Critical Files The Barcelona Model, 1973-2004

Critical Files The Barcelona Model 1973-2004

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Editors Josep Maria Montaner Fernando Ă lvarez Zaida MuxĂ­

ario Ros . d Mo

Fernando à lvarez Verena Andreatta Marc Andreu Ibon Areso Mari Paz Balibrea Debora Bellagio Jordi Borja Joan Busquets Alberto Canavati Antònia Casellas Javier Cenicacelaya Norberto Chaves Marcelo Corti Ferran Ferrer Viana Pilar Garcia Almirall Aurora García García de León Oriol Hostench Tania Magro Josep Maria Montaner María Mur Zaida Muxí Josep Maria Pascual David de la Peùa Daniele Porretta Jordi Rogent Isabel Segura Mercè Tatjer

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Critical Files The Barcelona Model 1973-2004

Editors Josep Maria Montaner Fernando Ă lvarez Zaida MuxĂ­

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Critical Files The Barcelona Model 1973-2004 Published by Ajuntament de Barcelona Department of Architectural Composition of the ETSAB-UPC Publications Board and Ajuntament of Barcelona Jaume Ciurana i Llevadot, Jordi Martí i Galbis, Jordi Joly i Lena, Vicente Guallart i Furió, Àngel Miret i Serra, Marta Clari i Padrós, Miquel Guiot i Rocamora, Marc Puig i Guà rdia, Josep Lluís Alay i Rodríguez, JosÊ PÊrez i Freijo, Pilar Roca i Viola Director of Communication and Citizen Attention Marc Puig Director of Image and Editorial Services JosÊ PÊrez Freijo Head of Publishing Oriol Guiu Production Maribel Baùos Publication and production Direcció d’Imatge i Serveis Editorials Municipals Passeig de la Zona Franca, 66 - 08038 Barcelona tel. 93 402 31 31 www.bcn.cat/publicacions Editors Josep Maria Montaner, Fernando à lvarez and Zaida Muxí Editorial coordination Josep Maria Montaner Translation from the Spanish Elaine Fradley Graphic design Francesc Polop disseny Publication schollarship Jaume Coscollar Distribution Actar D Roca and Batlle, 2 - 08023 Barcelona T +34 934 174 993 F +34 934 186 707 office@actar-d.com www.actar-d.com Š of the texts: their authors Š of the images: their authors All rights reserved. The content of this book is protected by law with prison sentences and/or fines and the corresponding compensation for damages for anyone who reproduces, plagiarizes, distributes or communicates publicly, in whole or in part, a literary, artistic or scientific work, or transforms, interprets or artistically produces it in fixed form, on any type of support or communicated by any means, without prior permission.

ISBN: 978-84-9850-406-4 Legal deposit: B-27.823-2012 Printed in Spain This book, a joint publication of Barcelona City Council and the Department of Architectural Composition of the ETSAB-UPC, has been produced with the assistance to the research project of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (HAR2008-05486) and the AGAUR of the Generalitat de Catalunya (Suport a Grups de Recerca SGR, GRE Grup de Recerca Emergent 2009 SGR 435). Further assistance was given by the Museu d’Història de Barcelona (MUHBA) and Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB-UPC).

The editors make no express or implicit comment on the accuracy of the information, either graphic or written, in this book, and therefore can accept no liability in the event of error or omission.

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Index 9

Introduction

11 27 33

Methodological introductions Josep Maria Montaner. The evolution of the Barcelona model (1973-2004) Fernando Ă lvarez. Heritage in the contemporary city Joan Busquets. Models of urban project

49 53 57 62 67 76 98

Economic, plans, projects and city strategies Josep Maria Montaner. Economic interests and actors in the city Marc Andreu. Power, economic interests and the Barcelona model Josep Maria Pascual. Urban development and democratic governance. Towards second-generation strategic planning Antònia Casellas. Governance and city. The evolution of the public-private partnership model in Barcelona Pilar Garcia Almirall. The urban transformation of Barcelona: the tax system and urban values Zaida Muxí. Barcelona’s Vila Olímpica, or the Ribera Plan revisited Ibon Areso. Bilbao at the turn of the century. Metamorphosis of the industrial metropolis

107 110 116 126 131

Urban social movements and neighbourdhood improvements Zaida MuxĂ­. City model and urban social movements: a three-step dance Tania Magro. “The spume that beats at the gates of the cityâ€?. Urban social movements in Barcelona (1964-1986) Verena Andreatta. Recovering the city by recovering its neighbourdhoods. Favela-Bairro and Rio Cidade MarĂ­a Mur. “Barbiâ€? superstar. The Bilbao effect surfs the crisis Tania Magro and Zaida MuxĂ­. Women who build cities in urban social movements

147 152 163 173 182 190 196

City remodelling and heritage Fernando Ă lvarez. City remodelling and heritage Oriol Hostench. Defending urban heritage in Sant MartĂ­ Jordi Rogent. Catalogues of listed buildings of the city of Barcelona Mercè Tatjer. Industrial heritage and the Barcelona model: Poblenou as an example Isabel Segura. Modern industrial heritage on the peripheries Ferran Ferrer Viana. Everyday heritage: “Barcelona, posa’t guapaâ€?

Javier Cenicacelaya. City and heritage. Bilbao and Monterrey

211 218 233 240 246 252 259 268

Theoretical models: diffusion and transformation Josep Maria Montaner. Barcelona, from urban model to registered trademark Jordi Borja. Barcelona and its relation with other cities: Bilbao, Monterrey, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires Marcelo Corti. Barcelona: a view from Buenos Aires Mari Paz Balibrea. The Barcelona model, from Cool Britannia to London 2012 Debora Bellagio. Dialogues between Barcelona and Rosario. An examination of MBM’s project for Parque Espaùa Alberto Canavati. The Barcelona model in the Forum of Monterrey Aurora García García de León. The evolution of branding in the Barcelona model Norberto Chaves. From model to brand. The real and the imaginary in urban management.

277 288

Addendum David de la PeĂąa. Participation and activism: the case of Can BatllĂł Daniele Porretta. The beginnings of a Reader on the Barcelona model

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Foreword

A city is a constantly evolving living being. There are times when the processes of change take place at the large scale, indisputably the most important of which, for Barcelona, was undertaken in the second half of the 19th century with the implementation of the Eixample town extension plan designed by Ildefons CerdĂ . A century and a half after the project was passed, the city is more alive than ever and undergoing major transformation.

Recent decades have comprised years characterized by large ambitious urban planning projects. The city has opened up to the sea, transformed entire districts and neighbourhoods such as Ciutat Vella and Poblenou with 22@, built essential infrastructures such as the Ronda beltways and promoted the restoration of architectural heritage. Of all of these interventions, the most emblematic and memorable is, beyond all doubt, the one that took place prior to the celebration in our city of the 1992 Olympic Games.

All activity, however, has to be in keeping with the needs of the city’s residents. Centring on the closing years of the period covered by this book (from the end of Franco’s regime to 2004), we see a crisis in the urban planning model that has taken form in Barcelona, especially with the increasing distance between municipal planning interventions and the perception of improvement by the city’s residents. Perhaps the most eloquent example is the urbanistic development of the controversial Universal Forum of Cultures.

It is the role of the institutions to examine critically the causes that produce this distance between politics, urbanism and citizens. We can only redress this negative trend by making the necessary adaptations to the city’s present-day model of transformation, but most of all we need to create ways of recovering the capacity for action and the involvement of the city’s people with the new urban projects we have to carry out.

Barcelona aspires to continue being a worldwide benchmark for architecture and urbanism, with its sights set very firmly on a kind of urbanism that combines the quality of its built space with information and communication technologies, at the same time considering its environmental and energy impact.

Barcelona needs to rethink itself beyond the mirage of the misnomer that is the “Barcelona model�. We have to all work together to realize our vision of productive neighbourhoods at a human pace, within a high-speed, hyperconnected, zero-emission metropolis, in the near future.

For the moment, I leave you with this interesting book about the “Barcelona model� that has excited so much discussion in recent years. Reflection and critical thinking are vital to bringing about change in our model of city construction—starting, perhaps, with these pages.

Xavier Trias Mayor of Barcelona

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Critical Files The Barcelona Model 1973-2004

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Introduction

This joint work is a collection and a summary of the most important reflections of the Arxiu Crític Model Barcelona research group, made up of teachers and students on master’s and doctorate courses, with the contributions of guest experts in the areas of architecture and history.

The objective was to bring a critical approach based on the rigour of university research to rethinking the Barcelona experience, from 1973, when Mayor Porcioles left office, to 2004, when the celebration of the Forum marked the start of a crisis characterized by a growing apart from the city’s inhabitants. The research project was seen as a response on the part of the university world to the necessary reconsideration of the urban model, with particular emphasis on providing more than either official triumphalist viewpoints of the city or disparaging criticism that proposed no practical alternatives for the near future. The idea was to dismantle the model, examining each of its parts, stripping back the dualities and schematism accompanying its presentation and interpretation, and analysing its originality and its contributions, but also its limitations and difficulties.

The project was based on two premisses. One was that the interpretation of Barcelona’s complexity could not be the work of a single person; it had to be the result of collective investigation that involved very varying approaches, both favourable and critical, from the viewpoint of urbanism and other activities, from the viewpoint of very different generations, with real-life experiences and viewed from a distance. The other was that taking a city as a model necessarily involves referring to other contemporary urban models—that is, establishing relations, particularly with cities that have been influenced by the Barcelona urban model.

The research project and this publication were made possible by the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (HAR200805486) and the AGAUR (GRE Grup de Recerca Emergent 2009 SGR 435), at the Department of Architectural Composition of the ETSAB-UPC, and with the Museu d’Història de Barcelona as a backing institution.

The editors would like to express their thanks for the support of the director of the Department of Architectural Composition (ETSAB-UPC), Manuel Guà rdia, and the director of the Museu d’Història de Barcelona, Joan Roca, as well as historians Teresa Macià and Elisenda Curià who have taken part, on behalf of the museum, in some of the research group’s meetings. We also wish to thank the architect Roser Casanovas, who joined the group towards the end of the project and, together with Daniele Porretta, started work on the preparation of a Reader on the Barcelona model. Special thanks go to corporate Communication and Quality of Barcelona City Council, for knowledgeable and enthusiastic support to the publication of this book.

Josep Maria Montaner, Fernando Ă lvarez and Zaida MuxĂ­, editors

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photo: Antonio Lajusticia / Barcelona City Council

Methodological introductions

The evolution of the Barcelona model (1973-2004) Josep Maria Montaner

“For those who rule do not express themselves, nor do they ever confess. Rarely in a people, or in a culture, have those who express themselves been those who rule, or, if this has occurred, it has been in different seasons, when they have ceased to rule. Those who rule, while they rule, neither express themselves nor take kindly to those who do it for them; hence, in all times of greatness, the State tends to inhibition, it looks askance at the poet; poets are considered, sensed, rather to be enemies in a well constituted republic, since they declare that which sometimes has to be concealed and contained. Power tends to be taciturn.�

MarĂ­a Zambrano, Delirio y destino, 1953

Introduction The city is the complex structure in which the contemporary life of human beings unfolds. A city is not a short story or a novel, nor is it an organism or a company, concepts with which many critics, economists and supposed experts confuse it. Each real city is made up of the superposition of many layers: historical, political, social, economic, formal, symbolic. The form of the city is the result of the superposition of different strata: urban memory, the subdivision of land ownership, street layouts and public spaces, the structure of neighbourhoods, housing and facilities, urban signs.

While the city is made up of history, social relations, real-estate interests and public regulations, it also has to be seen as a formal structure comprising superposition, fragmentation and confrontation: a space of superposition of various realities and forms, as the discontinuous view posited by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, FĂŠlix Guattari and Jacques Derrida has shown. A place of conflict and discord which, as Franco Rella wrote, is still the last possible context, thanks to the constant contraposition of ideas, of dialogue with the truth. A place of absence, as Massimo Cacciari wrote—absence of primitive celebration, of nature, of the organic, of the historic vestiges of the peoples and groups who once inhabited it, and were excluded or disappeared. The ultimate factory of art, the city is, perhaps, the last paradigm of contemporary society, as Ignasi de SolĂ -Morales wrote in the essay “Arquitectura dĂŠbilâ€? (1987).

A morphological look at urban heritage Though not to the exclusion of other interpretations, morphology is one of the key logics for interpreting the city. To understand the interventions in the Barcelona of recent decades, it is useful to consider it as a structure in the process of transformation, made up of the complex articulation of parts with very differing shapes, uses, types of development and urban responsibility. Delimiting the formal types of intervention will serve to explain both the essence of the city and the internal logic of the projects under way.

From a formal viewpoint, Barcelona is a clear city, rectangular, almost square, in shape. A square with definitive material boundaries: the sea, the river Besòs, the foothills of the Collserola range and a fourth side that stops a little short of the river Llobregat. The geographical square, with sides of approximately ten kilometres, contains a clear structure that started out as the orderly grid form of the Roman century and gradually became a medieval, organic, radial city. It was during the period of the Enlightenment that new urban orders began 11

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to be introduced into an incipiently industrial Barcelona: outside the historic centre, grid networks created neighbourhoods such as Barceloneta (1753) and, inside it, straight new streets were built, such as Carrer de Ferran, begun in 1824, and regular plazas were designed on the site of confiscated convents, such as Plaça Reial (1848-1859). This piecemeal process of urban renovation was later unified in the Eixample city extension project

by Ildefons CerdĂ . This plan introduced an overall order into the city, present-day and future, which shifted its centre and annexed the municipalities in the plain. This mid-19th century order still exists today, despite being revised and remodelled.

It is into this structure that the interventions of the last four decades have been introduced. The general strategy has been to complete the form of the city, at the same time seeking to address serious shortcomings: building on large empty plots or sites freed up by the demolition of obsolete infrastructures (stations and railway lines, industrial buildings, etc.), creating new public spaces, reworking some urban areas, reinforcing the entire road system. Since the city is now largely consolidated, the larger-scale transformations have been carried out not in the centre and in the Eixample, but around the perimeter of the original square: in outlying neighbourhoods, former industrial areas, at the entrances to the city, on the seafront and along the range of hills.

It is no coincidence that the four major interventions of the 1980s for the Olympic Games were introduced one on each side of this urban square: Montjuïc, Vila Olímpica, Vall d’Hebron and Diagonal. Though each of these four areas was given a different character, they have much in common. Firstly, the rapid, overall urban transformation of three of these areas (excluding the sports area of Diagonal) was impossible without the impetus of an extraordinary event such as the Olympic Games. Secondly, each is to some extent plurifunctional, but all play a specific role in relation to the city as a whole. The essence of the four areas is the urban specialization that completes their functional complexity: Montjuïc is used intensively as an area of parks and facilities for culture, leisure and sport; Vila Olímpica is a residential neighbourhood with a certain standard of services and public spaces; Vall d’Hebron has a high standard of facilities, particularly in the fields of health, sport and universities, and Diagonal has consolidated its role as an area of universities and sport, along with tertiary services.

To facilitate the connection between the neighbourhoods, areas or parts of the city, it was vital to ensure ongoing improvements to lines of communication, from the initial ring roads to boulevards and beltways, from bridges to tunnels, from Metro lines to service galleries and fibre optic networks. New expressways had to be planned that also served an urban purpose and created spaces for pedestrians. The result is a city that is a whole made up of independent parts with their own character, connected by a complex network of all manner of communications.

This city structure contains other types of parts that are not as large as these areas but serve to link them, situated at the points of confluence of various lines of circulation or contact between neighbourhoods. These are junctions, such as Plaça de les Glòries, Renfe-Meridiana, Plaça d’Ildefons CerdĂ , Carrer de Tarragona, Port Vell, which required far more complex solutions than the four main areas, since problems of circulation and diversity of uses had to be addressed in much smaller spaces that therefore involved greater superposition; these are the “areas of new centralityâ€?. Finally, as well as the areas, lines and junctions, other smaller but very important parts also played a fundamental role in the renovation of the city in the 1980s. These were points, focuses with a simpler, single-functional structure, serving to draw together and transform their urban environs. The idea was to revitalize the city by means of points seen as empty spaces and complexes for cultural activity. Public spaces and cultural buildings continue to provide the focuses in neighbourhoods that used to be represented by churches, markets or even theatres.

These, then, were the four main formal types of intervention in the Barcelona of the 1980s: areas, lines, junctions and points. They drew on the gestalt theory and the urban psychology that Kevin Lynch explained in his

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book The Image of the City (1960), seeing the form of the city, as interiorized by its inhabitants, in terms of the psychological and formal concepts of paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. Another useful reference was that of Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette (1982-1990) in Paris, with its points, lines and surfaces.

Characteristics of the Barcelona model in the first major transformation of the Olympic city This text, part of the research project, aims to construct a critical discourse on the Barcelona model. The analysis it presents therefore recognises the qualitative leap that the city has taken and the quality of the specialists involved in it, though based on the conviction that the construction of critical interpretations can reveal characteristics, constraints, contradictions and consequences of the basic model developed.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the great number and quality of urban planning and architectural interventions carried out in Barcelona made it a model of urban intervention, with the creation of over a hundred new public spaces, the remodelling of a whole series of facilities, the construction of four Olympic areas and various areas of new centrality, and the thoroughgoing modernization of infrastructures. This led, in the late 1980s, to the coining of the concept of the “Barcelona model�.

The three main features defining this urban model were the importance of the urban project rather than the plan; the emphasis on public space, complemented by opening the city up to the seafront, and the mechanisms needed to bring private initiative into line with public institutions. These three main themes were complemented by the attempt to recreate balance in the city by distributing urban values, improving interconnectivity and introducing tertiarization.

One of the underlying methodological arguments of the Barcelona model was to see the city as a laboratory.

This was, then, an empirical model, based not on ambitious technological planning but on fragmentary interventions, small and medium-sized interventions intended to strategically recompose the city using the tools of the architecture project.

The points of departure were clear: to remodel the city by exploiting its qualities and recovering its few open spaces; to focus on the singular phenomenon of the 1992 Olympic Games as the driving force for renovating the city, seeing Barcelona as an urban and social laboratory based on a form of urbanism seen as project, designing the Olympic areas and installations as fully integrated parts of the city, undertaking a drastic and much needed restructuring of infrastructures, and promoting large-scale projects in relation to the predominance of public space.

To analyse whether these objectives were met, below is a definition of the phases in the process in order to then explain the most characteristic interventions.

Proposed interpretation of the phases in the process The projects at different scales carried out in Barcelona were the result of definite political decisions, a specific management model and an urban programme outlined by a team of representative specialists: from the initial intervention of Oriol Bohigas, author of the seminal text ReconstrucciĂł de Barcelona (1985), to the varying tasks of professionals such as Joan Busquets, LluĂ­s Millet, Josep Martorell, Rafael CĂĄceres, Josep Maria Llop, Josep Maria AlibĂŠs, Borja Carreras-Moysi, Josep Antoni Acebillo and others.

Although the initial considerations were clearly defined, it is necessary to examine how they were put into practice, what their social consequences were and how the process was negotiated in the conflictive context of the late-capitalist city, at the confluence of many different economic and social interests.

Josep Maria Montaner. The evolution of the Barcelona model

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The period of analysis can be subdivided into four phases, five if we include the previous period of transition between the end of office of Mayor Josep Maria de Porcioles and the advent of the democratic councils, between 1973 and 1979.

1. Phase one, from 1979 to 1986, was one of slow, careful management and design of the democratic city in an attempt to address the accumulated debate and activity of years in individual neighbourhoods, in antiFrancoist social platforms and lines of urbanistic thinking, especially at the Barcelona School of Architecture.

In around 1984, it started to focus on the possibility of organizing the 1992 Olympic Games, following the tradition of exploiting large events to develop the city (the International Exhibitions of 1888 and 1929).

2. The 1980s marked a turning point. This radical change came about in October 1986, when the city was named as the venue for the Olympic Games. From this moment on, the construction of the planned projects acquired greater urgency and precision, and their interdependency increased alarmingly. Although in theory the model remained the same, as did the municipal authorities and city specialists, the choice of Barcelona as the Olympic city—a landmark that formed the baseline of the municipal programme—generated a change of pace, scale and context. The projects had to be built to a tight deadline, the operations became larger and more important, and the city’s market laws began to change, increasing the prospects of urban speculation.

After October 1986, operations such as creating urban parks were pushed into the background, and detailed interventions became much more difficult. This was the case, for example, of the creation of civic centres, such as the one in Sants, in the former tram depot (1977-1983), and the one for the right side of the Eixample, in the old La Sedeta factory building (1982-1984), projects that had characterized phase one. The new projects had to respond to a size and a rate of construction that precluded careful restoration and delicate negotiations. Accordingly, the scale of urban dialogue also changed: from this moment on, the Council had to negotiate directly with major developers that could promote the huge urgent operations required by Olympic Barcelona, avoiding the slower, more conflictive processes involved in working with smaller agents, that were generally more in keeping with popular demand. This period saw the consolidation of collaboration between the public and the private sector, and, accordingly, a change in pace prompted by investment interests and the quest for landmark events such as the 1992 Olympic Games, which Forum 2004 hoped to repeat.

This first concession to economic interests had its repercussions: in the end, there was no social housing in the Vila OlĂ­mpica, and the entire operation, which had begun with the expropriation of land by the government below market values, ultimately benefited the financial and real-estate sector, and the dwellings were built for the upper-middle class. In 1988, when criticism of delays in construction work started to make itself heard, the Council of Pasqual Maragall opted to consolidate the relationship between the Socialist government and businesses, increasing its reliance on financial market advisors and creating a Strategic Plan..

3. The third phase, starting in late 1992, was marked by the lash back of post-Olympic crisis and municipal debt which, in early 2003, was calculated at 145,000 million pesetas, more than the initially budgeted 101,000 million. The Council envisaged paying the debt represented by construction work and the corresponding financial costs in 17 years. The pace of development of public works fell off, and efforts concentrated on completing projects such as cultural buildings. This was a time of doubt, during which the Barcelona model continued by inertia: it was necessary to start formulating preferences and agendas of growth in the face of a minor capitalist crisis, and the decision made was to prioritize economic growth and efficiency.

4. The change of course became apparent in 1995 with “Barcelona New Projects�, a technocratic exhibition putting the city’s prime sites up for sale. It was consolidated in 1997, with the approval of the plan by the Hines group for Diagonal Mar, in the wake of the failure and irregularities of the Kepro group. This concession to

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the power of a large private developer and the possibility of constructing Forum 2004 right next to Diagonal Mar, with its fragmentary urbanism, characterized the fourth and final phase.

This period also saw the municipal crisis of 1996 leading to the resignation of the head of the Department of Urbanism, the lawyer Josep Maria AlibÊs, due to disagreements with city councillors Xavier Casas and Antonio Santiburcio. AlibÊs was replaced by Borja Carreras-Moysi In ten years, municipal power had gone from its peak (with the Illa Diagonal competition in 1987) to its weakest moment, when in 1997 it gave in to the conditions of Hines and the group’s project for a USstyle neighbourhood and a suburban shopping mall on a prime site in the city. In the process, the concepts driving Barcelona’s urbanism had broken down into conflicting and ultimately irreconcilable arguments: accommodating real-estate interests, constructing major infrastructures, showing an appreciation of citizen participation and aspiring to make the city sustainable. This, then, was a fourth phase of commercialization of the model, from 1997 to 2004. This phase was represented by the 22@ Plan for Sant Martí, not so much in its theory as in its controversial application, stripping the neighbourhood of its traditional social life and generating streets with impermeable ground floors and little urban life.

Characteristic interventions 1. The integration of public spaces The evolution of new public spaces, especially between 1980 and 1987, illustrates the empirical procedure initially applied.

The first plazas were built in historic centres (Ciutat Vella, Grà cia, Sants) and were small in size; the nature of the urban fabric dictated a series of conditions for these interventions. Plaça de Trilla, Plaça de Sants and Plaça de la Mercè all date from this initial phase. Gradually, the projects increased in size and extended to outlying areas of the city, especially in the east and north, with interventions such as Plaça de la Palmera, various parks (La Pegaso, La Espanya Industrial, La Creueta del Coll, El Clot) and avenues such as Via Júlia. These later interventions drew on all the accumulated experience and knowledge of the initial projects and the positivist procedure behind them. Most of these operations included attractive outdoor sculptures, many of them specially commissioned.

The process was completed by the creation of kilometres of new beaches that were to become characteristic of Barcelona as a post-modern recreational focus.

However, two phenomena called into question the correct application of the method. Firstly, the growing dispersion and lack of connection of management and coordination focuses in the Council planning departments hampered the definition of a coherent, unitary strategy. Secondly, the lack of rigorous critical debate outside the exclusive circles of municipal specialists and the evident impermeability to discussion of official circles prevented the implementation of this initial empirical method: since it was based on the analysis and rational discussion of successes and failures, the absence of review meant that it remained incomplete.

2. The metropolitan context Another basic reason for the success of Barcelona’s Olympic projects was the integration of the four main themes and each of the empty spaces in the existing city; each one of the projects related to the Olympic Games was carefully devised to benefit the city after 1992 by its continuing utility. The four Olympic areas were designed to be of service to the entire city. This was one of the most positive, intelligent aspects of the Barcelona model, setting it apart from the case of Seville and Expo’92.

Josep Maria Montaner. The evolution of the Barcelona model

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The operation as a whole actually brought an ambiguous approach to the centre/periphery duality, seeing it more in relation to the scale of the city of Barcelona than to the metropolitan scale. In this respect, though it served to update facilities on the periphery of Barcelona city, its effect at the metropolitan scale was to strengthen Barcelona’s centralism, concentrating services rather than distributing them regularly at metropolitan level.

This centripetal model was based on exploiting land in Barcelona to a maximum, emphasising its hypercentrality and relegating urban problems and constraints such as communication hubs, motorways, industrial installations and prisons to outlying municipalities, an underresourced hinterland. But that was not all; more serious was the failure to ensure sufficient protection of the belt of farmland represented by the fertile land of Maresme, Vallès and, in particular, Baix Llobregat, which would have allowed greater ecological balance for Barcelona and all of Catalonia, and maintained a regional drainage system.

The metropolitan scale is ultimately what allows Barcelona city to continue its role as the centre of a large territory, reinforced by technological and architectural features to raise the profile of the metropolitan periphery.

The telecommunications tower designed by Norman Foster is the ultimate symbol of this conquest of the metropolitan scale and, at the same time, an emblem of contemporaneity: it is a technological sculpture bringing together all the waves of the world of communications. Just as the Eiffel Tower introduced a new order in 1889, proving that Paris was a great industrial capital, despite the resistance of many intellectuals of the time, so the tower on Collserola plays a similar role: it confirms Barcelona’s identity as a post-industrial city, a service metropolis. The tower on Collserola is visible not only from Barcelona but also from the municipalities on the other side of the hills. Added to the Tibidabo skyline, it is a landmark for the whole area. The challenge now is to improve an entire metropolitan area whose Central Park is the park of Collserola.

3. Tertiarization of the city The shift from industrial to post-industrial society, starting in the 1960s, is reflected by the tertiarization of city spaces. As Daniel Bell pointed out in his classic book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), postindustrial society has exchanged the mechanical technology of engines for the intellectual technology of information, knowledge and microprocessing. The infrastructures of communication are more important than those of transport and energy. The tertiary sector is bigger than agriculture and industry. The industry that had characterized Barcelona disappeared.

Present-day Barcelona also responds to a post-industrial condition that it celebrates in its 22@ Plan. Its reality is the product of the major increase in spaces given over to offices, shopping malls and hotels. Before the construction of the projects for Forum 2004, there was nowhere, except the Besòs area, that was not related to the tertiary sector: tourism, consumerism and property development. The metropolitan decision to concentrate services in Barcelona merely served to highlight this trend.

In this respect, the process of gradual tertiarization has created a serious problem for everyday life in the Eixample district, where the conversion of the residential fabric into an area of offices in some places has irrevocably excluded residence as a function due to the high costs of purchase or rental that only businesses can afford. This is a bad thing for the city, since these areas, around Plaça de Catalunya and Passeig de Grà cia, for example, are being drained of domestic life, just like New York’s Wall Street. As a result, one of the most representative parts of the city is now primarily given over to the use of visitors.

4. Areas of new centrality With a view to addressing the unbridled tertiarization of the city and implementing the Barcelona model—empirical, integrated, centripetal, based on large-scale projects—a basic urban concept was devised. This was the idea of “areas of new centrality�, posited by Joan Busquets in 1987, covering both the four planned Olympic 16

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areas and urban hubs, very important spaces that emerged at the junction of major streets, on land formerly occupied by stations and railway lines, freeing up urban land of central significance, or spaces at the boundary between neighbourhoods. These were hubs such as Carrer de Tarragona, Plaça d’Ildefons Cerdà , Plaça de les Glòries, Renfe-Meridiana, Port Vell and the extension of Diagonal, crucial to enhancing the city’s urban cohesion and key focuses for channelling and directing new investment.

The aim was to control city development by redirecting the various urban developers to a series of areas earmarked by municipal planning. This involved concentrating speculation and social resources to specific points in an attempt to restore the balance of the city and avoid excessive tertiarization or specialization with negative effects on a given urban area. The Council eased the process by offering infrastructures and land with the appropriate legislation, in return for the cession of public uses, and, most importantly, directing the functions and forms of the city’s structure.

This proposal, identifying with an interclass approach in keeping with a general policy that could be termed middle-class socialism, sought to reconcile the various tensions that appeared in the city: the speculative interests of landowners and big national and international developers, and the city people’s need for facilities, open spaces and quality of life.

From a disciplinary viewpoint, the idea of areas of new centrality was very valuable. It represented a shining moment in the history of urbanism and architecture, giving rise to methods that served both to understand and interpret the city, and to design and intervene in it.

The implementation of this project of areas of new centrality was not without its problems, however, due to the precarious state of balance governing public control of the late-capitalist growth of the city. The approach worked well in developments such as Carrer de Tarragona or the Diagonal city block, striking a balance between new uses, the definition of volumes, architectural forms and urban morphology. In other cases, such as RenfeMeridiana, development was slower and more fragmentary, though producing acceptable results.

Other approaches, conversely, were complete failures, like the one for “Swimming pools and sports�, which met with great difficulties and was ultimately resolved by poor architecture, transferring most of what was originally public land for private uses.

Plaça de les Glòries, still at the planning stage, remains unresolved, and plans that have been carried out suggest no changes to this museum of horrors that stimulates the tertiary trend and the proliferation of unrelated architectural objects, instead of being designed correctly as a kind of urban campus.

Other areas of new centrality are Plaça d’Ildefons Cerdà , now complete with the inappropriately named Ciutat de la Justicia [City of Justice law court complex], and Diagonal-Prim, which provided the venue for Forum 2004. Both are examples of the direction taken by the Barcelona model, where the reconciliation of different parts is being overridden by reconciliation of economic power and urbanistic technocracy, producing single independent objects.

The management of these areas is also closely linked to the decision to dialogue exclusively with large urban developers, the new players in city construction, comprising mixed groups that include banks, property agents, large investment and insurance companies, hotel chains, etc. Examples from the late 1990s, such as the Hotels Plan and the project to remodel Port Vell, were the first results of the neoliberal model of city management that lay behind municipal policy and heralded a Barcelona coerced by globalized tertiarization at the start of the 21st century. The Barcelona model became primarily economistic after 1996.

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5. Cultural hotspots, axes and facilities Barcelona presents itself as a city of culture and art, but this brilliant outer show is something of a mirage. Its standard of museums, large exhibition venues and concert halls does not meet up to its ambitions as a capital.

Few of its museums have an efficient, modern working. Megalomaniac but necessary projects, slowly and expensively constructed, like the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), which has taken 20 years to open and is still not easily accessible, are a bad symptom. In this context, Barcelona continues to lose ground in national and international intercourse in the world of art and culture.

More importantly, the city lacks a clear overall urban strategy to locate cultural areas. Based on a stance that specifically favours neither decentralization in neighbourhoods nor concentration in certain areas of the city, the result is a defective hybrid based on improvisation, lack of coordination and dispersion of services.

There are various areas with art galleries; various concentrations of museums: some scattered on Montjuïc hill, the Centre de Cultura Contemporà nia de Barcelona (CCCB) and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in the Raval, isolated focuses of cultural activity in Poblenou or around the Born market. There are also various focuses of historic archives: La Llotja, La Casa de l’Ardiaca, the Crown of Aragon Archives, beside the Estació del Nord. However, there is no strategy to create cultural structures, axes, boulevards, networks or hubs, and a basic factor in this insufficiency is the indecision, incapacity or delay in exploiting the large reserves of space the city has at its disposal, such as the Born market place or the former Sant Agustí Convent, the delay in finding a solution for Montjuïc, with its associated problems of lack of definition and accessibility, and incompatibility of activities, and the loss of buildings that might have been valuable for cultural purposes but have fallen into the hands of private interests. All this cannot be solved by the creation of new cultural containers, such as the Disseny Hub Barcelona in Plaça de les Glòries, which only serves to increase this dismemberment.

Where progress has been made in this respect, conversely, is in the courtyards at the centre of the city blocks in the CerdĂ grid, some 40 of which have become local public spaces.

Now in the 21st century, these deficiencies have been alleviated by the efficient functioning of public centres such as the CCCB and the MACBA, the creation of new private centres, such as CaixaForum (2002) and the development of a series of new libraries, some of them in the inner courtyards of the Eixample that have been remodelled for public use.

6. The treatment of architectural, urban and social heritage One of the elements that most clearly points up Barcelona’s contradictions is the treatment accorded to architectural and urban heritage. Experience shows that some buildings and fabrics are carefully respected whereas others are drastically eliminated. There is a surprising contrast between the conservation of the old Olympic Stadium, with the conditioning factors and costs it represented, or the maintenance of the Palau Nacional, which compromised the smooth running of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, with the elimination of much of the industrial architecture in the neighbourhood of Poblenou.

What are the criteria for deciding to conserve some buildings and demolish others? The second part of this research project sets out to find answers. Firstly, anachronistic factors of symbolic valuation tend to predominate: a stadium is seen to form part of collective memory, a role not given to industrial heritage. Another obvious reason is the disappearance of anything situated in an area of radical transformation that is not monumental architecture of the first order. In short, there are as yet no established criteria as to the concept of heritage and what should be conserved, and the prevailing criteria are exclusively economic.

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The reasons for the elimination of the industrial heritage of Poblenou can be explained by the need to clear the area to remodel the entire infrastructure of sewerage, underground tunnels and railway tracks, quickly and without obstacles. The operation of Vila Olímpica, apart from showing a complete lack of concern for industrial archaeology, produced a new morphology of little urban interest. It comprises large city blocks that neither respond to the tradition of the Cerdà grid nor provide an alternative solution, offering a hybrid, unappealing morphology with an excessively low density and no relation with the existing fabric, showing that architecture and the city have to be the product of memory, not of nothingness. To culminate, the Vila Olímpica was christened Nova Icà ria, or New Icaria, in reference to the utopian aspirations of the followers of Étienne Cabet who inhabited the area in the early 19th century.

The urban proposal of the Vila Olímpica was the first step towards the privatization and clearing of public space, with some of the inner streets, passages and courts at the centre of the city blocks, which were marked public in the project, gradually being privatized. The streets have been reduced to mere channels for traffic, with commercial and leisure activity being concentrated around the shopping centre in Avinguda d’Icà ria, leaving all other spaces without multiple content. A morphology apparently reproducing the dense, multifunctional traditional European city masks low density and functional segregation. The only exception are the three blocks designed by Carlos Ferrater’s team, where there is a little more life, since they recreate the morphology of the almost closed block found in Cerdà ’s Eixample: the three inner gardens are public and leafy, and the shops are full of bustle, as they occupy smaller, more suitable premises at street level rather than up or down steps, as in the rest of the Vila Olímpica, and were designed to be transparent and to relate to the inner garden.

There is a considerable number of projects that suffer from a scant relation with the existing fabric and the urgency of intervention. A city needs to be built slowly, discussing and improving each project, agreeing on each intervention, allowing the dynamic of the city to evolve. It should come as no surprise that some interventions do not engage sufficiently with the scale, outlines and size of the pre-existing city.

One particularly lamentable case of this ambiguous relation with architectural heritage is the major project to develop the old harbour area of Port Vell. The problem was enormously complex because, in addition, private investment in the tertiary sector, consumerism and leisure took place on public land, at the very point where the sea meets the city, compromising views and direct contact with the sea. The lack of decision in the project manifested the shortcomings of the architecture discipline: it had methods and criteria for intervening and reusing old buildings, but its instruments for the reuse of old public spaces were not yet up to par. The MaremĂ gnum building may have found its place among the flows of pedestrians, but it lacks the great formal, conceptual and poetic quality of the proposal that Manuel de SolĂ -Morales designed for Port Vell back in 1977.

Even within Barcelona City Council as a body there were opposing conceptions of the treatment deserved by architectural heritage. For example, there was an obvious difference of opinions between the heads of the Architectural Heritage Department and Oriol Bohigas, who, during his mandate as head of Urbanism for Barcelona, advocated thoroughgoing renovation and ridiculed all defenders of architectural heritage.

7. The new network of connectivity The correct functioning of the new Barcelona called for a completely new design of the city’s network of connectivity to improve the relations between each of its areas and the hubs of new centrality. This involved a kind of intervention in the form of lines, drawn around the perimeter of the city (emblematically in the second ring layout), with a view to renovating the entire road, infrastructure, service and communications network. From the new sewerage system, alleviating serious problems of periodic flooding in parts of the city, to Collserola tower, designed to unify various antennae, including the remodelling and extension of the airport, together with the new design of the road network, these linear interventions were vital to the remodelling of the city.

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The Ronda beltways and tunnels were both the legacy of the project for the monumental Barcelona of the 1900s, designed by LÊon Jaussely in 1905, and the return to the concept of connectivity dating from the late 1960s, during the times of speculation under Mayor Porcioles’s mandate and put into cold storage by the economic crisis and the opposition of popular citizen movements. This time, it was argued that these traffic infrastructures were essential for the city.

The projects in question presented two new features. The first was the definition of urban thoroughfares that solved traffic problems as well as creating axes of facilities and boulevards. This was the case of Via Júlia, Avinguda de Rio de Janeiro, Avinguda de Gaudí, the parkways in Carmel, Rambla de Prim, Carrer de Guipúscoa and Avinguda de Brasil. The second was careful attention to the formal treatment of a series of urban elements such as bridges, tunnels, walls, signposting, gantries for road signs, awnings and bus stops, which had previously received rather summary treatment but actually have a strong influence on the city’s image and quality. The bridge designed by Santiago Calatrava at the union of Carrer de Felip II and Carrer de Bac de Roda, along with a series of bridges built in the east of the city, and the entrances to the La Rovira tunnel were emblematic of this new public works policy.

The Ronda ring roads were necessary to prevent the city coming to a standstill and reduce through traffic in the city’s historic centre but insufficient to solve the city’s overall traffic problems. As soon as they were opened, it was foreseeable that they would quickly fall short of the necessary capacity.

They represented an exclusive investment in private transport during an Olympic construction campaign that paid very little attention to public transport. The Ronda ring road operation was ideologically important in terms of change. It was regarded as necessary for a modern city aspiring to attract investment, which needs fast beltways, with the added technical and infrastructural value of providing support for the drastic restructuring of the city’s infrastructures and technologies: networks of water supply, electricity, telephone, information, etc.

The improvement of public transport (particularly the Metro), experimentation with new means of collective and individual transport and drastic control of traffic in the city centre, along with the construction of the promised park-and-ride facilities on the city outskirts are still the only solutions, yet to be implemented, to what is a major problem for the city. The inability to solve these problems and even the lack of interest among the people of Barcelona were demonstrated in 2010, after the end of this study. A vote on the transformation of Avinguda Diagonal to house the tramline and a pedestrianized area, and reduce private traffic failed due to the totally erroneous approach of the consultation.

Assessing the model With a view to drawing some initial conclusions, it is important to examine to what extent ideological justifications are generally superposed on interpretations relating strictly to the urban and architectural quality of interventions and the real contribution they represent for the city.

There have been various social repercussions in the city as a result of the application of its urban model. The first is its overt densification. Barcelona was already a city with extremely high levels of density. Despite the creation of new parks and the slow fall in fixed population, the projects carried out (sports installations, hotels, shopping centres, etc.) have made the city denser in terms of built volume and use. This is strictly linked to another two consequences: excessive consumption and tertiarization. Barcelona has become a large metropolitan scale tertiary focus and a centre of tourist attraction, and, although its resident population remains stable, the number of people going there to work, consume or pay a visit is increasing daily. It is a city with no more space, not a square inch that is not earmarked for some purpose or other, that has become in its entirety a stage for consumerism. This brings with it other consequences, which affect all big metropolises (New York, London, Paris, 20

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etc.): the sharp rise in the cost of living and the exorbitant housing bubble between 1997 and 2007, generating house prices and rents that only part of the population could afford. The city specializes and tertiarizes, losing its productive diversity and emptying certain areas of residents; there are major benefits for the city as a whole, but many of its citizens are gradually losing their purchasing power. The privatization of large public areas and the high cost of living in the city represent an attack on the right to the city of all city-dwellers.

Furthermore, the real construction of the city is showing that what has really happened is that the public sector has been preparing, in the best possible conditions, land for private development. This is the very process that culminated the Vila OlĂ­mpica development or has been produced by pushing through certain plans.

Indicators of sustainability are a valuable resource for assessing the evolution of the city, analysing in what aspects the city is improving or worsening its relations with the environment. They gauge the quality of public space, biodiversity, accessibility, health, participation, the use of renewable energies and waste recycling.

The process of renovation of the city of Barcelona is, without a doubt, as exciting as it is crucial. It is exciting because it is a living lesson in the complex processes of planning and constant construction of the city, and crucial both for itself and, as a model, for other similar cities. It could, however, have placed greater emphasis on the cultural, social and disciplinary debate. From a methodological and administrative viewpoint, it is a serious error for an operation like Barcelona’s to have tended too much towards caution and mere justification on the basis of political criteria. Political arguments are necessary but, when used by the powers that be, they are based on electoral triumphalism, schematic reasoning and the inability to accept mistakes. The correct construction of the city calls, conversely, for open debate involving all social operators and rigorous discussion from cultural, architectural and urban viewpoints. This intellectual debate was lacking in Barcelona, both during its major growth in the run-up to 1992, with the excuse that criticism could impede the correct celebration of the Olympic Games, and today, when it is increasingly difficult to find out about planning, and critical recapitulation has been vetoed.

The evolution of the Barcelona model: from acupuncture to prosthesis As of the mid-1990s, especially after 1997, the city’s reference model began to vary substantially. The Barcelona model, culminating in the experience of the Olympic Games, stood out for the underlying conceptualization of the whole city rather than the importance of specific monuments or complexes. Accordingly, independently of the fact that its urbanism was debatable and debated, its homogeneity and coherence were upheld by a finelytuned strategy that sought to establish territorial balance based principally on the identification of spaces of opportunity in the areas of new centrality, a network of road and service infrastructures, and a fabric of public spaces and facilities to support the major operations for 1992. The urbanism implemented, especially in the Forum 2004 area and Plaça de les Glòries, was increasingly partial and fragmentary. It comprised independent objects designed by internationally famed media architects rather than urban conceptualization and discussion.

Now, each part seeks self-justification rather than constituting an urban project.

Each period has had its own type of plans, instruments and modes of representation. In the mid-1980s, the Areas of New Centrality Plan, devised by Joan Busquets, was transparent and clear, unitary and coherent, a clearly focused document of urbanistic discipline inspired by the background/figure system leading from Gianbattista Nolli to Colin Rowe, that serves both to interpret and to administer the city. In the mid-1990s, during the period of transition of Borja Carreras-Moysi, the “second renovation�, and after the crisis of 1996, the urban project was a kind of urban photomontage or collage: the collage addressed the city as a palimpsest, in which the succession of interventions over time constantly constituted a new whole. The late 1990s, a time of planning headed

by Barcelona Regional and chief municipal architect Josep Antoni Acebillo, were marked by a neoliberal urbanism comprising large independent objects with no relation to the urban fabric; an opaque urbanism that was never clear or openly negotiated, that only became public knowledge once everything was already decided. This Josep Maria Montaner. The evolution of the Barcelona model

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intentionally diffuse, fragmentary, incomplete urbanism constantly varied the definition of its parts for no explicable reason. It was a kind of urbanism that dealt only with large-scale problems that therefore involved major operations and the big public and private operators. It was, then, also a kind of urbanism that shunned the local interlocutor, removing itself from the problems of the city’s people and the demands of social movements, from what the city’s people were interested in: quality of life, forming an integral part of the city, affordable housing, safety, integration of immigrants, the use of public spaces, new libraries or an efficient public transport network.

The exception to this diffuse urbanism of independent objects could have been the 22@ Plan for much of Poblenou, with its flexible, versatile application, capable of acting case by case and adapting to the existing morphology of the Cerdà Plan and to pre-existing industrial and social phenomena. It was an attempt to respond at a local urban level to the apparent needs of modernization and updating required by information and communication technologies, what François Ascher called the third modern urban revolution. The initial mechanism was to divide much of the 22@ district into six main areas of several city blocks and to commission a detailed study of each to a different team of architects to turn a building ratio into a three-dimensional project. The initial premisses were to respect pre-existing urban, social and productive fabric such as housing, workshops and old industrial buildings, and to enhance the multifunctional city with a new dialectic between new and existing strata. Research activities and companies involved in the new economy were prioritized and accorded a higher building ratio, applying a new urbanism based on the premisses of flexible regulations, case-by-case compensation, and the definition and creation of public spaces. The 22@ Plan was envisaged as a sustainable plan, from studies to reuse surplus heat energy from nearby thermal power plants to the conception of public spaces free of the nuisance of private vehicles, reducing traffic and street parking. The reality, however, is quite different.

The epigone that was Forum 2004 The Forum 2004 urban complex illustrated this change of course. There was a shift from careful acupuncture in an existing urban fabric to the addition of a false limb. The result was a large area, 180 hectares, which even today, in 2011, still does not work. Despite the politically correct wrapping of the core themes of Forum 2004 (multiculturalism, peace and sustainability), the poorness and ambiguity of the contents illustrated the gratuitous, random and arbitrary nature of most of the containers, revealed the total individualism of contents and containers, and once again showed the flimsiness of the proposition and the randomness of Barcelona’s new urban model.

What has prevailed is a fragmentary urbanism made up of urban products, isolated objects with little relation between them and even less with the setting, with more emphasis on the name of the architect than on the relation between the buildings and the city. Most of the contents for 2004 had been decided before the programme of such an ambiguous event, “Forum 2004�, was revealed. Far from being critical, thought-provoking, multidisciplinary or multicultural, the dominant criteria were provided by business, economy, production and management. Way back in 1944, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment that the culture industry helps to make society more stupid. This persistent lack of content showed the event for what it was: exclusively an operation seeking political prestige, real-estate intervention and one big party.

Most of the decisions involved in the project for 2004 were hazardous and inconsistent, such as using land reclaimed from the sea, a procedure representing a huge financial cost with the possibility of serious damage in the future due to storms. Organizing most of the space by means of a huge platform of more than 10 hectares over the pre-existing Ronda ring roads and the Besòs wastewater treatment plant, standing next to two power plants and a waste incinerator, has little to do with common sense and involved excessive complications. The idea of placing urban service infrastructures on view in the 21st-century metropolis is, in theory, an attractive one, but here it meant making a virtue of necessity: it is patently obvious that, with more time and more solid ecological conviction, all of these installations, without having to be banished to the periphery, called for com-

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plete redesign rather than maintenance. The vast, strange, star-shaped plaza remains on the edge of the city, a space for hire for events, with a kind of underworld potentially developing beneath it.

The whole 2004 operation was obviously an attempt to accompany and promote the property development of Diagonal Mar, a closed community that breaks with Mediterranean, public Barcelona and is strategically situated at the centre of the new seafront. In retrospect, it is apparent that Barcelona has undergone the gradual dissolution of its urban structure. With the exception of projects such as the three city blocks in Vila OlĂ­mpica or the five city blocks on the seafront, this gradual process, starting in the Vila OlĂ­mpica and reaching as far as the tower blocks of Diagonal Mar, involved eliminating the relation between residential typology and traditional street morphology, setting up the building-as-object and undermining the strength of city fabric. They were interventions that chose the fabrics to be restructured, occupying them with objects that bear no relation to the setting. In time, this age of Haussmann-style control under chief architect Acebillo came to be interpreted more critically and less conditionally as what it was: arrogant, technocratic and anachronistic urbanism.

Furthermore, the Forum area is extremely difficult to reach by public transport, with very poor communications aggravated by the presence of the Diagonal Mar shopping centre, which obstructs access and vampirizes the urban life around it, pushing the adjacent streets and the Ronda beltway to their capacity of vehicles. In fact, contemporary Barcelona has not yet truly focused its attention on public transport, particularly the Metro. It failed to do so in 1992, instead choosing the Ronda beltways, and again in 2004, continuing to concentrate on major infrastructures, such as a larger airport, big shopping centres or the Forum 2004, with huge car parks full of private vehicles. The 2004 project paid scant attention to the renovation or improvement of public transport infrastructures in the area, entrusting the bulk of mobility to private transport, as witnessed by the plentiful car parking facilities envisaged.

In short, the Forum 2004 operation showed a marked determination to concentrate the efforts of the city on this eastern limit, exploiting its urban fabric to the maximum and ultimately breaking it down into a territory where, rather than combining harmoniously, the new objects and minor fabrics are at odds. It is true that one of the reasons why this urban area is so complicated and tense is its proximity to two popular neighbourhoods with conflicts arising from their isolation and social marginalization. La Mina and La Catalana are in the process of drafting their respective remodelling and improvement projects. For this very reason, some elements in the 2004 complex were specifically designed as barriers to protect the representative city from the marginal city. Diagonal is an avenue that serves to interrelate urban fabrics, but when it turns and becomes Avinguda del Taulat, its mission changes to one of division. The urban discussion as to the remodelling of these neighbourhoods and their relation with the Forum area is inevitable, yet today the independent representative projects, which were ultimately a priority and completed in time for 2004, merely serve to consolidate this historic ghettoization.

Conclusions The urban planning procedure that Barcelona adopted, from the return of democratic government in Spanish cities to the celebration of the Olympic Games, has become a model to be exported. It is a model that adapted the urbanistic discussion of the time to a local reality, in which participation, territorial rebalance and the quality of the spaces and buildings produced can be considered exemplary. However, the great paradox is that, instead of improving and extending its own model, Barcelona has consumed it. The model applied by the city today can no longer be considered a “Barcelona model�; it is an imported and, somehow, imposed model. This urbanism reveals the mark of globalization on Barcelona, characterized by recourse to star-system architects as a guarantee of supposed architectural quality; fragmentation, segregation and independent objects that promote large international property agents and urban disintegration as an inevitable reality, and politically correct discourses on public space leading to repressive regulations of citizenship.

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In Barcelona, the essential urban products of the global city are gathering force: residential neighbourhoods that tend to isolate themselves (Diagonal Mar), ephemeral, un-urban shopping centres (La Maquinista and Diagonal Mar), representative tertiary centres (Plaça de les Glòries) and the infrastructures of fast communication (motorways, high-speed trains and airports). This is all because Barcelona, sadly, has stopped learning and reinventing itself using its own tradition and reality, and those of similar urban cultures, and started to import models of US urbanism that are being challenged by some sectors in the United States: from the nostalgic New Urbanism defending the traditional city to Robert D. Kaplan’s critical An Empire Wilderness (1998) and the radical urbanism of Mike Davis, Norman M. Klein and Leonie Sandercock.

In short, the Barcelona model has evolved from the conviction of urban concepts to the slow fragmentation of the neoliberal city. It has moved from a clear, didactic urbanism to a cryptic one for initiates, imposed over real needs and programmes, with no general framework to provide citizens with a reference; a technocratic urbanism that, in the heat of the competition between cities and the supposed urgency of large infrastructural work, has forgotten the values of its culture and the aspirations of its citizens.

For this reason, this research project closes with the failure of Forum 2004 and ends with the replacement of the model by the brand.

Josep Maria Montaner (Barcelona, 1954) is a Doctor of Architecture and Professor of Architectural Composition at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB-UPC), where he has also been Assistant Director. Jointly with Zaida Muxí, he is co-director of the master’s degree course 21st Housing Laboratory (www.laboratoriovivienda21. com). He is also a writer and contributes to El País and La Vanguardia newspapers, and is author of some 40 books on architecture, including DespuÊs del movimiento moderno (1993), La modernidad superada (1997, 2011), Sistemas arquitectónicos contemporåneos (2008) and Arquitectura y crítica en LatinoamÊrica (2011). He has lectured at universities and institutions in Europe, America and Asia. He has been awarded various prizes, including the Lluís Domènech i Montaner Prize (Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1984), Serra d’Or Critics Prize (1991) and the National Urban Design Journalism Award (2005).

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