Barcelona: Urban Identity 1992-2002

Abstract

Barcelona: Urban Identity 1992-2002 Donald McNeill is a Ucturer on human geography at the University of Southampton, UK. His doctoral research on Barcelona was published by RoutUdge as Urban Change and the European Left: Tales from the New Barcelona (1999), and he continues to do research on the city. He has oho published on mayoralpolitics in Rome and London, and current work includes developing a geography of the Vatican under John Paul II. Across the European continent cities are being transformed , reconfigured, reoriented, reimaged. Barcelona, a city that was long constrained by a Francoist straitjacket, now bears little resemblance ro the gaudy guidebooks of die 1960s and 1970s with their lurid images of the Sagrada Familia, their dusty statues of Columbus, the gohndrines bravely navigating the working port. The city has been, in no particular order, Catalanised, globalised, informationalised, gentrified, redesigned, and Europeanised. Its sounds and smells have changed; some streets have gone and others have arrived; high buildings have soared above the two-story housing in Hostafrancs and Pöble Nou. The Ciutat Vella (Old City) and the Barrio Chino (Chinatown) ate, contrary to some opinion, as vital as ever. And all around, in virtual and territorial spaces, the city is being pulled open and stretched wide by fibre optic cables, an ever-expanding airport, rondes (expressways ) and a high-speed train network. The city is unbound, snaking beyond its municipal limits into the valleys and along the north and south coast, and it is disembedded, feeding on the skill of its football team and the aesthetics of its atchitects, its icons projected globally by the media. There have been dramatic changes, yet all taking place against an unusually stable backdrop of social democratic governance, where a centre-left coalition has been in power in the city council since 1979. In this paper I want to explore how some of the diverse processes mentioned above might be related to issues of urban identity, and how interventions in the urban landscape are intimately politiArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 6, 2002 246 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies cal. I want to reflect on the city's emergence from dictatorship through the Olympic phase, where the urban left (in a range of guises) found itself having to rethink how its politics fitted the changing city and how the city, in turn, fitted the transformation of the political options of the centre-left. After briefly ttacing the evolution of this relationship, I will discuss the changing nature of the old town, the growing dogma of a technologically modernised city, the impact of deterritorialisation on the city's icons, primarily its football club, and finally will draw some comparisons between the 1992 Olympics and the city's next "megaevent," planned for 2004. I. Urban Policy and the Left 1979-2002 Perhaps the most striking aspect of the city's development since the re-establishment of democracy is its uninterrupted governance by a social democratic party, the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC). Here, under the mayoralties of NarcÃ-s Serra (1979-82), Pasqual Maragall (1982-1997), and Joan Clos (1997present ), the city has followed a reasonably coherent and carefully rationalised urban policy, a situation which makes it unusual both within Spain and the widet European context. This also makes it an interesting laboratory in which to follow the possibilities of public-sector led planning and development. Since 1979, it is clear that the Barcelona Left has understood itself by looking through an urban lens and, moreover, that its self-identity has changed alongside its vision of the city. In the years of the transition , and the earliest days and months following the 1979 elections, many on the Left hoped for a radical, strongly participatory , non-marketised urban policy. Yet the changing climate of politics in Spain and the world economy prevented such a direction. The PSC in Barcelona found itself facing the same dilemmas that the PSOE government faced in the early 1980s, when: in order ro eventually give impetus to the European project of democratic socialism, Spain [had] first to catch up with the most developed member states; but the restructuring needed to obtain economic convergence [tended] to strengthen...