as it may, the spectacular Richard Meier building which containsthe museum is the closest thing in Barcelona to the Guggenheim phenomenon inBilbao: a space conceived as a tourist attraction in itself.

We cannot finish this section without mentioning the event that has beenmost instrumental in manufacturing consensus between the different, opposingconceptualizations and uses of culture and public space analysed so far: theOlympic Games. Barcelona’s ‘Olympic fever’ – understood as the city’scollective pride at having been chosen to host the Olympic Games – had beenbrewing since the city’s selection for this role in October 1986, and to a lesserextent since its nomination as a candidate in 1983. A sporting, cultural andideological event all in one, the Games succeeded totally in generating localpatriotism and consensus, as well as in introducing the city to the world at large.The Games were construed as a project by all and for all, an event in whicheverybody could participate and from which everyone would benefit in the formof municipal self-esteem. Their planning and implementation constitute thecrucial period for securing the city’s economic future and, as stated earlier, marka qualitative shift towards major urban restructuring projects. On an ideologicallevel, the Olympics sutured the gap that separated the minimalist urban policy ofthe first social-democratic government from the maximalist, populist policy ofMaragall and his team. Invoking the Olympic games as a pretext, streets werewidened, ringroads were built, hotels went up, cultural and sports facilitiesproliferated. The pretext was so effective because it appealed to local patriotism:that is, to a collective desire to rise to the occasion, especially important in acountry suffering from a historical inferiority complex. The Olympic Gamesgenerated a civil fraternity, materially embodied and reinforced in everyarchitectural and urban project, which was perceived as required by the event.Once again, this was not a unique phenomenon. In the post-industrial city, spacesof cultural and sports consumption become, in the words of Harvey, symbols ‘ofthe supposed unity of a class-divided and racially segregated city. Professionalsports activities and events like the Los Angeles Olympic Games perform a



similar function in an otherwise fragmented urban society’ (1989: 271). Morethan any other event, the Olympics contributed to the construction of a collectiveimaginary of democratic Barcelona for its citizens. Indeed, they made theinhabitants of Barcelona into citizens and, for that reason, they constitute afundamental patriotic event that even produced its own foot-soldiers (Espada1995: 138) in the form of ‘voluntarios olímpicos’ – that is, the citizens whovolunteered to participate in organizing the Games’ infrastructure.

The end of the Games meant the end of their vast potential for promoting thecity. To replace them, another macro-project has since 1997 been proposed bythe local government: that of ‘Barcelona 2004: FPrum Universal de les Cultures’.While the Olympic Games provided a great opportunity to redevelop andrestructure the city, the FPrum is being instrumentalized to continue such a task,through a project where the centrality of culture in an transnational context iseven more obvious. The event is supposed to span the period between the twoCatalan holidays of 23 April (dia de Sant Jordi, Catalunya’s patron saint and alsothe Day of the Book, an obvious association with culture) and 24 September (diade la Mercè, the patron saint of Barcelona, and the day of the city’s ‘fiestamayor’, a popular cultural event). In one of the official brochures, the FPrumproject is defined as a:

convocatPria a totes les cultures del món perquè facin sentir la seva veu,en una gran Festa de la convivència [...] intent de respondre aldesafiament que planteja la mundialització de totes les activitatshumanes, des del protagonisme de la societat civil [...] per posar encomú tot allP que afavoreixi la solidaritat, els drets humans i undesenvolupament sostenible.18

The use of terms such as dialogue, solidarity, human rights, civil society andsustainable development play a prominent role in defining a fashionable kind ofprogressive rhetoric which is in fact contradicted and refuted by the increasinginequalities that the facilitation of this project is generating in the city.19 The useof culture as an umbrella word or concept (FPrum Universal de les Cultures)covering all the areas mentioned is significant in itself of the leading role andtotalizing meaning that culture is acquiring today. Joan Clos, current SocialistMayor of Barcelona, defends its promotion as a thematic replacement in a newcontext for the World Fairs and Universal Exhibitions characteristic of thetwentieth century: ‘Les fires del segle han estat supermercats de la tecnologia pera badocs i consumidors, perP per al segle que ve volem fPrums participatius on esdebatin idees per la pau, la sostenibilitat i la cultura’(Altaió 2000: 237). What hasnot changed with respect to these modern events is their use by localgovernments and financial interests as ways of promoting the city and asoccasions for restructuring and replanning it. In the case of the FPrum 2004project, a civilized, humanist proposal for dialogue among cultures – one that isrespectful of difference – is needed to justify the urban redevelopment of theBesPs estuary area – one of the most depressed neighbourhoods but also one ofthe most coveted sites in the city – with an estimated investment of 170,000



million pesetas (Ricart y Aroca 1999; Cia 1999). Culture and urbanredevelopment, culture and spatial restructuring continue to go hand in hand inBarcelona, continuing to justify each other.

From critical postmodernity to the recycling of modernitySo far, I have focused on a critical analysis of the urban and culturaltransformations defining Barcelona in the democratic period, paying particularattention to the discontinuities and changes that, at the level of hegemonicdiscourses, are presented as consensual continuities. My contention has been thatthe profound spatial changes taking place in democratic Barcelona obey the logicof a progressive post-industrial shift towards a service economy, a processbringing with it the imposition of a certain postmodern hegemony. In the finalpart of this article I will refer to the politico-philosophical implications of thisimposition, which I will also engage from the perspective of urban and spatialconsiderations.

The period of the Spanish Transición is discursively and hegemonicallyconstructed as, on the one hand, a break with the Franco regime and all forms ofpolitics derived from or associated with it, which are repudiated as anti-modern;and, on the other hand, as a continuation of the spirit and principles of civilresistance to Francoism, which in turn are presented as directly inherited from theprogressive, democratic modernity destroyed at the end of the Spanish Civil Warin 1939. This representation of history allows the new – and not so new –hegemonic groups to present themselves as modern and democratic, in radicalopposition to a reactionary, anti-modern Francoism (Balibrea 1999). This is veryclear in the case of Barcelona’s urbanism in the Transition period. The attackslaunched by local urbanists, architects and politicians on the urban projects of theporciolista20 period were made in the name of the new democracy’s position ofenlightened modernity, and against the unimaginative obscurantism of porciolistaauthoritarianism. Residents’ associations, urbanists and politicians formedalliances aimed at regenerating or reconstructing a city that would now be anti-Francoist in its social, aesthetic and political principles. And being anti-Francoist, they seemed to imply, it would necessarily become democratic andprogressive.

I wish to argue, however, that these attacks on porciolismo were also attackson modernity. The criticisms of a dictatorial state, its corresponding architectureand urbanism (tenement blocks and indiscriminate growth) implied at the sametime an attack on one specific modern vision of reality: that embodied, in one ofits most deplorable incarnations, by Francoist porciolismo. In other words, it wasnot from a position of re-found modernity that an anti-modern past was beingrepudiated. Rather, it was from beyond modernity, from postmodernity in one ofits most progressive forms, that a perverse Spanish late modernity was beingrejected.

To illustrate my thesis about the political urban discourses of the Transitionperiod, I will use a paradigmatic text for definition of the spatial changes thatwere to take place in democratic Barcelona, Reconstrucció de Barcelona (1985).



This book offers an urban, aesthetic, political and economic explanation ofBarcelona’s reconstruction. Its author was the influential architect, urbanist andintellectual, Oriol Bohigas, who would play a major role in the implementation ofsuch changes.21 Bohigas’s text takes the form of a critique of modernity offeredfrom the privileged position of an intellectual from the periphery but at the sametime extremely well-informed, who charts the results of a short-sighted, self-interested application of the principles of modernity at the service of aspeculative economy in the throes of expansion and fast-track development. Thebook’s critique of the limitations and errors of modernity is, I wish to argue,offered from a postmodern position.

From the start of his book, Bohigas states that the operating principle ofporciolista urbanism is obsolete, because it is based on unlimited expansionfinanced by private capital. By contrast, he proposes the reconstruction of whatis already there, stimulated and financed by public bodies. He equally rejectsthe amendments to porciolista speculative urbanism defended by the PlanGeneral Metropolitano (PMG),22 because this latter understands the city ‘comun gran sistema coherent i racional, en el qual domina una mena de metafísicade la totalitat’(1985: 14) but in reality implies ‘un model ideal desistematització i, per tant, d’utopia regressiva’ (1985: 14), ‘unes dictadures quedissimulen amb les obres de gran abast i amb la inassequible totalitat lesmancances petites i quotidianes de la realitat’ (1985: 15). Although herecognizes that this urbanism ‘[ha aplicat de forma] ambigua i sovint erradauns conceptes urbanístics que es varen inaugurar com a revolucionaris itransformadors i, a la fi, s’han mostrat reaccionaris i sense futur’ (1985: 22),he mostly goes on to connect this totalizing vision of the city to thedictatorship. This is implicit in his use of the expression ‘utopía regresiva’, andquite explicit in his observation that: ‘Cal recordar, d’altra banda, a quinaclasse i a quins estaments afavorien aquella política de grans sistemes i a quisacrificava la manca d’una adequada atenció als problemes particulars delsbarris’ (1985: 15).

It is highly significant that Bohigas’s object of attack throughout his book iscentrally constructed around the concept of totality. He uses the term ‘totality’ todefine a kind of urbanism which, besides being politically anti-democratic, anti-popular, anti-human and pro-big private business interests, is also presented as‘un sistema global apriorísticament racionalitzat i asèpticament coherent iincontrovertible’ (1985: 30). By adding this extra component to his criticaldefinition, Bohigas merges his critique with the critique of totalizingrepresentations that is central to the postmodern rejection of modern meta-narratives.

Indeed, Bohigas’s justification of his position and of his proposed changesobeys a postmodern logic in its attention to margins and silenced minorities, aswell as in its rejection of grand utopias. As an antidote to the macro-interventionwhich he deems harmful, Bohigas constantly advocates minimalism and micro-interventions that do not aim at radical structural change in the name of a utopianblueprint. Thus he advocates ‘el concepte de ciutat com a suma conflictiva de



trossos reals’ (1985: 9), ‘des de la peça relativament autPnoma del barri, delsector d’estructura física consolidada’ (1985: 14), the ‘consideració delproblemes urbans a partir de les realitats sectorials’ (1985: 16), and a ‘retorn a laidea del carrer, la plaça i el jardí urbans’ (1985: 18). In short, in opposition to theformer urbanism that is ‘pretesament homogeni i universal’ (1985: 23), Bohigasproposes one that is ‘múltiple i heterogeni en les intencions, en els mètodes i enels instruments’ (1985: 23); not a ‘urbanisme totalitari i críptic’, but rather‘plenament participat pel ciutadà’ (1985: 23), one that is free ‘per conviccióantiutPpica de les previsions inassequibles temporalment i metodolPgica’ (1985:24). The aim of this new approach is to reconstruct the city from below, bypaying attention to the needs of its most humble citizens, dignifyingneighbourhoods, avoiding the social segregation produced by big motorwaysdividing districts, and totally respecting historical street layouts.

At one point in his argument Bohigas states:

És important adonar-se que aquest nou requeriment es troba suportatalhora per les propostes que sorgeixen de la participació popularencaminada ja democràticament sense necessitat de demagPgies, per lesconclusions dels debats de volada cultural en el camp de l’arquitectura il’urbanisme i – el que encara és més significatiu – pel desprestigi de lesactituds sistemàtiques en el quadre de les metodologies científiques i delpensament filosPfic més progressius. (1985: 14)

In the ensuing explanation of what this ‘pensament filosPfic més progressiu’might be, Bohigas insists on a new attention to the individual and to the attack onmethod by philosophers Agnes Heller and Paul K. Feyerabend.23 In other words,in order to explain and justify a project that he himself defines as progressive insocial and human terms, Bohigas links certain tenets of postmodern philosophyand of postmodern architectural and urban planning theory to the demands ofgrassroots residents’ movements that were so politically crucial in Barcelonalocal politics during the Transición through to the early 1980s. The key to theearly political consensus in democratic Barcelona was the building of thisalliance between the people and the cultural and political elites, between socialmovements formed in the struggle against Francoism and the new philosophy andaesthetics influenced by postmodern thought.

Very shortly after, however, the original positions held by this political andcultural front, which can be defined as a critical, progressive form ofpostmodernity, would be massively neutralized. The rapid, constantimplementation of the various changes defined and analysed in this article – inpractice, hegemonically presented as a continuum – produced a different kind ofconsensus: one derived from complacency and devoid of any grassroots or civilresistance. Once it became hegemonic, this consensus became the politicalopposite of what it had been, to the extent that it succeeded in co-opting virtuallyall forms of civil resistance coming from outside institutions. These would bereplaced by what Joan Roca (1994: 601-4) has called the ‘orquestación ritual desimulacros de participación’. Even more significantly and paradoxically, this



consensus abandoned its original political critique and its rejection of theexcesses of modernity, in order to embrace two fundamental concepts of themodern period, recycling them for its own purposes: the concept of totality, soradically critiqued by Bohigas, and the end of history. These two appropriationsconstitute the spatio-temporal axis of the dominant discourse on the city since themid-1980s. They were extremely effective in eliminating the majority of voicesof resistance and in making the immense majority of the city’s inhabitantsembrace consensus.

The rejection of totality as a form of violence aimed at imposing a false kindof universalism, omniscience and objectivity was central to transitional and, as Ihave argued, postmodern attacks on porciolista modernity and on the PlanGeneral Metropolitano. Paradoxically enough, having frequently been the maintarget of Socialist criticism in the 1970s, totality became the buzzword ofSocialist consensus from the mid 1980s on. The same local government that hadopposed it would now impose it as a means of clinging to power, by means of atotalizing and globalizing discourse and a megalomaniac aesthetics. Thephilosopher Xavier Antich puts it this way:

a las puertas del siglo XXI, parece impropia la antigua pretensión demirar el mundo bajo el prisma de la totalidad, como si todavía fueraposible organizar una cultura [en la que se] pretende organizarlo todo aldictado de lo grande, monumental y desmesurado.[...] a pesar deldesprestigio de las macroideologías de referencia, en el mundo de lacultura continúa perviviendo una determinada forma de hacer a logrande, propia de un modelo imperial que no es aplicable a lo quedebiera esperarse de una Barcelona que ha sido bandera en la defensa dela Europa de las ciudades. (1996)

Despite Antich’s accurate assessment of Barcelona’s urban and cultural politicssince the mid 1980s, I would like to disagree with his rejection of totality as ananachronism. Totality continues to be an indispensable element in themanufacturing of consensus.

From and for the purposes of a position of power, the city must berepresented as a rational and ordered unity, one that is fully understandable andvisible. The map is the physical incarnation of this need, and its taxonomicfunction, operational since the early modern period, far from being anachronistichas in fact been enhanced through use of the most sophisticated technologies ofsurveillance and panoptic observation, promising full visibility of their objects.Beside their function as a control mechanism, totalizing visions of the cityprovide the citizen with a single, overall representation of it: an image claimingto embrace everything, or everything that matters, with no shadows, no fissures,no dissidences, these being represented as an innocuous pluralism. It isinteresting that Antich should refer to totality as a prism through which to viewthe world, because the provision of instruments that enable all citizens to see thecity as a totality has been a highly effective way of generating consensus inBarcelona. In the successive publicity campaigns organized by the social-



democrat City Council since the mid 1980s, global images of the city haveproliferated, supplied by the poster artists that the city council attracted – andeventually co-opted – from the margins of the underground comics and pop-artscene. The most paradigmatic figure here is Javier Mariscal but Flavio Morais,Outumuro, Carmelo Hernando, Stanton have collaborated here as well. Theseartists, all coming from the margins, have contributed hugely to the implantationof a standard, popular, totalizing vision of Barcelona, figured as a combination ofold and new emblematic elements (the Sagrada Familia together with the Fostertower), including the newly reconstructed and resemanticized waterfront in ahomogeneous, attractive totality excluding all dissonant elements. This is, ofcourse, the ideological trap of the totalizing image: it implicitly denies theexistence of what is not made visible: undesirable spaces and subjects, theincreasingly transnational circuit of capital, information and interests that makethe city possible.

Referring to the history of portraits and images of Barcelona that the city hasbeen able to preserve, Albert García Espuche24 states that any representation ofthe city is always just one representation of it, a vision marked by particularinterests: ‘Qui posseixi la Imatge de la ciutat,’ he says, ‘posseirá la ciutat’ (1995:18). Here he is referring to those with the power to decide what will becomevisible in the city, what hierarchy will govern the organization of the visible, andwhat will be relegated to invisibility. García Espuche is particularly careful whendescribing the relationship between image and power, and when calling thereader’s attention to what the picture always hides. Global images (thosesupposed to represent the whole of the city) coincide, he says, with times of greatcivic unanimity, when it is possible to produce and conceive of a contained,acceptable image usable as propaganda for the citizens at large. He identifies asglobal images those images produced in Barcelona from the mid-sixteenthcentury through till the end of the eighteenth century. According to GarcíaEspuche, such global images were not generated again until the time ofMaragallismo. Let us cite again the Royal Institute of British Architects’ pressrelease of June 1999, which corroborates García Espuche’s stress on theembracing of totality:

Barcelona is now more whole in every way, its fabric healed yetthreaded through with new open spaces, its historic buildingsrefurbished yet its facilities expanded and brought up-to-the-minute.Past and present, work and play are happily intermeshed in a newtotality that is more than its often splendid parts, and is betterconnected even to sea and mountains. And yet the character ofBarcelona, though changed, is more distinct than ever and ready forthe global age [...] (my emphasis).

For Michel de Certeau, on the contrary, the seductive total image is rather:

the representation of a panoptic power [...] a fiction [...] that transformsthe city’s complexity into readability and that freezes its opaque mobility



into a crystal-clear text [...] a ‘theoretical simulacrum’ [...] a picture, ofwhich the preconditions for feasibility are forgetfulness and amisunderstanding of processes. (1985: 128, 124)

Forgetfulness and the misunderstanding of processes are also tantamount to theend of history, to the extent that they imply a reconciliation with reality(represented without shadows or secrets), ‘la anulación del hiato entreidealidad y realidad’ (Esquirol 1998: 10), making obsolete the concept ofhistory as a struggle to tame nature or as a desire/need for a better world, etc.The immediate consequence is a democracy without politics – that is, ademocracy of consensus – in which confident and passive citizens, mute withsatisfaction, place themselves in the hands of ‘políticos-gestionarios [para que]se encarguen de brindar toda la prosperidad, felicidad, paz y estabilidadposibles’ (Esquirol 1998: 10). The end of history leads to conformism andpragmatism, and it feeds on the arrogant assumption that one is living in thebest of cities at the best of times, seducing citizens and visitors alike intobelieving that this is really the case.

Totality and the end of history, a throwback to a Hegelianism tailored to theinterests of the most conservative form of postmodernism (Ripalda 1999: 189-97), can be interpreted as necessary ideologies for the accomplishment ofconsensus, and they become particularly feasible in times of prosperity andoptimal geo-political conjunctures, as it is undoubtedly the case in democraticBarcelona. These kinds of appropriation of Hegelianism have been occurring inthe First World since the times of social-democratic prosperity following the endof World War II, as expressed in the influence of the work of Alexandre Kojèveand, in a more recent post-Cold War version, that of Francis Fukuyama. Theirrecurrence in Barcelona’s case, following a period when far more progressivepremises rejected the most anti-democratic and anti-human elements ofmodernity, demonstrates the need to understand postmodernity as a historicalframe of contradictory complexity. In order to analyse it, a combined global andlocal approach is required.

Notes*I wish to thank Quim Aranda, the Fundació Tàpies and the MadeinBarcelona group, especiallyNoemí Cohen, for giving me access to invaluable information to document this article.1 http://store.yahoo.com/award-schemes/ribroygolmed.html2 See also Irving (1999: 5-6) and, in Spanish, Fancelli (1999: 12).3 In calling urban spaces ‘texts’, I do not mean that urban spaces constitute a discourse withoutextra-textual materiality. I mean that circulation in the city is possible only inasmuch as urbanspaces are, semiotically speaking, made up of readable signs whose meanings are continuouslydecoded and negotiated. Phil Cohen (1998: 95-100) rejects this use of the term, arguing that themetaphor of the city as text has historically allowed power structures to control the decodingprocess, stigmatizing as other anybody considered not to be not properly ‘readable’. Withoutdenying the value of this critique, I believe that the semiotic analysis of the city as text can still bepolitically useful. And in calling urban spaces ‘vehicles of ideology’, I do not mean to imply a one-directional or static process. Different social actors, operating under conditions of inequality, canintervene to modify this text or to subvert its dominant uses (De Certeau 1985: 122-45).



4 In the words of Manuel Borja (1996: 120): ‘[Aquestes citacions histPriques] ens mostren lareconstrucció de la imatge, perP no el drama. [...] No sols no reconeixen el teixit humà i urbà de lazona, sinó que l’amaguen.’ Also against this politics of amnesia see Roca (1994: 730-2).5 The concept of an architectural quotation of the past that is void of any meaning, also known as‘historicism’, is one of the central features of postmodern architecture. See Jameson (1991: 18).In a more general sense, the instability and infinite slippage of the signifier with respect to thesignified is a constitutive tenet of post-structuralism. My criticism is not of the instability of thesign, but of the uses made of this instability to create a dominant ‘semantic politics’ indemocratic Barcelona.6 Public space is nominally for all citizens but in practicality access to it is restricted to certainindividuals and groups. During the modern period, access to public spaces was determined bygender (since women – that is, bourgeois women – were supposed mainly to occupy the privatesphere), but also by race and social class. According to Fredric Jameson (1997: 129): ‘private(space) is simply what interpellates me as an intruder while the existence or the waning of a trulypublic space can be measured by the degree to which it still interpellates me as a citizen’. The keypolitical question here is whether all individuals are really interpellated by public spaces andwhether they have equal free access to them. For a history of the concept of public space, see Boyer(1994: 7-11).7 Sculptures by Bryan Hunt, Oldemburg, Pau Gargallo, Tàpies, Chillida or Miró are still todaydotted across peripheral or popular areas such as the north end of the Túnel de la Rovira, Parc delClot, Can Dragó, Parc de la Creueta del Coll, Horta o Sants. Also characteristic of the architectureof this first Socialist period are the so-called ‘plazas duras’ – squares built on a cement ground andvery inexpensive to maintain and furnish – and the ‘casales’ (civic centres) built in every citydistrict.8 See the City Council manifesto Pla Estratègic Barcelona 2000.9 See Ferran Mascarell’s words in Ribalta (1998: 108). Mascarell has been City Council Head ofCulture since 1999 and before that was Head of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona. He is animportant figure in the formulation of the Socialists’ cultural policies. See also Gomà (1997) andEtxezarreta et al. (1996).10 Oriol Bohigas (1989: 125-6) explains in his memoirs that Narcís Serra, first social-democraticMayor of post-Franco Barcelona, had since the early 1980s hoped that the city would be chosen forthe Games because he saw this as a unique opportunity to secure its fast-track restructuring. Thiswas not the first time that a big cultural-entertainment event had been utilized in Barcelona as anexcuse for urban transformation in times of crisis and economic recession: the other two examplesare the World Fairs organised by the city in 1888 and 1929.11 This coincidence helps explain the process of co-option/institutionalization of the once verybelligerent residents’ movements that would take place in the course of the 1980s (Roca 1994: 601).12 Though he himself, in the successive institutional posts he held under Mayors Narcís Serra andPasqual Maragall, was very instrumental in producing the opposite of what he had once preached(Bohigas 1989: 125-35).13 A number of grassroots groups and organisms whose members are affected by these specificproblems have been organizing to defend citizens’ rights and to minimize the impact that thesetransformations are having on the city’s social fabric and politics. Good examples are thePlataforma Cívica opposing the Projecte Barça 2000, and the FPrum Ribera del BesPs.14 In which he included Zaragoza, Toulouse, Montpellier, Valencia and Mallorca.15 I am using the word ‘nationalist’ here in its most common meaning in the Spanish politicalcontext, where it is applied to those ideologies whose political priority is the defence of the rights,however these are understood, of the historic nationalities within the Spanish state. Needless to say,parties covering the whole spectrum of the Spanish state, and specifically the PSOE, are not devoidof nationalism, Spanish nationalism in this case. My point is that Maragall’s project for Barcelona,even though he ultimately belongs to the PSOE, is not fundamentally aligned to a Spanish, andclearly not to a Catalan, nationalism.



16 Which does not prevent their interests and objectives from often coinciding. On the one hand,the nation-state framework has proved very compatible with this politics of facilitating theleading role of cities. What we could call the Spanish state ‘politics of 92’ fundamentallypromoted three urban enclaves, Seville-Madrid-Barcelona. 34% of the one billion pesetas ofpublic investment in the Olympic Games came from the state. On the other hand, the state-widepolitical and economic crisis following the carefully marketed boom of 1992 caused a decline inthe city’s prominence, because it signified a de facto halt to subsidies and investments in themost crucial and ambitious projects for the development of post-industrial Barcelona: theexpansion of El Prat airport, and the building of a high speed railroad line connecting Barcelonawith Madrid and France (these projects are only now, in 2001, being materialized). Finally, theCatalan autonomous government has also promoted the internationalization of Catalan culturaland economic connections within the framework of the European Community, invoking ahistoric national community with S. E. France: Catalunya Nord and Occitania. Joan Roca (1994:607-8) notes the difference between the local (Barcelona) and autonomous government’sstrategies in this respect, arguing that the City Council proposes a community among cities,while the Generalitat does so among regions.17 It could be argued that the urbanism and civility invoked by the Socialists in the 1980s has animportant precedent in early twentieth-century Noucentiste discourse, particularly in terms of itsanti-nationalist (Catalanist) implications, which both share. In this article, I limit myself tohighlighting the ways in which the civility invoked in the 1980s was a response to contemporaryhistorical conjunctures.18 See Barcelona 2004, 10 preguntes sobre el F/ rum (n. d.) on the web page of the FPrumhttp://www.barcelona2004.org/ which contains more complete and up-to-date information on theFPrum project. From the time of its first formulations by Pasqual Maragall in 1997, the projectreceived numerous criticisms for its lack of specificity and focus.19 An acute criticism of the FPrum project and the economic interests involved in the redevelopmentof the areas where the FPrum is supposed to be located (now a marginal working-classneighbourhood, BesPs-La Mina) can be found in MadeinBarcelona (1999). See also Ricart andArosa (2000).20 José María de Porcioles was Mayor of Barcelona between 1957 and 1973, years of greateconomic expansion, also known as the ‘años del desarrollismo’, in Barcelona and in theSpanish state. Urban growth in this period was characterized by the location of a great number ofmanufacturing industries in the outskirts of the city and the need to accommodate ever-increasing waves of immigrants coming to work in these industries. The result wasdisproportionate, unplanned, speculative urban growth in the working-class neighbourhoods andindustrial belts, along with the indiscriminate opening up of big road arteries, with no respect forthe history of the city’s topography. The lack of rigorous urban planning, of concern for thequality of life of the new populations, and of infrastructures, together with the lack of any ethicalconsiderations in the building of new residential areas, are characteristic of the years ofporciolismo .21 A prominent member of the generation of children of the ruling classes who had grown up underFranco and were privileged enough to become dissidents (what would later be called the ‘gauchedivine’), Oriol Bohigas joined the ranks of the progressive civil resistance to late Francoism very earlyin his life. He was one of the founding members of the architecture journal CAU, a publication known,among other things, for being extremely critical of porciolismo. By the time he held his first post on theSocialist City Council, it is not an exaggeration to say that he was the most charismatic and influentialarchitect in Catalunya. Bohigas has been Professor at the Escola d’ Arquitectura de Barcelona since1971 and was its Director in 1977-1980. He has also been Head of Urban Affairs on Barcelona’s CityCouncil 1980-1984 under the first social-democratic Mayor of the Transición, Narcís Serra; MayorPasqual Maragall’s personal advisor; and City Council Head of Culture 1987- 1991.22 The Plan General Metropolitano was the first urban project approved during the Transición, in1976; it was written by Albert Serratosa and Joan Antoni Solans. See Roca (1994: 615-21, 627) fora critique of Bohigas’s attack on the PGM in Reconstrucció and from his institutional position of



power, which helped to minimize the project’s impact. According to Roca, Bohigas’s successfulattack opened the door to later deregulation and urban speculation favoured by the social-democratic governments. Roca defends the continuation of the PGM as the only existinginstitutional way of curbing the frenzied urban development of the 1980s.23 Here he could have mentioned Catalan and Spanish philosophers that were much closer to him,such as Xavier Rubert de Ventós (De la modernidad. Estudio de filosofía crítica, 1980) orFernando Savater (Panfleto contra el todo, 1978), which introduced postmodern thought to Spain.24 García Espuche curated a 1995 exhibition at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània (CCCB)entitled Retrat de Barcelona, devoted precisely to different images of the city and to an analysis oftheir transformations across the centuries. I am quoting his words from the two-volume catalogue tothe exhibition.

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urbanism, culture n post-industrial city - challenging bcn model - balibrea

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