Awards

• Winner of North American Catalan Society Award for Outstanding Work in the Field of Catalan studies 2013
• Winner of North American Catalan Society Award for Outstanding Work in the Field of Catalan studies 2013.
• Winner of North American Catalan Society Prize for Outstanding Work in Catalan Studies 2013

Overview

Thinking Barcelona studies the ideological work that redefined Barcelona during the 1980s and adapted the city to a new economy of tourism, culture, and services. The 1992 Olympic Games offered to the municipal government a double opportunity to establish an internal consensus and launch Barcelona as a happy combination of European cosmopolitanism and Mediterranean rootedness. The staging of this municipal “euphoric postpolitics,” which entailed an extensive process of urban renewal, connects with the similarly exultant contexts of a reviving Catalan nation, post-transitional Spain, and post-Cold War globalization. The transformation of Barcelona, in turn, contributed to define the ideologies of globalization, as the 1992 Games were among the first global mega-events that celebrated the neoliberal “end of history.” Three types of materials are examined: political speeches and scripts of the Olympic ceremonies, with special focus on Xavier Rubert de Ventós’s screenplay for the reception of the flame in Empúries; the urban renewal of Barcelona directed by architect Oriol Bohigas; and fictional narratives by Quim Monzó, Francisco Casavella, Eduardo Mendoza, and Sergi Pàmies. This juxtaposition of heterogeneous materials pursues some type of postdisciplinary decoding linked to a strictly Marxist premise: the premise that correlations between different superstructural elements shed light on the economic instance. In this study, Barcelona emerges as a singular conjuncture overdetermined by global capitalism, but is also a space to reflect on three main problematics of postmodern globalization: the spectralization of the social in a fully commodified world; the contradiction between cosmopolitanism and the state; and the vanishing essence of the city.

Full Product Details

9781846318320

Table of Contents

Reviews

Illas' deep and extensive knowledge of theory transforms the reflection on Barcelona's particular experience into a significant contribution to the current critical discussion on the city as postmodern political and cultural site...Thinking Barcelona contributes decisively to the theoretical development of fields such as Catalan Studies, Hispanism, Cultural Studies, Urban Studies, Political Theory, Art History, and Architecture. -- Professor Mario Santana The subject of this volume is the transformation of Barcelona in the 1980s and early '90s that pivoted upon the Olympic Games of 1992. Anyone who-like me-had a close connection with Barcelona at that time will remember the sense of excitement as it burst onto the world stage, but also residents' sceptical reception of certain aspects of the 'prettification' of their city. Edgar Illas tackles this ambivalence through a Marxist lens, attempting to show how global and local imperatives, conditioned by the demands of late capitalism, combined to produce the 'postmodern', tourist-centred city we see today. Illas' approach to this subject is impressively wide-ranging, with the disadvantage that it sometimes feels a little meandering. The reader is taken on a journey through theoretical discussions derived from Marxism and deconstruction, historical narratives of the city's development during the Games, discussions of policy and urban planning from previous eras as well as the period of the Games, and examples drawn from literature and other texts. Towards the end, the focus narrows to a concern with public spaces. Illas views these as occupying an ambiguous position as both a symptom of Barcelona's transformation into a tourist simulacrum and a possible site of radical resistance to this kind of commodification of space. The discussion is divided into four main chapters. The first examines Barcelona's vocation as an Olympic city in the context of Spain's democratic transformation and Catalonia's renewed autonomy. Illas shows how Barcelona became caught up in the modernizing project that has come to be firmly associated with mayor Pasqual Maragall: a project Maragall described as adjusting the city to meet the needs of its inhabitants, but which Illas rightly argues was really about making Barcelona competitive in the global race to attract tourism and business. This is complemented by analyses of La ciudad de los prodigios by Eduardo Mendoza and Sergi Pamies' short story 'La gran novel la sobre Barcelona'. The chapter ends with an excursion into Derrida's and Jameson's critiques of Fukuyama's The End of History, designed to highlight the 'posthistorical deadlock' to which the Olympic Games were necessarily subject, since the ghosts of the dictatorship 'are no longer unrepresentable traumas that cannot be incorporated to the existing historical narratives; rather they are part of the very simulacrum that has obliterated the sense of history to begin with' (76, 73). The second chapter focuses on the long-standing attempt to construct Barcelona as fundamentally Mediterranean, in contrast with landlocked Madrid. The discussion revolves around the poetic performance devised by Xavier Rubert de Ventos to welcome the Olympic Flame as it arrived in Empuries from Greece. However, Illas also analyses the contradictions in Barcelona's claims to contemporary cosmopolitanism that are derived from this rhetoric of historical contact between peoples, using the novel El triunfo by Francisco Casavella, which deals with the effects of immigration in the old districts of central Barcelona that were the target of gentrification. The third chapter concentrates on the effect of urban planning on Barcelona, once again diving back into history to show the influences that shaped the modern city, before turning to the planning that took place specifically around the Olympic Games. Illas argues that even though Oriol Bohigas, the main architect of Barcelona's transformation, rejected the idea of creating a 'master plan' for the whole of the city and preferred to concentrate on the transformation of specific spaces to meet local needs, the effect was to push Barcelona further down the path of 'touristification', 'museification' and 'Disneylandization' (168). Quim Monzo's short stories appear in this chapter as expressions of the kind of postmodern angst experienced by those living in what Rem Koolhaas calls the 'Generic City'. The final chapter, 'Learning from Barcelona', seeks to rescue the positives from this bleak vision, and concentrates on public spaces as a potential site for political contestation and resistance to commodification. Illas concludes that Barcelona's new public spaces occupy an ambivalent place between generic non-lieux and sites for local emancipatory politics. It is the possibility of openness and publicness that remains latent in these commodified spaces which becomes, for Illas, the aspect of the 'Barcelona Model' that is most worth retaining and emulating. With such a multi-faceted treatment of Barcelona' approach to this subject is impressively wide-ranging, with the disadvantage that it sometimes feels a little meandering. The reader is taken on a journey through theoretical discussions derived from Marxism and deconstruction, historical narratives of the city's development during the Games, discussions of policy and urban planning from previous eras as well as the period of the Games, and examples drawn from literature and other texts. Towards the end, the focus narrows to a concern with public spaces. Illas views these as occupying an ambiguous position as both a symptom of Barcelona's transformation into a tourist simulacrum and a possible site of radical resistance to this kind of commodification of space. The discussion is divided into four main chapters. The first examines Barcelona's vocation as an Olympic city in the context of Spain's democratic transformation and Catalonia's renewed autonomy. Illas shows how Barcelona became caught up in the modernizing project that has come to be firmly associated with mayor Pasqual Maragall: a project Maragall described as adjusting the city to meet the needs of its inhabitants, but which Illas rightly argues was really about making Barcelona competitive in the global race to attract tourism and business. This is complemented by analyses of La ciudad de los prodigios by Eduardo Mendoza and Sergi Pamies' short story 'La gran novel la sobre Barcelona'. The chapter ends with an excursion into Derrida's and Jameson's critiques of Fukuyama's The End of History, designed to highlight the 'posthistorical deadlock' to which the Olympic Games were necessarily subject, since the ghosts of the dictatorship 'are no longer unrepresentable traumas that cannot be incorporated to the existing historical narratives; rather they are part of the very simulacrum that has obliterated the sense of history to begin with' (76, 73). The second chapter focuses on the long-standing attempt to construct Barcelona as fundamentally Mediterranean, in contrast with landlocked Madrid. The discussion revolves around the poetic performance devised by Xavier Rubert de Ventos to welcome the Olympic Flame as it arrived in Empuries from Greece. However, Illas also analyses the contradictions in Barcelona's claims to contemporary cosmopolitanism that are derived from this rhetoric of historical contact between peoples, using the novel El triunfo by Francisco Casavella, which deals with the effects of immigration in the old districts of central Barcelona that were the target of gentrification. The third chapter concentrates on the effect of urban planning on Barcelona, once again diving back into history to show the influences that shaped the modern city, before turning to the planning that took place specifically around the Olympic Games. Illas argues that even though Oriol Bohigas, the main architect of Barcelona's transformation, rejected the idea of creating a 'master plan' for the whole of the city and preferred to concentrate on the transformation of specific spaces to meet local needs, the effect was to push Barcelona further down the path of 'touristification', 'museification' and 'Disneylandization' (168). Quim Monzo's short stories appear in this chapter as expressions of the kind of postmodern angst experienced by those living in what Rem Koolhaas calls the 'Generic City'. The final chapter, 'Learning from Barcelona', seeks to rescue the positives from this bleak vision, and concentrates on public spaces as a potential site for political contestation and resistance to commodification. Illas concludes that Barcelona's new public spaces occupy an ambivalent place between generic non-lieux and sites for local emancipatory politics. It is the possibility of openness and publicness that remains latent in these commodified spaces which becomes, for Illas, the aspect of the 'Barcelona Model' that is most worth retaining and emulating. With such a multi-faceted treatment of Barcelona's transformation, I have necessarily only been able to give a reductive sketch here. Moreover, it is sometimes unclear where the discussion is going and how the multiple pieces of the jigsaw relate to one another, with theory, history, politics, urban planning, architecture and literature all stirred into a somewhat heady mix. However, the book is well worth reading and will be of interest to anyone with a fascination for Barcelona, or a curiosity to discover its relevance for other projects of urban transformation beyond an uncritical implementation of the 'Barcelona Model'. -- Kathryn Crameri Bulletin of Spanish Studies ... the book is well worth reading and will be of interest to anyone with a fascination for Barcelona, or a curiosity to discover its relevance for other projects of urban transformation beyond an uncritical implementation of the 'Barcelona Model'. Bulletin of Spanish Studies

Illas' deep and extensive knowledge of theory transforms the reflection on Barcelona's particular experience into a significant contribution to the current critical discussion on the city as postmodern political and cultural site...Thinking Barcelona contributes decisively to the theoretical development of fields such as Catalan Studies, Hispanism, Cultural Studies, Urban Studies, Political Theory, Art History, and Architecture. -- Professor Mario Santana

Author Information

Edgar Illas is Assistant Professor of Spanish, Indiana University.

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