Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
INĂŠS SALPICO January 2013
Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
Foreword - Opening windows Looking out from the windows of our home/office in the centre of Barcelona offers a very good analogy of what it is like right now to live here – in Spain, but quite specifically in the Catalonian capital –and of the impact that the economic crisis and the burst of the real estate bubble has had. Beyond statistics and numbers there are clear consequences visible when you walk around and experience life in the city. Looking out of our windows facing the street this is what we wake up to – a beautiful example of early XX century Catalan Modernism:
However, the windows on the opposite side, overlooking the inner courtyard, frame quite a different view - an empty derelict building that takes up nearly half of the block:
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
We live, quite literally, between two portraits of the complex coexistence of realities that results from a certain model of development of the city, whose progress came to a tragic halt, not only because but surely catalysed by the burst of the real estate bubble and the ensuing economic crisis. It is a moment when the city’s (and society’s) anachronisms are strikingly clear, not only in the news or on days of street protests but also, and namely, in the city’s daily life and in the physical reality of the urban landscape. Just three blocks away from where these pictures were taken is Passeig de Gracia – the city’s main shopping and touristic artery. The beautiful façades ready for the tourist to photograph and the newly opened Apple and Prada stores ready for the tourist to spend money, are a thin superficial layer of an urban strata beneath which local shops close, unfinished developments scar the landscape, whole buildings lay gloomily empty. Further away, in the outskirts and suburbs, the drama of evictions leaves entire families homeless and thousands of apartments closed, idle items in banks’ books. One could easily question, in many cases, the social legitimacy of banks enforcing such actions when they scandalously were the ones promoting and for long profiting from the insanity of cheap credit and albeit recklessly managed have received epic bailouts, thus having their own debts covered by the government. Also, and perhaps most importantly, their inefficiency has revealed them unable to cope with the flood of property they have claimed against failed mortgages, meaning that this houses will probably, and disturbingly, remain empty for a very, very long time.
So in choosing which of our windows to open, one chooses to look at a very different and partial aspect of the complex reality of an equally complex socio-historical moment.
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
I – Processes – the road to Today What these pictures portray is in fact the culmination of a number of processes that have shaped the city’s landscape and development during the past decades:
1 - The rise and fall of the urban entrepreneurialism governance model. (Whether this model can actually be called one of governance is a whole topic in itself) Based on the development of big plans that draw broad strokes in the city, it is fuelled by a promiscuous synergy between public institutions, investors, politicians and contractors and a varied sort of hybrid consultants and managers. Having to generate consensus, attract investment and depending on large partnerships, it almost invariably makes use of flagship events that can offer a motto and brand for the plan to be implemented. The development becomes that of a chronic engagement in great ventures – existent or invented – that are imposed on the city and on the population as a collective narrative capable of justifying all means to an end. This rhetoric is then used to facilitate private-public partnerships, speed up planning discussions and ease the issuing and obtainment of permits, quite often to intervene in areas where existent regulation would otherwise limit land development but that are urbanized under masterplans’ exceptional frameworks. This is what notoriously happened in Barcelona in the period leading to and following the 1992 Summer Olympics in what has become a case-study of urban transformation labelled as the Barcelona Model. The Fòrum Universal de les Cultures, in 2004, attempted (and failed) to replicate de same effect to enable the unfinished urban renewal on the north-east area of Barcelona. It is also failing conspicuously in the 22@ tech and business district – el districte de la innovació – not only because of the conflicts and controversy around the adequacy of the plan but also, and more simply, due to obvious unfortunate timing. It is also what, at a smaller scale, attempts to be replicated every year in events such as the Mobile World Congress or the Sonar Festival.
The logo syndrome: Big projects and events as the primary urban development strategy
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
One of the fundamental, and now obvious, problems of this model is that it is designed and works only in a scenario of growth and expansion, and offers no answers or strategies to cope with periods when the city’s evolution cycle is not in such a phase – i.e. it’s a model that does not serve a complete and true long term strategy for any city. Needless to say that some of the main agents operating this model – the private partner and investor – quickly withdraw their participation and further investment when a crisis hits, and the public institutions are left with no money, half-finished plans and suddenly unsatisfied citizens. The growth/expansion issue becomes especially severe when it is done blindly, as it was, and planning and building do not match demography: between 1972 and 1999 urbanization (land development) doubled while the population was stable.1 Another problematic consequence of urban entrepreneurialism and of its dynamics, is the huge blind spot – the legal savage land where everything is allowed – left by the exceptional regulations (or suspension thereof) done within the framework of master plans. Smaller and individual owners and investors, controlling property on the margins of the big projects that are being carried out, ride the wave when the tide is going up – exploiting the possibility for monopoly rents2 and playing the game of speculation – and simply refuse any responsibility when the tide recedes. Under the pretext of the crisis, helplessness becomes their name for short-sighted investment. And property is simply abandoned, scarring the city, no responsibilities taken for space and infrastructure for which there should be minimum requirements of maintenance and deadlines to when it should be made available for public use.
2 – The emergence, within the urban entrepreneurialism model described above, of its two key figures: the prince architect3 – dictator of form, the mighty draft of whom is not questioned in regard to what impact it will actually have in the city and the MBA manager4 – junior leaders trained in business schools, affiliated with (but not necessarily committed to) political agendas. For both, the political system becomes the mean to access more desirable posts within the urban entrepreneurialism’s public-private ventures – and here is the core of the neoliberal drift of the planning and development of cities such as Barcelona. Under the “enlightened despotism”5 of these two figures ahead of the main urban planning projects, a city brand, rather than an urban strategy was outlined and implemented. In Barcelona it’s inevitable to mention Oriol Bohigas, architect, that in 1980 left his position as director of the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona to become responsible for
BORJA, Jordi: “Revolución y contrarrevolución en la ciudad global”, quoting official data HARVEY, David, The Art of Rent: Globalization, Monopoly and the Commodification of Culture in: Spaces of Capital New York: Routledge, 2001 3 BONET, Jordi: Barcelona 1976-2011. Balance crítico de un modelo de desarrollo urbano. Barcelona, 2011 4 Idem. 5 McNeil, Donald: Urban Change and the European Left: Tales from the New Barcelona. New York: Routledge, 1999 1 2
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
the Urban Planning Department of the city until 1984. After that he became the urban planning consultant in charge of the plans and urban policy leading to the 1992 Olympics. This period in Barcelona’s planning strategy set the tone to the sprouting of imposing buildings, some of them highly disruptive of their surroundings, stamped with the names of prominent starchitects6: MACBA (Richard Meier), Hotel W (Ricardo Bofill), Torre Agbar (Jean Nouvel), Edificio Gas Natural (Enric Miralles), Edifico Forum (Herzog & DeMeuron), just to name a few.
Clockwise from top left: Edificio Gas Natural – photo: Arquitectura Viva Hotel W, Barcelona – photo: hotels.com MACBA – photo: Liao Yusheng, figure-ground.com Torre Agbar – photo: tublogdearquitectura.com The years around the 1992 landmark also corresponded to the dismantling of the industrial activity of the city and the drift to a city focused on the culture, service and tourism industries.
The term has made its way into colloquial use to refer to architects whose celebrity and acclaim has made them somewhat famous amongst the general public. In order to attract investment, increase property value and persuade municipalities (in turn allured by the possibility of a Bilbao effect) to approve large projects, developers are often eager to sign them up and have their name in the projects’ brand. 6
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
3 - The absence of a solid strategy to manage existent built patrimony. Another inevitable consequence of the urban entrepreneurialism model and of the approach taken by its head figures. In building a brand and planning for growth, the maintenance and integration of existent structures is made only in so far as it meets the goals of the plan for the new. Also the investors in these ventures have been urban speculators, not urban entrepreneurs. They do not feel a responsibility towards the city nor understand that urban development is more than strictly building, and carries an impact (social and economic as much as infrastructural) in a context much larger than the construction site. The notion of built environment is replaced by that of (iconic) buildings. This comes as particularly problematic in Barcelona when its model (and brand) was originally built upon a reaction and denial of its former tradition as an industrial city. It was against this perception than a sophisticated, beautiful city for culture and leisure was sought by the illustrated classes during and after the fall of Franco’s dictatorship. This means much of the industrial lots and constructions – that actually correspond to incredibly large sections of the urban area – where both symbolically and physically abandoned. The Modernist patrimony on the other hand, has been central to the construction of the identity and brand of Barcelona. Catalan Modernism – headed by the mythical figure of Antoni Gaudi – has been fundamental to the consolidation of a Catalan contemporary identity. The progressive Barcelona of the Olympics was therefore also the one that revived the genius of the Modernist Masters. But again here there’s the problem of disregarding the bigger picture: the focus on the Modernist legacy has meant the shallow approach to the maintenance of other historically relevant patrimony (not only industrial, as already mentioned, but also post-war) and to the problems of the periphery (infrastructural, functional, aesthetic, etc.). But the health of the Modernist legacy is itself not a given. On this matter, again, a huge blind spot has been left and the owners of exquisite Modernist buildings in the city centre saw the opportunity to maximize profit as a criteria for transformations that have greatly corrupted the spatial and aesthetic qualities of the century old constructions, compromising the very same distinctive characteristic that make them so valuable (take the mythical hydraulic tiles that are – I dare say criminally – replaced by parquet, for example). A good grading and monitoring system is definitely in need.
4 – Culture as either part of the discourse upon which the city’s brand is built or as a resistance strategy of those opposing the current models of development. In both cases culture is made hostage and subjected to those very same models. It depends on the survival of the opposite forces holding the status quo and collapses along with the success of said brand. In Barcelona, Cultural Industries have developed as a satellites at the service of a myriad of core services of the third sector (restaurants, bars, tourist routes, hotels, etc.) that sustain the
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view city’s positioning as a touristic destination in the past decades. The artist – even the one that enacts resistance – become the provider of characters of differential value to the brand that is being sold. In that sense both the establishment and the rebel artists are absorbed by the merchandising logic of the city and are made its accomplices and essential defining elements. (A similar process has happened in Berlin, where street artists to a great extent became “the new establishment” and shaped its strong image/brand after the fall of the wall.) On the other hand culture is also used to redeem the enforcement of violent changes in the urban tissue, legitimise speculative manoeuvres and justify the hygienization of areas where monopoly rent can be enforced. Would the intervention in Barcelona’s neighbourhood Raval, for example, with all the demolitions and rehousing of locals in the suburbs, have been possible if its tour de force wasn´t the construction of a modern art museum – MACBA – signed by a famous architect (Richard Meier)? These processes also help to better understand what has been said before about approach to architectural legacy and patrimony and it being managed according to the needs of the development of the brand and not as part of structural, historically informed and long term patrimonial strategy. In Barcelona is very clear how modernism architecture is serving as part of the narrative created by and through hop-on hop-off tourist bus routes. At the same time, and as already pointed out, there isn’t an effective historical and aesthetic strategy for the management of built patrimony – buildings like the one I live in or the one shown in the first picture are often mutilated by their owners, maintaining seemingly distinct characters that help to increase their market value, while there is no legislation or monitoring of the full preservation of structural, spatial and decorative unique historical elements (namely in the out-of-sight interiors). It’s all too obvious how easily, then, the city becomes a product to be seen rather than a place to live in. Its main audience becomes a) the tourist; b) the temporary and/or seasonal expat resident (retired or seeking the 4-hour work week life style); c) the suburban voter that is given the Saturday experience of a beautiful city but not the privilege of living in it. The role of Culture then becomes almost nothing else than that of a number of cultural and creative industries catering leisure and tourism, providing a pleasant backdrop for consumerism and shaping distinctive characters that will help the competitive positioning in the global market. In such context “culture is the sum of a city’s amenities that enable it to compete for investment and jobs, its comparative advantage”7. Culture is what primarily shapes the soul of any City. But if the City itself becomes a product, instead of soul, Culture is required to provide but tradable content.
7
ZUKIN, Sharon: The Cultures of Cities. New York: Blackwell Publishers, 1996
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
5 – A Narrative (a symbolic identity) of the City that excludes a big part of it and possibly the majority of its citizens. The nature of the creation of the image of a city around flagship projects and events and focusing on leisure and tourism makes this an inevitable outcome; the areas outside the axis of intervention are somehow erased at a symbolic level and the heterogeneous dynamics of individuals and communities living in the city made tense by the enforcement of the brand. Brands are invariably flat images – an inevitability of wanting to reach the broadest possible audience – built upon the broad strokes that outline its general character and make it a signifier for sellable product, necessarily not representing the true complexity of life in a city. Tourists are, by the very nature of what touristic travelling is, not available, willing or indeed able to cope with a more layered, complex reality when staying for a short time in an unknown place towards which they already have defined expectations. To dispel discomfort and aid their decision making when shopping for holidays: that is what, above all, the brand is for. The mechanisms of dissent and the activities at the fringe of the main narrative are in fact appropriated to create characters of distinction that are exploited to create further brand differentiation (as for example with street artists, immigrant communities, etc.). It is interesting though how at the root of these processes there is in fact a tradition, in Barcelona, of strong participation of the local communities, kidnapped along the way and victim of its own success. The vital movimientos vecinales (neighbourhood movements) had an incredibly active role in the city during the last period of Franco’s government and where a key agent in catalysing the transformation of the city. From their vitality and power would stem the forces that would eventually appropriate them: firstly, the local power and planning departments headed by the prince architects (again inevitable mentioning Oriol Bohigas, that actually gained initial protagonism close to and within the movimientos vecinales to eventually become the city’s head planner); secondly – once the government had exhausted its funds and investment and management were fully controlled by private agents – by the public-private partnerships that appropriated (replaced?) the democratic apparel. This ultimately corresponds to the compromise of one of the most distinctive characters of the Barcelona Model: the shaping of individual and carefully public spaces generated around public participation and strong collective meaning (which can be understood within a society making its way out of forty long years of dictatorship, and reconstructing its identity upon the memory of a modern vanguard). This participative drive paved the way to an elation that would give carte blanche to those prince architects and managers. They would use it to make big promises and epic visions for the city, quickly jumping from the symbolic small public spaces to monumental and disruptive plans. The 1992 Olympic Games might have been the moment when all innocence was lost. Instead of the culminating moment of a collective achievement, it was then that local communities started to realize how their own views and needs had been bypassed and that a different image of the city had been built and sold to the exterior market. The consequences of such process would only become more obvious over time. Inês Salpico_Jan2013
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
II – Scenario – Present Tense The failure and degradation of these processes has shaped Barcelona’s urban landscape and are at the root of the major problems the city now faces - and although specific in context and nature it is easy to extrapolate what happened here to other metropolitan regions around Europe. It’s a fact that the Barcelona Model has been corrupted and adulterated in many ways. If you happen not to notice it as a tourist it’s precisely because that is a (big) part of the problem, because its corruption (death?) corresponds to the success of the Barcelona Brand. Let me try to systematize a few of the main expressions of the mutation of a model of urban development into a model of city branding.
1 - City centre focused on services and tourism, drained from local residents, making it particularly vulnerable to: a) the volatility of markets, the dynamics of speculation and, therefore, moments of crisis like that we are now experiencing. This explains the apparent paradox: the centre is now full of empty property – most of which originally where mixed used or residential buildings entirely converted to office space in the heydays of the real estate boom – easily discarded by the same suddenly not profitable companies whose influx a couple of decades ago caused the price inflation that would force many of those living in the city to flee to peripheral areas; at the same time retail luxury multinationals keep opening more and bigger shops along the touristic routes, therefore making it impossible for what would now seem a natural adjustment in prices that would allow people to repopulate the centre. The nature of new economy, weaved by financial highly mobile capital, means that in moving so fast this capital relies on ephemeral infrastructures to support it. What we are now realizing is that these infrastructures can in fact be entire cities.
A portrait of Passeig de Gracia: Starbucks, Jimmy Choo and plenty of office space available
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
b) becoming yet another fragment of Generic City. Passeig de Gracia has become a theme park with the same attractions as the Champs Elysées8 or Oxford Street in London. The same array of shops and brands reassure the visitor with the certainty of a certain touristic and shopping experience. The specificities and character of each place are merely appropriated as different backdrops for the same offer. The individual here cannot aim at being a citizen, merely a consumer.9 The problem then gains another level of complexity. It is no longer merely about whether locals can afford to live in the city centre, but about whether, even if they can/could, life is possible when, along with retail chains and fast-food restaurants,
basic local services (such as
supermarkets, schools, healthcare units, etc.) are not available. The saturation of touristic activity and the speculative hijacking of the markets have drained most of the multifunctionality of the main axis of the urban centre. The success of the Barcelona Brand, having started from a process that promised to return the city to its citizens, in great measure actually ended up expelling them from its core. One could think of an inverse reformulation of Saskia Sassen’s notion of urban fascism10: instead of social stratification as a function of the time-distance to the nodes of centrality and excellence, we can think of social stratification determined by the forced displacement to peripheral clusters of accessible services of first need.
Luxury Living: Someone found a cosy dwelling outside Bisazza
8 An
account of how the same phenomena is affecting the French capital can be read in “The Champs-Élysées, a Mall of America”, New York Times, September 15, 2012, page A4 9 I wrote a small depiction about how different it was to walk in Passeig de Gracia when, in a day of general strike, all the shops were closed. The day Louis Vuitton was closed can be read by clicking the link or going to salpico.com 10 A term Saskia Sassen coined, ironically enough, during her intervention, in Barcelona, 2004, as one of the speakers of the Dialogues about the XXI Century City, one of the events of the Fòrum Universal de les Cultures Inês Salpico_Jan2013
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
2 – Tension and Conflict in the public space. What has been described before – the overflow of tourists, the appropriation of the city centre by the global generic commercial scenario, the imposition of the branding narrative described in Section I, n.5 – has been the cause for inevitable tension bound to, in contexts like that of recent months, escalate into conflict. Building in Barcelona’s neighbourhood Raval displaying Volem un Barri Digne!! (We want a dignified neighbourhood!!) signs (detail below)
In Barcelona it is especially obvious how difficult the cohabitation of locals and hordes of tourists has become, generating reactions of mutual exclusion – of which the «Volem un Barri Digne!» (We want a dignified neighbourhood!) signs (above) are a good example. Not only do tourists make noise, litter and clutter the streets they have also contributed to soaring petty crime (namely, and notoriously, pick pocketing) easily predating crowds of often drunk individuals. Attracting such a number of visitors, drawn by an open, festive Mediterranean city (i.e. they come here to party a lot) has had a perverse and apparently contradictory effect: the need for measures of control by the local authorities. However, such measures – laws of conduct, noise regulations, tougher licensing rules for bars and restaurant – created mechanisms of control that have affected locals and small business more than the tourist, thus generating further forces of resistance and dissent.
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
Taming the impolite (but paying) guest: Last summer, Barcelona’s Town Hall printed and distributed this leaflet raising awareness about how to make “good use of public space” and about the fines for committing an array of “anti-social behaviours”
On the other hand, the strategies of dissent and the activities at the fringe of the main narrative, if primarily were, as already described, themselves appropriated to create brand differentiation also open the gate for conflict. Public space being, in parallel with the media, the stage where confrontation takes place. As made obvious by last year’s protests in the streets of Barcelona and Madrid, there’s a thin line between a level of tension than can be exploited to generate interest and visibility – the cool clusters of street artists, the rough ethnic neighbourhoods, etc. – about the city and that which actually ruptures it – in the long term, if those leaving on the fringes are more than those who can actually live, enjoy and work in the city’s core the situation becomes unsustainable. The importance of public space from an aesthetic and commercial point of view is what makes it also important at a social level and as stage for confrontation. Needless to say there were no
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
tourists in Passeig de Gracia in the days thousands of demonstrator flooded Barcelona. Alas, people enjoyed taking pictures at/with them when a smaller group was camping in Plaza Catalunya. It is indeed a thin, possibly dangerous, line. Mobilization can easily be reabsorbed by the media and the status quo.
Clashes between police and demonstrators, in the streets of Barcelona, during the protests propelled by the general strike, 29th March 2012 Photo: ABC.es
One million people flooded the centre of Barcelona, on 11th September 2012, in an unprecedented march for the independence of Catalunya Photo: El Pais
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
3 - Big plans that failed to survive the events for which they were built for and/or live up to the future envisioned through them. A paradigmatic example is the area of Diagonal Mar and Forum, whose development was catalysed by the 2004 Fòrum Universal de les Cultures. It corresponds to a turning point in the understanding of the evolution, failure and probable death of what was once called the Barcelona Model and of its total replacement by the Barcelona Brand. Although it could be argued that such model, that is actually more social (having to do with public participation, the creation of local centralities and public space) than purely formal, actually died as soon as 1992 with the Olympic Games – already a violent imposition of iconic buildings and monumental underused structures – in 2004 there was no collective excitement to hide the pointlessness of the investment by an already bootstrapped government and its inability to actually bring improvements to the city in the aftermath of the event.
Herzog & De Meuron Forum Building (above) and the surrounding area, where the 2004 Forum de les Cultures took place, now verging abandonment
The Diagonal Mar plan was never finished; the sections of the tram line that would connect the the south and north end of Avenida Diagonal was never built; the iconic project by Herzog and de Meuron that housed the Forum now hosts a few music festivals and is otherwise a sad forgotten land (see pictures above); investors fled leaving apocalyptical skeletons of half built structures.
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view An unfinished building of which only a big skeleton stands, located just behing Herzog & de Meuron’s Forum (you can also see it in the background in the picture on the previous page)
The never completed Diagonal Mar plan: expectant land, by the Mediterranean, just off of where the Forum took place in 2004, serving as an anachronistic surrounding for prime real estate
The retreat of private investment is therefore a particularly serious issue not only at an economic level but also, visibly, as an urban problem. In these large areas of unfinished plans of expansion as well as in the historic centre, half built buildings left to rotten have a huge impact in the urban landscape and, at a functional level, in the urban dynamics. As already pointed out in Section I, there should perhaps be way to enforce if not the completion at least the appropriation of such buildings so that they could be put to use. And it may not even be necessary to create new legislation: if zombie companies11, being sustained by government backed loans given by government bailed out banks simply have this plug pulled and declare insolvency, they will be prevented from abandoning but still holding to the property they own and keep in their books for make-up purpose. Letting these hazardous companies die instead of sustaining them in view of future resuscitation, might speed the regeneration of the urban
11
see “Companies: The rise of the zombie”, Financial Times, January 9, 2013, page 9
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
landscape and even promoting the market’s health, allowing for other agents (private or public) to develop and make idle property available to citizens.
The works on the erection of this building, a development of Sapinsh giant Nuñez y Navarro, stopped about one and a half years ago. The façade stands, a mere two blocks away from central Plaza Catalunya
Completely empty buildings, in the city centre and in a radius of just three blocks
4 – The illusion of an international city, that although attracting an immense flow of foreigners (tourists, temporary residents) is not in fact Global (if we use Saskia Sassen’s definition of Global City12 being that in which international capital and political decision making converge to engender new processes of decision making and transnational strategic
see The Global City: Strategic Site/New Frontier in American Studies, Vol. 41 (2000), The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (2001) and The Global City: introducing a Concept in Brown Journal of World Affairs, Vol. XI (2005) 12
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
position). There is neither financial activity nor relevant decision centres that make it so. Also the small entrepreneurial tissue is frail. This makes the city vulnerable to crisis and to the type of social unrest that derives from an economic structure not anchored by the attraction of qualified labour and by a pool of local consumers. The fact that the city specialized in tourism, events and business conferences (15% of the municipal GDP results from touristic activity13) has meant it has not privileged, or in fact made possible, the meeting of these requirements. Barcelona has been, regardless of its visibility, hierarchically dependent on Madrid. But Madrid’s effective power as a global city is mostly built upon a vocation towards Latin America. Such a scenario would be a great opportunity for Barcelona to conquer a truly relevant role in the European stage. Local leaders have in fact sought (or logically should) to position the city as a key node in connection with Asia and eastern Europe, namely through gaining a strategic positioning in the Mediterranean Railway Corridor14, part of an European integrated freight axis, (picture below) and linking it to Port. However, the absence of a seamless connection between the Spanish and French railway networks and of local transportation and logistic infrastructures to articulate Railways, Barcelona’s Port and El Prat Airport have prevented it from actually being implemented and having any impact in the city’s development and strategic positioning.
The envisioned FERRMED Rail Freight Axis Scandinavia-RhineRhone-Western Mediterranean Source: FERRMED, http://www.ferrmed.com
BONET, Jordi: Barcelona 1976-2011. Balance crítico de un modelo de desarrollo urbano (Barcelona, 2011), quoting official data 14 The Mediterranean Railway Corridor, http://www.catalannewsagency.com/specials/mediterranean-railway-corridor 13
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Living in Barcelona: Rooms with a view
III – Perspectives – Crisis as Opportunity
The burst of the real estate bubble was not the cause and just stripped down and exposed the problems of the wider phenomena we have in the previous sections analysed, all of which converge in the evolution of the Barcelona Model and its mutation into the Barcelona Brand. The current moment, that might be a turning point in Barcelona’s urban development, is an invaluable opportunity to make all the agents involved change their perspectives, strategies and understanding, at the light of what has so far been done and of the consequences it has had. The unsustainability of a model that regarded planning and demography, land development and real economy, as separate realities, is now obvious.
The crisis is, then, the screaming lead to stop some of the processes that were described (or rather reassess them, as they have already been stopped by the economic context) and change the development paradigms for the city and its inhabitants. More than a warning or a time for reflection the present situation should be a call to action. It is (can be) the perfect flowerbed to:
a) Repopulate the city centre and reassemble its multifunctional layering. This might, in itself, revive and rebalance the market under less savage and rather selfregulating dynamics. The mere fact that so many buildings are derelict and empty and so many owners are stuck with idle patrimony (although sometimes not for lack of demand but because they are waiting for a miraculously quick economic recovery and are not willing to adjust prices) is an open gate to the reappropriation of the city by more heterogeneous communities, services and businesses. It can be a break-through in rescuing the city centre from being hostage of a certain city spectacle syndrome, made to be seen rather than lived. Of course this might require some action from public agents, both regulators and planners, namely through catalysing the availability of idle property to create more and diversified offer of space in the city centre. For there is the danger that, if such opportunity is disregarded, the hounds of speculation come biting again, sitting as they are around the corner, breathing on our neck, certain that everything will go back to normal. The current idleness of the markets can be more a warning about the future than it is about the past and present. Namely if we think many of the main players are kept sailing on not so harsh winds by the prime real estate, the demand for which has not gone down (nor have the corresponding prices, naturally15) and that, along with retails and fast-food multinationals, keep the pressure in the city centre’s market.
“Las rentas 'prime' se mantienen estables en Madrid y Barcelona”, Inmodiario, October 3, 2012, http://www.inmodiario.com/185/15307/rentas-prime-mantienen-estables-madrid-barcelona.html 15
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b) Give renewed protagonism to public participation and social movements and foster a renewed true citizenship. Now that the processes that erode and perversely masked the erosion of public participation and citizenship have been exposed it’s perhaps possible to return the city to its main actors, that had been kicked out and/or silenced (or did they silence themselves?) so that the brand could thrive. The level at which the economic situation has finally come to deeply affect people’s lives has triggered a renewed awareness. The fact that there is a tradition and memory of public participation has certainly made the reaction and will for mobilization faster and more effective. A good example is the criticism, resistance and activism against 22@16 and, in a very straightforward, operative and proactive manner, the movement claiming the regeneration of the industrial complex Can Batló17 that has not only promoted a number of debates but also collectively organized countless activities that show precisely how the space could serve the community. (As already mentioned the abandonment and underuse of industrial complexes is one of the main problems – and disregarded opportunities – of Barcelona’s recent development.)
Can Batlló: General view of the former factory and one of the many meetings held on the grounds to discuss and claim its use by and for the local communities Photos: http://canbatllo.wordpress.com
The mobilization in the areas within and surrounding the plan’s perimeter has been active and continuous, from the plan’s announcement to this day, as documented in blogs such as http://www.poblenou.org (Poble Nou is the neighbourhood most affected by 22@) 17 All information about Can Batlló, its history and the movement claiming its availability for public use can be found at http://canbatllo.wordpress.com/ 16
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If these movements enact a true, open and inclusive citizenship they can use the crisis as a tool to rehearse new forms of collectively inhabiting the city. And in such a moment it is fundamental to be operative and collaborative, rather than feel harassed and hide behind blurry quests or inconsequential radicalisms at the risk of being taken over by demagogy (something the independence movement in Catalunya sometimes brings to mind). Such entrenchment could actually compromise the future of the democratic city as much as speculation and financial predation. Moreover, confrontation and catchy mottos cannot be mistaken by participation: they are exactly what the media likes to appropriate only to spit back out, devoid of content and effective consequence, becoming just the gateway to be silenced by the status quo. After the violence and media frenzy of some of last year’s days of protest I often thought of Il Gattopardo’s18 famous line: «everything needs to change, so everything can stay the same».
c) Recover multiple, multi-functional centralities. This was actually one the fundamental premises of the Barcelona Model and is also a key action to: ease the pressure on the historical centre from an infrastructural, social and economic point of view; allow for patrimony that has so far been disregarded (such as derelict industrial plots, like Can Batlló) to be nodes for the regeneration of areas of the city that have been in the shadow of the big plans and development strategies; give communities in more peripheral patches of the urban area more equal mobility and access to services.
d) Liberate culture from being either the aid to an advertisement message or a form of resistance. Now that austerity measures are slashing budgets for culture and education, it was made clear how they had often been opportunistically used in political rhetoric and of how they are indeed a basic right and need, regardless (or beyond) economic return.
e) Shape and implement new governance models. The conflicts that have already taken place, with the city centre as the privileged scenario, should have made politicians finally realize how the good planning and management of the city is a fundamental tool, that needs to be seen more from a social and less from a short term economic prospective. They should then be motivated to claim it back, now that developers, investors and prince architects have (perhaps deceitfully and strategically) renounced it and acknowledge the obvious death of urban entrepreneurialism. Building a new governance model, with a reinforced
Il Gattopardo is a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, published posthumously in 1958, brilliantly adapted to the movie screen by Luchino Visconti in 1963 18
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role of planners, communities and of politicians themselves, seems a natural priority right now, when there seems to be absence of a strategy and of a vision for the far and near future. The unrest of recent months should have already made it clear how the city landscape mirrors and breathes the social and political context. Politicians have been chronically late in acknowledging this. In treating urban planning as an aesthetic and economic tool they have failed to understand and use its true potential for collective evolution and transformation. One thing is certain: a sustainable model will be a more autonomous one, not frailly dependent on the logics and mechanisms of the global financial markets and their systemic drifts. A city might also be but is not only a product. Therefore urban strategy and planning cannot correspond to the constant fight for differential value, comparative advantage and competitiveness in regard to other players. It must be built upon a vision for structural inherent autonomy.
Along with the crisis, the opportunity has come. The infrastructures, social and physical, are here. Politicians are adrift? Yet another opportunity. Communities are certainly now more sensitive to the need for intervention – and namely collective intervention – than before. That this failure can be somehow understood as well as the result of unexpected success of the Brand that overwrote the Model is an argument that can, but shouldn’t be used to wait for the economy to pick and go back to the same modus operandi. It’s time for transformation. And it’s time for a comprehensive, multi-level view: look out, to a world that has changed since the end of the Spanish dictatorship and in which the city cannot exist self-referentially, entrenched in the image it has created for itself; look inside, to what, at the level of the individual happens beneath the sunny reflection of that image’s seductive but deceiving opaque surface.
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