Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City by Edgar Illas

Abstract

Reviewed by: Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City by Edgar Illas Benjamin Fraser Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City Liverpool UP, 2012 by Edgar Illas In Thinking Barcelona, Edgar Illas sets his sights on exploring “the ideological constructs that accompanied the conversion of Barcelona into a global city” (2). In the Introduction, he builds on and carefully distinguishes his contribution from work by Joan Roca i Albert, Mari Paz Balibrea, Joan Ramon Resina, Donald McNeill and Manuel Delgado Ruiz, all the while disentagling oversimplifications of Marxism and referencing the likes of Althusser, Harvey, Jameson, Rancière, and Negri. From these [End Page 289] opening pages the reader may correctly surmise that Illas wants to interrogate each term in his book’s title: not just “Barcelona,” then, but also the part about “Thinking.” What results is an ambitious work with a theoretical throughline of its own. Fittingly, given that this is a book in part about contradiction—or as he writes “the problematic fusion of capitalist and democratic aims” (7)—Illas’s prose is never satisfied. In content, he is attentive to disagreements and “internal discordances” (7); in style, he is aware that each point has a counterpoint. This book is at once skeptical and critical: of a state that “can deploy exact copies of all sorts of civil forums and social movements” in one given case (the Fòrum Universal de les Cultures), making it “impossible to distinguish between real political struggle and its simulacrum” (10); and of what I will describe as a problematically romanticized and abstract view of “the people” that obtains equally, perhaps, in the discourse of both urban boosters and urban critics, for example. But still, in his conclusions and despite his extensive critique, there is a hint of optimism: he would like to “devise possibilities for future transformative urban projects” (7), or as he repeats at the book’s close, to hope for “future urban transformations” (222). Chapter one marshals notions of the specter to confront late capitalism’s ideological machinery through discussion of events such as the Universal Exhibition of 1888, the International Exhibition of 1929, the aborted 1936 Popular Olympics, and the Barcelona Games of 1992. Here Eduardo Mendoza’s La ciudad de los prodigios (1986) (56-62, 74-75, and a brief but important segment analyzed on 136) and speeches by the Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch and Mayor Pascual Maragall function as impetus to fuse cultural production and the political and economic dimensions of urbanism. Chapter two interrogates the contradictions of discourse touting urban cosmopolitanism through Maragall’s script (written by Xavier Rubert de Ventós) delivered at the reception of the Olympic flame, the text of “The Rio-Barcelona 1992 Declaration,” and Francisco Casavella’s novel El triunfo (1991) (110-17). Chapter three looks at urban regeneration from 1981 to 1992, incorporating short stories by Quim Monzó (169-76) and focusing perhaps on Oriol Bohigas’ gravitation toward public spaces of the city—reading the latter in light of the contradictions of Kenneth Framption’s program on Critical Regionalism. Chapter four seeks to recover the potential of master plans as a way of ensuring urban continuity, to recognize a contradiction in the promotion of urban public spaces, and ultimately to link urban planning and grassroots democracy. While the book throughout is a strong and welcome contribution, I was most impacted by what I see as the fourth chapter’s exploration of the contradictions of urban planning. Here Illas moves beyond Barcelona in order to return to it. Swiftly and at an accelerating pace readers are carried through cities across the globe—Pearl River Delta cities, African cities, the European city, the Japanese city, Mexico ity—and more important they are simultaneously carried through the various ways in which theorists have been thinking cities across the globe. At the end of this journey are two sections titled “Master Plans and Public Space” (199-210) and “Urban Public Spaces” (210-17) that abutt the book’s conclusion. Earlier in this chapter Illas had noted that “master planning is a vital tool to control the unremitting forces of private interests” and lamented that in the Barcelona model, failure came from the...