The Global Cultural Capital

The Contemporary City Series Editors Ray Forrest Lingnan University Hong Kong Richard Ronald University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands In recent decades cities have been variously impacted by neoliberalism, economic crises, climate change, industrialization and post-industrialization and widening inequalities. So what is it like to live in these contemporary cities? What are the key drivers shaping cities and neighborhoods? To what extent are people being bound together or driven apart? How do these factors vary cross-culturally and cross nationally? This book series aims to explore the various aspects of the contemporary urban experience from a firmly interdisciplinary and international perspective. With editors based in Amsterdam and Hong Kong, the series is drawn on an axis between old and new cities in the West and East. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14446 Mari Paz Balibrea The Global Cultural Capital Addressing the Citizen and Producing the City in Barcelona Mari Paz Balibrea Cultures and Languages Birkbeck, University of London London, United Kingdom All quotes originally in Spanish and Catalan are provided in translation and were translated by Mari Paz Balibrea Enriquez The Contemporary City ISBN 978-1-137-53595-5 ISBN 978-1-137-53596-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53596-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017935425 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. 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The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom To my parents, in memoriam: Barcelonian lives without cultural capital CONTENTS 1 Introduction: Still Paying Homage to Barcelona 1 Part I In Theory: The Subject of Culture 2 Theorizing Culture in the Creative City 13 Part II Taming the Political Citizen 3 Stories We Live By: ...and the Games Created the City 45 4 Culture Is to the Social Materialization of Democracy as the Critical Subject Is to Democratic Citizenship 53 5 Building Participatory Measures 77 Part III The Olympic Framework 6 Preamble 103 7 Working for the City Image: Municipal Publicity Campaigns Redefining the Preferred Barcelona Subject 107 vii viii CONTENTS 8 Exercising Democratic Citizenship: Sport in the Run-Up to the Olympics 129 9 Rethinking Barcelona’92 as a Cultural Milestone 147 10 Olympic Volunteers: Rise of the Super-Citizen 163 Part IV Back to Work: Governing the Creative City 11 Volunteers Unbound 181 12 New Regimes of Government 191 13 Masterminds of Culture 203 Part V Be Yourself Out There: Inhabiting Barcelona for the Global Market 14 Capital Subjects: Redefining Capitality in Global Films on Barcelona 217 15 Barça in the New Millennium: The Other Barcelona Model 235 Bibliography 273 Index 297 LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 4.1 “Cambia tu ciudad con los socialistas” (Change your city with the socialists) 1979 Electoral campaign poster (PSOE, José Ramón Sánchez) 70 Fig. 7.1 “Barcelona més que mai” (Barcelona more than ever before) logo (Ajuntament de Barcelona) 109 Fig. 7.2 “Barcelona ’92” logo (COOB’92 S.A., 1988) 110 ix CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Still Paying Homage to Barcelona Is there anything new remaining to be said about Barcelona? The city’s international prestige is nowadays indisputable. It has become a common- place in the European Cities Monitor – which lists the top European cities for business expansion according to the opinion of senior executives from leading businesses – to find Barcelona at the top of that list (Cushman and Wakefield 2010) in the quality of life category.1 Equally, its stature as a tourist destination does not even require an argument. Desiring Barcelona comes for the potential visitor as naturally as breathing, its status endlessly validated by armies of preceding tourists left in awe by its charms. In more specialized circles, the ones this book now joins, saturation takes different forms. Barcelona’s transformation in the post-Francoist period is widely considered among architects, urban planners, and local politicians around the world, as a model because of its perceived ability to reconcile economic restructuring with spatial regeneration and the widening of the citizens’ right to the city (McNeill 1999; Kirby 2004; Marshall 2004a; Busquets 2005: 345–445).2 As such, the Barcelona case has been widely studied in academic contexts and emulated across the world by policymakers and other local institutional agents (González 2011). But no less abundant have been the critical accounts of this transformation as the end of pro- gressive urban life and the silencing of democratic voices at the service of global capital. In joining such a crowded scene, this book pays, once again, homage to the exceptional Barcelona case and claims to illuminate previously untold © The Author(s) 2017 1 M.P. Balibrea, The Global Cultural Capital, The Contemporary City, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53596-2_1 2 1 INTRODUCTION: STILL PAYING HOMAGE TO BARCELONA perspectives for its complex understanding. Thanks to previous studies, our work does not need to explore in detail the ideological implications of the so-called “Barcelona model,” but in another sense will go into much more detail than any previous works on the scrutiny of institutional and official political discourses, particularly those concerning culture. It has also become a common-place to include Barcelona among the creative cities and to accept as a given its use of culture for urban regeneration. This book, rather than taking these statements for granted, investigates in much more depth than has been the case so far the genealogy of cultural discourses in Barcelona’s post-Francoist democratic municipalities up to the end of the millennium. Its purpose is to identify, trace and make sense of a transformation in the uses of culture, from being the terrain where democracy materializes, to constituting the central economic asset of the Barcelona brand. Furthermore, such an exploration is informed by a theoretical preoccupation with the relation of subjects to power as mediated by culture. Even more, this book proposes to consider Barcelona as a privileged case study to understand how such relations are articulated. After all, Barcelona’s local institutions were pioneers in becoming aware of the close relationship between culture and the social and economic devel- opment of the city, and subsequently in implementing a new paradigm in cultural policy for entrepreneurial creative cities (Rodríguez Morató 2005, 2008). It is within this new paradigm that, for local powers, a new con- ceptualization, not only of culture but also of the local residents would become indispensable. The analysis of local government documents and their organized events and products shows how they constructed and disseminated ideas of and for the local population, the purpose of which was to influence this population’s concept of itself and of its contribution to the beneficial functioning and prosperity of life in the city. The Barcelona case, therefore, provides in this book the basis for a theorization of citizenship and cultural transformation, by arguing that the economic and political logic of the creative city, with its ties to culture, is a key paradigm for understanding how citizenship is defined in the neoliberal urban context. This is different from the better-known framework of identity used to discuss local citizenship in Barcelona and beyond. In relation to cities, identity has been developed in greatly over the past twenty years around issues of branding (Anholt 2007), that is, of the need and desirability for local institutions to consciously produce a cohe- sive and attractive corporate identity for their cities that allows them to compete successfully in the global market. From the viewpoint of their INTRODUCTION: STILL PAYING HOMAGE TO BARCELONA 3 focus on identity, these studies take whole cities as their units of analysis, and not only the ways in which citizens are incorporated into the brand. Analogously, the turning of Barcelona into a global tourist brand as a corollary to its exemplary transformation has attracted the attention of a large number of scholars, either to praise or to criticize it (among the most salient are: M. Delgado 2005, 2007; Etxezarreta et al. 1996;Marshall 2004a;McNeill1999; Monclús 2003;Roca1994; Vázquez Montalbán 1987). These studies, coming from human geographers, urban planners, anthropologists, and intellectuals more generally, focus on the redefini- tion of a place, and particular perspectives have attracted more attention, such as public spaces, in the work of M.

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