McNEIL, Donald - Urban Change and The European Left

Urban Change and the European Left
Urban Change and the European Left takes us on a journey through the cityscapes of
one of the favourite holiday destinations of the contemporary European left. Taking
five themes current to debates on the future of socialism in the city—Marxism and
memory; European regionalism and city-states; social democrat new realism; the
future of the urban social movements celebrated by Manuel Castells; and a ‘designer’
socialism of architecture and public space—the book looks at the way politicians
and critics use the city to ground their political messages.
Through the mixing of methods and genres, the book explores local narratives of
urban change through ethnography, biography, travelogue, and social history.
Drawing on novels, architectural commentaries, urban plans, political speeches,
history and autobiography, Urban Change and the European Left provides accounts
of public art, architecture, grassroots struggle from the SEAT car factory to the
peripheral housing estates of Nou Barris, battles for control of the 1992 Olympics,
and the city and Catalan identity;
Containing critical commentary on Barcelona previously unavailable in English,
this book helps to make sense of the shape of contemporary urban change and
describes the way in which cities are central to the construction of place-based
political identities.
Donald McNeill is a lecturer in Geography at the University of Strathclyde.
Urban Change and the
European Left
Tales from the New Barcelona
Donald McNeill
London and New York

First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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© 1999 Donald McNeill
The right of Donald McNeill to be identified as the Author of this
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1998
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
McNeill, Donald, 1969–
Urban Change and the European Left: Tales from the New
Barcelona
/Donald McNeill.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
1. City planning—Political aspects—Spain—Barcelona. 2. Socialism—
Spain—Barcelona. I. Title.
HT169.S652B362 1999
307.76′0946′72–dc21 98–49106
CIP
ISBN 0-203-98191-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-17062-1 (Print Edition)

Contents
List of illustrations vi
Acknowledgements vii
Chronology viii
Introduction 1
The New Barcelona 1
The city and the European Left 2
Urban reportage 3
1 A rough guide to the New Barcelona 7
From the air, homage to Blair 7
The birth of the New Barcelona 11
An electoral map 14
2 Red heritage: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán as socialist flâneur 23
Barcelona noir 25
The Barrio Chino and the triumph of the middle classes 30
‘From the long march to the marathon’ 37
Barcelona as theme park 44
3 Battles for Barcelona 56
City-states or bourgeois regions? 57
Barcelona. as capital of la anti-España 59
Pujol, Maragall and the National Question: two visions 66
Battle I: Barcelona vs. Catalonia? 72
Battle II: The Olympics 74
v
4 The gospel according to Pasqual: mayor Maragall’s new 84

urban realism
Barcelona in la decada socialista and beyond 85
Maragallisme as social democratic new realism 88
Globalisation: Barcelona as competitive city 93
Beaches, malls and office blocks: the ‘Barcelona model’ 97
Europe, solidarity and citizenship 103
5 Manuel Castells in the Eurocity 112
Manuel Castells and the Barcelona Left 113
Porciolismo 1957–76: the developers’ city 117
The city from the grassroots 121
‘Porciolismo with an Olympic shirt on’ 129
Contesting the Eurocity 134
6 Designer socialism: the politics of architecture and public 140
space
The city of architects 141
The Left, space and its public 147
Public art in the New Barcelona 155
More state than civil society? The enlightened despots 160
7 Progressive futures? 173
The Eurocity and urban entrepreneurialism 174
Culture capitals: the politics of spectacle 177
Political spaces in the New Europe 179
Red heritage, green future? 180
Glossary 184
References 188
Index 197
Illustrations
Figures
1 Barcelona: an electoral map 15

2 Map of Ciutat Vella/old city 32
3 Map of Barcelona’s red belt 63
4 Butifarra! 125
Plates
1 ‘Franco ha muerto’ 24
2 A street demonstration at Olivetti, Plaça de Glories 65
3 October 1986: Pasqual Maragall takes the acclaim of the crowds in Plaça 77
de Catalunya
4 The Olympic Village from Barceloneta 99
5 Carrer Tarragona from Hostafrancs 101
6 Parc de l’Espanya Industrial 127
7 Calatrava’s tower from Sants 143
8 Homenatge a Picasso/Homage to Picasso 159
9 MACBA. Richard Meier’s contemporary art gallery 164
10 Plaça dels Països Catalans 167
Acknowledgements
Thanks first of all to Vicky and my parents, for putting up with long periods of
virtual unemployment.
In Barcelona, I have to thank the many guiris and post-guiris who helped me settle
in: in particular Gordon McK. and Sharon at the start, Ross and Louise for being
extremely well-informed and flexible flatmates, and everyone else who made my stay
an illuminating experience. In Cardiff, thanks to everyone at the Department of
City and Regional Planning who provided support in various ways. I am also
grateful to the Department of Geography, University of Strathclyde, who supported
me during the closing stages of the work.
For information gathering, the following institutions in Barcelona were extremely
helpful: Institut Municipal de Història de la Ciutat; Federació d’Associacions de
Veïns de Barcelona; libraries at the Universitat de Barcelona and the Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona; the Arxiu Fotogràfic and the library at the Ajuntament de
Barcelona. Truly invaluable were the numerous new and second-hand bookshops
which yielded a lot of diverse and surprising material.
A number of people have either commented on various aspects of the text, or
have provided stimulating discussion concerning many of the themes addressed, or
have given me particular research leads. In no particular order, thanks to: Chris
Ealham, Caragh Wells, John Lovering, John Punter, Kevin Morgan, Nick Fyfe,
Mark Boyle, Aidan While, Ross Montgomery and two anonymous referees.
Thanks to Sharon Galleitch for the maps, Vicky for most of the photographs, the
Arxiu Fotogràfic/Pérez de Rozas for Plates 1, 2 and 3, and the Federació
d’Associacions de Veins de Barcelona for permission to reproduce from La Veu del
Carrer.
The generous financial support given by the Department of City and Regional
Planning, University of Wales, Cardiff was crucial in allowing me the opportunity of
undertaking the research visits to Barcelona during 1995 and 1996.
Chronology1, 2
1861 The Eixample (extension) is urbanised under a variant of a plan

proposed by Ildefons Cerdà, the beginning of modern Barcelona.
This would connect the old city with the townships surrounding
it, such as Gràcia and Sants.
1888 World’s Fair at the Ciutadella park on the edge of the Case
Antic.
1929 Exp in Barcelona sees the urbanisation of Plaça d’Espanya and
parts of Montjuïc, and the building of the Mies van der Rohe
German Pavilion.
1931 Formation of the Second Republic.
1936 Victory of left-wing Popular Front at general election leads to
army rising in Morocco, under the leadership of General Franco.
By 18th July the Civil War has begun.
1937 13th February: Barcelona bombarded by Italian warships (leaving
17 dead), a prelude to the blanket bombing of the Basque town of
Guernica two months later. Meanwhile, 500 the in internecine
warfare between anarchist and Stalinist resistance (see Orwell’s
Homage to Catalonia).
1939 Fall of Barcelona on 26th January effectively ends war. In June,
public use of Catalan is banned.
1951 Tram strike in Barcelona over fare increase, first major act of
resistance to regime (and sign of gradual stirrings of opposition).
1952 Regime opens SEAT car factory in Zona Franca, Barcelona, with
technology and business acumen supplied by Fiat of Italy, who
insist on its Barcelona location despite the government’s
(prescient) fears of disciplinary problems.
1953 Military base agreement signed between US and Spain.
1957 Camp Nou, home of FC Barcelona (el Barça) is inaugurated; first
SEAT 600 rolls off assembly line—will transform Spain into a
society of mass mobility.
ix
1962 ‘Generation of 62’ agitating in universities and factories show

signs of widespread organised political opposition to regime.
1965 Beatles appear at Monumental bull-ring; Coca-Cola factory
established at La Verneda; end of 2nd (modernising) Vatican
Council. All symbols of inexorable tide of cultural modernity.
1971 Birth in Barcelona of Assemblea de Catalunya: successful
coalition of nationalist, communist, socialist and civil opposition
to dictatorship.
1973 On 20th December, Franco’s prime minister and favoured
successor, Admiral Carrero Blanco, is assassinated by Basque
terrorist group ETA in a Madrid car bomb.
1975 20th November: Franco dies in hospital. Two days later, Juan
Carlos is crowned king of Spain and new head of state.
1976 Hot transition begins with wave of strikes. Adolfo Suárez is
appointed prime minister, and initiates rapid political reforms.
On 1st and 8th February, FAVB co-ordinates vital street protests
in Barcelona demanding ‘Llibertat, Amnistia, Estatut
d’Autonomia’ (Liberty, Amnesty, Statute of Autonomy). Socias
Humbert becomes transition mayor, his tenure marked by policy
of municipal land-buying and end of Porciolismo.
1977 First democratic elections since 1936 won by Suárez’s right-wing
reformers, the UCD. Labour unions and PCE legalised. Moncloa
accords (austerity measures) signed by all major parties, including
communists. Huge demonstrations in Barcelona demanding
return of Generalitat, soon delivered by Suárez.
1979 In March, Right under UCD win general election again, PSOE
subsequently drops Marxism under pressure from González. In
April, Left (PSC and PSUC) sweep to victory in Barcelona local
elections, a pattern repeated across urban Spain. Narcís Serra
appointed mayor of Barcelona.
1980 Pujol and CiU win surprise victory at Generalitat elections, as
many voters of Hispanic origin abstain (due to indifference).
They will repeat their victory in 1984, 1988, 1992 and 1995
(losing their absolute majority in the last case, however).
1981 23rd February: attempted coup by disaffected Francoist rump
fails when King Juan Carlos refuses to support them. For a tense
night, however, parliament is held hostage and tanks appear on
the streets of Valencia; psychologically, this would further cement
the need for a social trace and a non-radical transition.
x
1982 PSOE wins huge general election victory (October). Serra

becomes Defence Minister, and Pasqual Maragall mayor of
Barcelona.
1983 PSC wins overall control of Barcelona again.
1986 In October, Barcelona wins 1992 Olympic nomination.
1987 PSOE loses control of 21 out of 27 large cities in local elections,
but Maragall retains control of Barcelona (to be repeated in
1991).
1992 Barcelona holds Olympics, while Seville (Expo) and Madrid
(European City of Culture) confirm Spain’s full international
economic and cultural integration.
1993 PSOE wins general election but loses absolute majority due to
rise of PP.
1995 PSC/Maragall narrowly retain control of Barcelona in face of
PSOE calamity in rest of Spain at local elections.
1996 PSOE finally ousted from government, but PP reliant on CiU
and other regionalist parties to retain control.
1997 In September, Maragall steps down as mayor amid speculation that
he is preparing a bid to lead the PSC in imminent Generalitat
elections. He is replaced by his deputy, Joan Clos.
Notes
1 Drawn primarily from Fabre and Huertas (1989) and Graham and Labanyi (1995).
2 All translations in the text are from Catalan or Castilian and are by the author unless
stated in the bibliography. Barcelona is a city where both languages are used. As a general
tule, I have rendered place names in Catalan with certain exceptions.
Introduction
The New Barcelona

I love Barcelona. I love its streets, its buildings, the soupy air, the smelly hammy
bars, the Mediterranean in the winter, the diversity of its neighbourhoods, the
music on the metro (Midnight Cowboy, muzak and Mozart), the arty urban parks,
the way they rub tomato on their bread before they make sandwiches, the harsh
rasping Catalan, the Rambla after it has rained, the magnificent combination of
football and concrete at the Camp Nou, expat shopping at Marks and Spencer, the
lush hills which pop up all over the city, the density which means you could walk
across the whole city—a city of 1.5 million people—in half a day, the greasy
butifarra sausages. The beaches and the beer. I am not alone in this homage to
Barcelona, being joined by multitudes of curious or hedonistic visitors on
architecture field trips, football weekends, honeymoons, raves, inter-rails, cultural
espionage forays, conference circuits, and Thomson city-breaks. Its popularity has
been an indicator of the city’s success in marketing itself abroad, helped by the
boundless free publicity of the 1992 Olympics and a grapevine that has wended its
way throughout Europe and as far afield as North America and Japan. The New
Barcelona: modern, efficient, ‘cosmopolitan’ (due largely to the huge weight of
tourists pressing down on its delicately tiled pavements rather than to any striking
ethnic diversity), a model of how cities should look in the New Europe.
And this explains its popularity with the European centre-left, consummate
consumers of fine food and architecture, and anxious to retain the city as a focus of
activity. Barcelona has undergone an urban renaissance second-to-none, and has
done so largely because of the efforts of its social-democrat-led city council, since
their arrival in the mayoral office in 1979. While Los Angeles has become ‘the
essential destination on the itinerary of any late twentieth-century intellectual…the
terrain and subject of fierce ideological struggle’, torn between boosterist dreams and
dystopian nightmare, Barcelona represents a less polarised —but equally ideological
—vision of the happy marriage of state intervention and economic
competitiveness.1 As such, it has featured heavily on the agendas of urban policy-
makers and politicians around the world, from Atlanta to Lisbon to Shanghai to
London. And from Leeds to Manchester, Glasgow and Cardiff.
2 INTRODUCTION
But it signifies something else, too: the negation or death of the old city, be this
its vanishing Marxist heritage, the destruction of the dusty, sunny informality of its
streets, the spirit of collectivity that flourished under the 40-year dictatorship
suffered by its citizens, or the very difference that marked it out, redolent with a
local colour eulogised by writers from Jean Genet to Robert Hughes. To get to the
New Barcelona, the city went through some sort of transition. As it was
modernised, so some things were destroyed: the ‘tragedy of development’ perhaps,
but out of this transition there were winners and losers, presumably. Or was this all
a Whiggish welcome to the New Europe?2
I undertook this study precisely because Barcelona was so popular in the
soundbites of municipal politicians and Sunday supplements, precisely because of
the extent to which it has captured the imagination of a lot of trend-setters and
policy-makers. And while it cannot compete with Los Angeles as a ‘laboratory’ of
social science research (with the Chicago School or the Paris of Benjamin being
clear predecessors), I would maintain that within lies an important set of lessons
about how politicians, critics, social movements and parties have interpreted urban
change in contemporary Europe. Furthermore, it is important that our
understanding of urban change is informed by studies from a variety of geographical
locations, not just the usual examples of London, New York and Los Angeles. A
focus on Barcelona reveals a lot which contradicts, qualifies or modifies the
anglophone normality of much contemporary urban research. And it allows a
privileged viewpoint of some of the anxieties of the European Left as it has struggled
to retain control of the European metropolis. But why the Left?
The city and the European Left

Why indeed? Despite the fact that many geographers pride themselves on a concern
for ‘a progressive politics of place’3 (which includes—of course—the claims of non-
party political actors such as the women’s movement, anti-racist organisations, etc.),
there is a curious lack of engagement with the role of socialist or Left parties today.
Some may say that this is because they are no longer socialist, no longer progressive.
If so, fine. This does not invalidate a search for what went wrong, and how
changing political values are communicated. In other words, the whole issue of the
Left and the city is something which geographers have tended to ignore, yet
something to which they can contribute hugely The fact is that behind the city’s
transition a whole range of Left political traditions have been re-invented and
rewritten. And what is particularly interesting is the way that Barcelona as a place
has been redefined in this process.
That cities often embody or signify sites of both material and symbolic political
struggles has been recognised in recent geographical work. For example, Jane M.
Jacobs, in Postcolonialism and the City, shows how struggles over the production and
use of space in cities such as London are reflections of broader cultural conflicts.
Gerry Kearns’ excellent account of the Paris of 1989 illustrates how the city was a
kind of political theatre for the Mitterrand presidency. Driver and Gilbert’s
INTRODUCTION 3
historical geography of imperial London employs the metaphor of ‘performance’ as

a means of highlighting ‘spaces in movement’ rather than seeing urban space as
static and predictable. And the importance of recognising how urban change is
discursively constructed has been developed in Beauregard’s Voices of Decline, with
reference to changing public discourses about the American city.4
My interest here, then, is to take this conception of the city as both a discursive
and a material site of struggle and performance and use it as a contribution to
attempts to chart the recent trajectory of the European Left. This has been taken
forward at the level of the nation-state by a couple of recent studies, Anderson and
Camiller’s Mapping the West European Left and Donald Sassoon’s One Hundred
Years of Socialism,5 but comparable material on how this has affected both urban life
and the political discourse of municipal politicians has been thin on the ground.
Defining what it is to be Left or socialist for the purposes of an academic study is
notoriously difficult. As Sassoon notes in his substantial historical monograph, there
is often very little alternative for the historian or analyst of the Left but to accept ‘all
self-styled socialist, social-democratic, labour and workers’ parties as the frame of
reference’.6 Such an approach may be necessary when examining socialism as a
movement. However, in this study I think it is important to look not just at
socialism or social democracy where it is represented by a political party, as in
Barcelona city council (chapter 4), but also where it is disappearing (chapter 2), or
challenged from the grassroots (chapter 5), or is defined by place-specific criteria
such as civic, regional or national identity (chapter 3) or indeed, where it is
appearing in unusual guises—the designer socialism which I describe in chapter 6.
These are all aspects of Left politics which the urban-sensitised geographer can
contribute to. In this sense a tight definition of the Left is restrictive. Instead, the
thematic focus helps to identify areas where Left identity is being negotiated, where
it is subject to processes which help clarify its relationship to concrete phenomena.
In many ways the book is an attempt to personalise the contemporary dilemmas
facing the Left through a focus on autobiography and biography, through a meshing
of historical narrative with observation and thick description.7 This is a conscious
response to suggestions that work on the Left has been written from the standpoint
of the political party, rather than through more social historical narratives. Sassoon’s
mammoth work has been criticised on this very point, one commentator suggesting
that he has over-emphasised the Left as technocrats, and arguing the need to move
‘outside the conference halls and committee rooms of socialist party policy-making
into the streets’.8 I would agree with this. We need to explore alternative modes of
representation to understand how politics and urban change are intertwined. Here I
pursue what I call urban reportage, the search for a style of writing that emphasises
the importance of local narratives.
Urban reportage
I have already cited Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, and I am happy to claim that this
was for me—as for many contemporary urban geographers—a formative text, a
4 INTRODUCTION
wholly refreshing way of looking at a city. And while the following sketches
of Barcelona are far less detailed, far less sparklingly rendered than the Californian
textual experience, the book is empathetic with Davis’s attention to searching for a
political mode of representation. Davis may be too tendentious for some (and James
Duncan has written a useful critique from this perspective)9 but he shatters the
myth of the disembodied author and—most importantly—forces open the
contemporary city, talking about real people wielding enormous power. This could
be called ‘muckraking’ academia,10 and his targets—priests, politicians, police chiefs
and Frank Gehry—are all savaged within a coherent narrative framework.
This idea of narrative frameworks is important, as narrative—the act of telling
stories—is an alternative way of structuring academic work to the conventional
theoretical or conceptual approach. In carrying out the 12 months of fieldwork in
Barcelona (made on several visits between 1995 and 1997) the sifting of newspaper
reports, urban histories, the city council’s plans and economic strategies, biographies
and autobiographies of key protagonists, published interviews and dialogues, social
histories, novels and the grassroots press has revealed a number of ‘stories’ which
show how political actors make sense of the city—the ‘performance’ metaphor
referred to above. These are often informal knowledges, and I have woven them into
political and economic commentaries on the city and Spain as a means of providing
context and interpretation. The result is a thematic set of tales, each more or less
chronologically narrated. The downside of this is that the issues dealt with overlap
between chapters, but where possible I have tried to avoid this. I would suggest that
the book be read sequentially as the major themes of urban politics in Barcelona,
Catalonia and Spain are set out in the earlier chapters, and the major characters are
also introduced early on.
The representational approach I have taken here is deliberately provocative. I am
not claiming that reportage is ‘scientifically rigorous’. I am already braced for
accusations that this work is mere ‘journalism’. Yet it is rooted in a belief that
academic writing in certain spheres should be addressed to audiences wider than the
author’s immediate discipline. George Orwell argued for this very strongly, and as
Bernard Crick—Orwell’s biographer—has lamented at some length, academic
books about political issues ‘were once written in plain English not in social science,
whether in the Marxiological or the American methodological dialect’. And as both
Crick and Raymond Williams have noted of Orwell, there was an intention in the
latter’s work to make political writing something of an art, as well as a means of
communication.11 Others have extended this approach to understanding the city,
specifically, and I have been influenced by the likes of Walter Benjamin, Patrick
Wright, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, François Maspero and Mike Davis, who have
all thrown a highly illuminating spotlight on daily life in their chosen cities, each
engaging with the elusive politics of the street, or rather politics as seen from street
level, but who are also aware of the hidden forces which have to be uncovered to
understand how cities and political identities are changing.12
I begin by providing a brief political travelogue to Barcelona, as a means of
orientation and scene-setting for the chapters that follow. In chapter 2 I examine the
INTRODUCTION 5
idea that the contemporary European city is becoming more and more alien to a
Left politics. Drawing primarily on the work of local critic and novelist Manuel
Vázquez Montalbán, I examine how the New Barcelona of the 1980s and 1990s is
distanced from what we might call ‘classic’ socialist culture, in the sense of it being
internationalised, modernised and gentrified, while the popular landscapes and
places in the city are being redefined and redesigned by the city council. One of
Vázquez Montalbán’s obsessions is the degree to which once Marxist political
activists have now become leading advocates of capitalist modernity, expressed most
succinctly in the organisation of the Olympics. From the idea of a loss of Left
identity, I move in chapter 3 to examining how the city has been integral to the
development of Catalan political identities, and how this has split between the
socially inclusive ‘city-state’ notion of social democratic mayor Pasqual Maragall,
and the ‘bourgeois regionalism’ of Catalan president Jordi Pujol.13 In chapter 4, I
confront the key issue of the Left in power in today’s city, pulling out some
distinctive themes of Maragall’s re-interpretation of municipal social democracy, an
urban ‘new realism’. This is followed in chapter 5 by a critique from those in the
city’s grassroots citizens’ movements of Maragall’s version of Left identity, which
argues that this does nothing for the most vulnerable sections of the city’s
population, and that the property development pursued in building a New
Barcelona is directly counter to their interests. I illustrate how this relates to the
redefinition of socialist politics in the city by linking it to the biography and work
of Manuel Castells, whose analysis of capitalism was influential among the
generation who came to power in the late 1970s. This link illuminates how the
Barcelona urban Left has often been extremely sensitive to the workings of
capitalism and urban restructuring. In chapter 6 I argue that there is an interesting
Left interpretation of the built environment at play in Barcelona, expressed in the
choice of architects and projects which have heralded the city’s renaissance. Finally,
I try to draw together some of the themes explored, relating them to the broader
strategic issues facing the European Left.
Notes
1 Davis (1990), pp. 19–20.

2 Marshall Berman’s (1983) account of the agonies of modernity and modernisation are
as applicable to Barcelona as they are to New York, coupled as they are with a very acute
sense of how the transition was politicised.
3 Massey (1993).
4 J.M.Jacobs (1996); see also J.M.Jacobs (1994), which expands the methodological
discussion on this point; Kearns (1993); Driver and Gilbert (1998), quotation from p.
14; Beauregard (1993).
5 Anderson and Camiller (1994); Sassoon (1996).
6 Sassoon (1996), p. xxiv.
7 For more detail on this, see McNeill (1998).
8 Eley (1998), p. 114.
6 INTRODUCTION
9 Duncan (1996).
10 See Lindner (1996).
11 Bernard Crick, ‘Politics and the English language’, Guardian 29 March 1997, p. 23;
Williams (1991).
12 Benjamin’s urban writing is well described by Gilloch (1996); Wright (1993);
Enzensberger (1989), and Chalmers and Lumley (1989) for a commentary; Maspero
(1994); Davis (1990).
13 The phrase is Harvie’s (1994).
1
A rough guide to the New Barcelona
From the air, homage to Blair

2nd April, 1997, 10.30pm (local time). As the British Airways flight descends, I
look out of the window at inky Barcelona flickering below, an invisible city but with
tell-tale landmarks for the frequent flier: the green neon Sony sign in Plaça dels
Països Catalans, Santiago Calatrava’s graceful wishbone tower, the evenly spaced
streetlights of the Eixample. I had just left a Britain underwhelmed by election
fever, my in-flight reading consisting of an Economist election guide. Putting it aside,
my thoughts turn from New Labour’s spending plans to the city humming away
below, people glued to Sorpresa Sorpresa or Telenoticias, drinking coffee and eating
magdalenas, stacked high in their apartments in Sant Andreu, in Les Corts, in
L’Hospitalet. And I am happy to be back because I like Barcelona a lot, and I
calculate the best way to get from the airport to my waiting box-room in a friend’s
flat in Sants, and the approximate time it will take between getting off the plane and
levering open the first cold bottle of Estrella beer, Barcelona’s national drink.
I had come to Barcelona because of its reputation as a heartland of socialism. It
interested me because it had changed dramatically in a short space of time, throwing
up the same sort of tensions and dilemmas posed to the Left in cities such as
Glasgow and Sheffield, Lille and Paris—cities with strong traditions of socialism and
working class protest, but now lumbering under the burden of deindustrialisation,
unemployment, and Maastricht. I had come because Tony Blair and his New
Labour colleagues had gone on record as big fans of what the long-serving social
democrat mayor—Pasqual Maragall—had done for the city. But I had also come
because Barcelona has a special place in the literary heritage of British socialists,
thanks to the efforts of one Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, whose first visit to
Barcelona shocked him:
It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class
was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the
workers and was draped by red flags or with the red and black flag of the
Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the
initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted
8 A ROUGH GUIDE TO THE NEW BARCELONA
and its images burnt… Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the
town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the
loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night.
And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In
outward appearance, it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically
ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there
were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-
class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of the militia uniform.
(George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia)1
This was 1936, and Orwell had come to Barcelona as an enthusiastic, idealistic
member of the International Brigades—the volunteers who arrived from all over the
world to fight against fascism. The state of affairs which he found upon his arrival
would not last for long. As a result of bitter struggles within the Republican forces—
between pro-Stalinist communists on one hand, and Anarchists and Trotskyists on
the other—one of Europe’s most revolutionary cities fell to Franco’s Nationalists in
1939. For much of the following three or four decades, until Franco’s death in
1975, little trace would be left of this radical political culture. The banning of
political parties, the often violent suppression of the labour movement, the constant
surveillance, harassment and imprisonment of socialist intellectuals and shopfloor
activists—many of whom would be locked up in the Model prison close to the city
centre—were a constant of everyday life as the dictatorship tried to ensure that red
Barcelona would not be seen again.
In writing Homage to Catalonia Orwell set out to correct some of the mistruths
circulating about the course of the Civil War in Spain, and the events of Barcelona
in particular. His sympathy for the Trotskyists and Anarchists went beyond his
immediate experience as a militia-member at the Aragonese front, seeing the events
of Spain as being a microcosm of the closing horizon of Europe at the time: ‘[t]his
squalid brawl in a distant city is more important than might appear at first sight’.2
Going out to fight in Spain with the International Brigades—as did many British
socialists of his generation—was one way of making an individual stand against the
rising shadow of European fascism.
So what would he say now, Orwell, were he to return to the Barcelona of the
1990s, if he had flown into El Prat airport in 1992 as the world’s greatest athletes
arrived to participate in an Olympic Games financed by some of the most powerful
transnational corporations in the world? What would Orwell say if he were to open
the British lifestyle magazines, travel guides or Sunday supplements which have
rushed to eulogise the city, almost without exception beginning their pieces with
‘Homage to…’? In a lengthy appendix to Homage to Catalonia Orwell made clear
what he felt about those parts of the British media either on the Right— such as the
Daily Mail—which presented Franco as a patriot coming to Spain’s aid, or on the
Left which presented the Trotskyists as being saboteurs of the Republican cause. So
what would he feel about the status of his work, what would he feel about socialism,
were he to read the British media now?
A ROUGH GUIDE TO THE NEW BARCELONA 9
It is worth speculating that—given his apparently total disillusionment

with Stalinist-tainted communism before his death—he may have turned into one of
those who learnt to stop worrying and love capitalism. Once Barcelona was a capital
of European socialism, a microcosm of the great ideological battles of the first half
of the 20th century. Think again of the symbolic importance of the Republican
cause in the Civil War for the rest of Europe. But by the 1990s, the city had become
subject to what John Urry calls ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’, a move beyond mass
tourism which includes a ‘curiosity about all places, peoples and cultures and at least
a rudimentary ability to map such places and cultures historically, geographically
and anthropologically [along with] an openness to other peoples and cultures and a
willingness/ability to appreciate some elements of the language/culture of the place
that one is visiting’.3 Barcelona was now host to a whole generation of tourists and
visitors for whom the great choices of the first half of the 20th century were
increasingly irrelevant.
As such, the altruistic internationalism of the International Brigades has been
replaced by a more hedonistic attitude displayed by visitors to the city. Of course,
over the years Homage to Catalonia has provided a foundational text for anglophone
visitors to Barcelona. For the British, the city has taken a firm hold on the
imagination of Guardian readers, clubbers, foodies, and high-disposable-income
football followers. As a recent feature in the London-based Time Out listings
magazine began, ‘Leave the grey skies of London behind for the wild buzz of
Barcelona, where culture vultures swoop by day and party animals whoop it up at
night. Our guide steers you through this born-again city, from a ramble down the
Rambla to a gawp at Gaudí and the city’s high-design culture palaces and clubs’.4
This affinity with the city had been building up slowly over the years. But rather
than waning after the Olympics, its popularity seems to have increased. The arrival
of budget air travel—courtesy of the Easyjet line from Luton to Barcelona—sees an
extra 2000 people a week flying out to the city at peak times. And why? ‘We get off
on Barcelona’s ubiquitous sense of taste and design, Gaudí s freeform lunacy, the
carefully-cultivated hedonism, the 24-hour-a-day lifestyle free from drunken
oafishness (except our own)’, says a surprisingly reflective Guardian travel piece.5
And besides Mark Hughes, Steve Archibald, Terry Venables, Bobby Robson and
Gary Lineker—all maintaining British interest in the Bança team over the last few
years—the evocative blaugrana (blue and purple) striped shirts worn by Cruyff,
Maradona and Ronaldo have long kept the city’s name among Europe’s urban
footballing elite.
So the aesthetic cosmopolitans of the 1990s, Europe’s reasonably affluent, are
able to ‘wander as tourists—which is to say consumers of images—from one
historical culture to another, delightfully free from the need to commit themselves
to any, and free to criticise while determining for themselves the extent of their
responsibility’.6 Instead of idealistic commitment to political and humanistic
principle, they are able to use their knowledge and education to consume the
political heritage of places. And this political agenda has two dimensions: an openness
to the idea of a New Europe, and a fondness for the—often related— notions of
civilised life: café culture, modern art, long lunches, strolling. The European city.
This may help to explain the popularity of Barcelona with sections of British
society. For Blairites of all varieties, for urban designers, architects and journalists,
the city has provided a treasure-trove of warm Euro-urbanity. However, this only
serves to highlight the yawning gap between the political commitment in Homage to
Catalonia and the rather glib references to the city in Sunday supplements and
political soundbites. For Europe and place-identity are not the soft options they are
often made out to be by centre-left imagineers. Few would contest the suggestion
that European integration has had a profound impact on the political and economic
life of the continent. It is often argued that this process has at its core a logic of
deregulation and competitiveness, with its goal ‘the creation of a Greater Europe
that amounts to an enlarged zone of commodity exchange with no supranational
social regulation’.7 The essence of the Maastricht Treaty, the inter-governmental
agreement which planned closer economic integration, is to prioritise the control of
inflation over the reduction of unemployment. Worse still, the pursuit of
aesthetically pleasing environments is not necessarily an innocent process. The new
cityscapes may directly conceal a worsening in social polarisation and a de facto
reduction in democratic control over the city and its spaces as steps are taken to lure
in large corporations, or as councils are mortgaged with huge spending on arts and
museum budgets. As city governments have been forced to become more
competitive, so they struggle with their counterparts both far and near for a limited
amount of mobile capital. And when moderate socialists look elsewhere for
successful examples that they can copy, they look to Barcelona.
Barcelona retains a hold on the centre-left imagination precisely because it shows
the results of a re-invented municipal socialism, aware of globalisation, willing to
work in partnership with the private sector. But most of all the city is glamorous. In
contrast to the rather miserable affair of British municipal labourism, Barcelona’s
lifestyle and public spaces seem dynamic, exciting, infusing New Labour’s thinking
on cities. Its mayor, Pasqual Maragall, received ‘a hero’s welcome’ when he
addressed a high-profile Evening Standard-sponsored conference on the future of
London in 1996.8 For Tony Blair, ‘Mr Maragall’s work has shown what can be
achieved in reinventing a city’s identity through rebuilding and regenerating the
public sphere’.9 The Guardian has gone further: ‘brilliant Barcelona’, it enthused,
‘represents a virtuous circle, in which daring enterprise catches people’s
imagination, and the flowering of that imagination encourages even greater daring…
Why can’t we be more like the Barceloneses?’. This in the editorial column, entitled
‘Homage from Barcelona’, of course.10
Tony Blair’s New Labour would subsequently win the 1997 general election by a
landslide, and within a year Blair and family would holiday with the new Spanish
prime minister José Maria Aznar and his family, appearing with him in Hello! and
sharing mother-in-law jokes about his trip with Des O’Connor on prime time.
Little matter that Aznar’s Partido Popular is the inheritor of many of the social bases
which sustained Francoism. Now, I’m not going to say who the British PM can be
friends with, but isn’t this a little strange? Between 1936 and 1996, between the
arrival of the first and the second Blair in Spain, a lot has clearly happened to
political ideology.
The Spanish social democrats (the PSOE) have been similarly pragmatic. As
James Petras has argued, ‘[t]he Socialist party elite has followed a typical three-stage
pattern: early militancy involving popular mobilization, leading to election victories
and public office, followed by the conversion of public office into entrée into elite
circles, investments, and high incomes’.11 In order to cement this social transition,
the PSOE years were characterised by clientelism and spectacle, both designed to
ensure the party’s hegemony in Spanish society. Through a variety of mechanisms—
free holidays to pensioners, a tight control of the handing out of public jobs, and an
increase in the extent of the hitherto non-existent welfare state—the PSOE was able
to establish dominance within society And with 1992 being the magic year of the
Olympics, Madrid’s turn as European City of Culture, and—above all—the Seville
Expo, there was a lot of energy devoted to creating a New Spain built on the joint
values of economic internationalisation and fiesta. The PSOE years were
characterised by a period of ideological cooling, as the dictatorship was laid to rest with
the minimum of fuss and a collective amnesia with regard to the conflicts of the
recent past. And with a New Spain came a New Barcelona.
The birth of the New Barcelona
Over the centuries, the capture or the sacking of Barcelona was never halted
by the city walls. The city’s growth, however, was. While within the walls the
population density went on rising, making life intolerable, without lay open
fields and wasteland. In the evenings or on public holidays, people in
neighbouring villages would go up on the hilltops (today known as Putxet,
Gràcia, San José de la Montana etc.) and look down, sometimes with brass
telescopes, on the citizens of Barcelona milling to and fro, orderly and
punctilious, greeting one another, disappearing from sight in the maze of back
streets, only to meet again with more handshaking, further inquiries as to
their respective health and fortunes, and another round of leave-takings. The
villagers enjoyed the spectacle. Occasionally a simple rustic would attempt to
score a hit on a city dweller with a stone, though this was impossible, given
the distance, not to mention the walls.
(Eduardo Mendoza, City of Marvels)12
How cities change. Standing on Barcelona’s hills today—in the leafy park of Putxet,
the crisp promontory of Tibidabo, the lush Olympic magic mountain of Montjuïc,
or on the proletarian peaks of Carmel—you would today have considerably better
odds of hitting a resident with a random stone. All around you the city has grown
up. The medieval walls have gone, although the area they enclosed, the Ciutat
Vella, can still be made out, roofs jammed together around its narrow streets and
alleys, before being engulfed on three sides by the 19th century grid plan known as
the Eixample. From these hilltops you can guess the location of the old industrial
townships which the city ate up voraciously around the turn of the century, villages
which became colonised by the city’s main industries of textiles and, later,
engineering. Such districts—Sants, Sant Martí de Provençals, Gràcia, and Sant
Andreu—still retain the marks of the past. Industrial archaeologists must adore
Barcelona, its streets betraying traces of the old manufacturing landscape, brick
chimneys and dusty workshops still popping up unexpectedly down side-streets and
behind towering apartment blocks.
But the industry has gone now, migrating over its natural boundaries, its collar of
valleys and hills, and the two rivers that neatly bound it to north and south (the
Besòs and Llobregat). Beyond these natural limits lies a metropolitan area of 4
million people, vastly swollen in Spain ‘s economic boom of the 1960s, when car
ownership rose from 9 to 70 per 1000 people, and when TV ownership soared from
1% to a staggering 90% of the population.13 The medieval city had burst forth from
its army-imposed walls in 1854, opening the way for the urbanisation of the
Eixample: it would continue growing and eating land until all its floorspace was
exhausted. The visitor is unlikely to see much of the landscape of the periphery, save
on a trip to the airport. But should you wish to visit it, you would do well to take
Ignasi Riera’s Off Barcelona,14 a travel guide to those towns hidden from the eyes of
the tourist. He ventures into the submerged fabric of rural villages, the archaeology
of the early industrial revolution in Badalona and Cornellà, the coastal towns such
as Castelldefels, temporary home of one Ronaldo and once the projected site of a
Corbusieran garden city, and he describes the compulsory metropolitan experience
of visiting els hipers for a multi-pack of anchovy fillets. This world, criss-crossed by
motorways and railways, was created in the delayed arrival of Spanish industrial
modernity, housing the thousands of immigrants who came from Andalusia and
Extremadura to the big cities, Spanish-speaking ghettos where it was difficult to
become accustomed to the indigenous Catalan-speakers and the fact that ‘one did
not say “good morning” to people in the streets’.15 And it was here that many of the
most militant workers’ movements sprang up in the late 1960s and 1970s, in
Sabadell (still with a communist mayor) or Cornellà, lending it the nickname of the
city’s ‘red belt’.
It is these areas which question the assumption that Barcelona is a Catalan city,
and it is worth noting that some have seen Barcelona as a dilution of Catalan
identity (a key issue in the city’s electoral battles between social democrats and
nationalists). Barcelona remains a city with a high proportion of Castilian speakers,
the majority of whom came to the city in the 1950s and 1960s, many settling in the
peripheral towns and estates of the metropolitan area. Perhaps the most notable
attempt to recognise the struggles of this Castilian-speaking working class to gain
acceptance in Catalan society has come from Francese Candel, a novelist and
journalist from Zona Franca, whose book Els Altres Catalans (1963) brought to the
attention of a wide audience the problems of integration faced by many incomers.
In Santa Coloma de Gramenet they have a successful Feria de Abril modelled on the
Seville extravaganza, and when Real Betis—the most popular Seville team—play at
FC Barcelona’s Camp Nou, they are assured of significant support both in the
stadium and in the bars of the red belt. Porciolismo and the Castilian language, two
of the major cultural marks left by the dictatorship, now help to make up a
suburban culture a long way from the image of Barcelona as Catalan city, and bring
home the reality that Manuel from Fawlty Towers really was from ‘Bar-theh-lona’,
and not the Bar-sa-lona of Catalan pronunciation.
You may miss these areas if you are driving, entering Barcelona through one of its
numerous expressways. Searing in from the northeast is the Meridiana, from the
northwest the Diagonal, both of which slice through the city before intersecting at
Plaça de les Glories, an engineering merry-go-round which whirls cars off left, right
and centre to the city’s different barris. From the airport, the Gran Via speeds into
the city on a course parallel with the sea, passing within a block of Plaça de
Catalunya, before heading straight on out towards the Costa Brava. Alternatives
include the Ronda de Dalt and Ronda Litoral, which skirt the peripheries of the city
via the northern suburbs and the coast, respectively. As in most large cities, the
observant urban anthropologist will use such expressways to note down the fleeting
landscape of the metropolitan area, before being dropped into metaphorical
heartlands marked by medieval stones, art nouveau lamp-posts and prawn
restaurants. Edge-city connoisseurs worried about such cultural time-space
compression may be interested in taking the Gran Via from the airport, and could
note the case of Sant Cosme housing estate a mere AmEx card’s flick away, hidden
from the view of inflooding Olympic visitors by strategically placed M and M
billboards, echoes of Mussolini’s cardboard street-fronts, or they will marvel at
Bellvitge to their left, the high-rise housing that billboards cannot hide, plonked on
the periphery with the barest of services provided and the minimum of public space
provision.
This is the landscape of a city which, by the end of the 1960s, had thrown itself
into modernity with disastrous consequences. It was a raw, dusty modernity.
Labouring under a creaking, puzzled dictatorship, Barcelona was everywhere
touched by spreading power pylons, shambolic car-strewn no man’s lands, and
concrete fly-overs. In the heart of the old town, the tree-lined Rambla which runs
from the sea up to the expansive Plaça de Catalunya (site of El Corte Inglés, the
city’s major department store, hence landmark) still provided Barcelona’s citizenry
with one of Europe’s most beautiful boulevards. Towards the bottom of this lay the
seamy district of the Barrio Chino, a haven of petty crime specialising, as ever, in
drugs and cheap sex, all tucked into narrow, dingy streets—an illegal but tolerated
agglomeration economy which gathered in sailors, travellers and assorted locals. The
sea, the dirty Mediterranean, was visible only from a few, narrow points: near the
towering statue of Columbus at the foot of La Rambla, or from the arcadian heights
of Montjuïc. Elsewhere the docks and warehouses barred it off, with only the close
salty air giving a hint of its proximity.
From the 1980s, all this began to change. The end of dictatorship had brought a
democratic city council to power, which set about comprehensively replanning the
city. Progress was slow at first, and reflected the demands of the citizenry: new
public spaces in an overcrowded city. But suddenly there was a change in pace:
Barcelona was to bid for the 1992 Olympics. Even before the award was formally
made in 1986, the pavements were being thrown up and buildings demolished, as
preparations were made for the relaunch into European modernity. Under the
Barcelona Posa’t Guapa (Barcelona Make Yourself Beautiful) campaign, the council
encouraged business and property owners to invest in the cleaning of the tarnished
facades of many of the fine art nouveau (modernista) buildings clustered in the
Eixample, and the Gothic stone of the old city. The discovery of the work of Gaudí
by a mass international audience—the Japanese being particular devotees—helped
shift the image of the city significantly up-market. Here was the New Barcelona,
efficient, clean, cultured, the envy of city halls across the world.
But this is a rough guide, and the essence of such guides is to get away from the
tourist circuit, to get below the city’s skin. A reasonable start to any travelogue
would be to hear what the experts think, and I draw here from the 1994 edition of
Spain: the Rough Guide:
Barcelona, the self-confident and progressive capital of Catalunya, is a

tremendous place to be. A thriving port and the most prosperous commercial
centre in Spain, it has a sophistication and cultural dynamism way ahead of
the rest of the country…. Barcelona has long had the reputation of being the
most cosmopolitan city in Spain, especially in design and architecture… But
there are darker sides to this new-found prosperity and confidence. As more
money is poured into the sleek image, poorer areas are left behind. Indeed,
despite the post-Olympic sheen and the high-tech edge to much of the city
infrastructure, there is a great deal of poverty here and hard drugs are rapidly
acquiring a high profile.16
Such a discourse is interesting, coming as close as a tourist guide will come to

engaging with the politics of the city, and highlighting the dual city metaphor which
permeates many contemporary alternative travel guides (bibles of the aesthetic
cosmopolitans). In what follows, I want to extend the rough guide to a brief,
descriptive travelogue of the city’s electoral map.
An electoral map17
In the 1995 election, the most recent municipal election to be held in the city (at
the time of writing), the Catalan social democrats of the PSC were narrowly
victorious over the Catalan nationalist coalition, CiU. Some of the implications of
this will be discussed in later chapters, but in attempting to capture some of the
political geographies of Barcelona I want to provide a breakdown of the city’s
electoral map. In part, this is to reflect the social differentiation which exists within
the city, as well as providing a fairly coherent gazetteer of its districts. However,
recent work in geography has stressed that places are, above all, representations: an
Figure 1 Barcelona: an electoral map. Electoral districts: 1, Ciutat Vella; 2, Eixample; 3,

Sants-Montjuic; 4, Les Corts; 5, Sarrià-Sant Gervasi; 6, Gràcia; 7, HortaGuinardó; 8, Nou
Barris; 9, Sant Andreu; 10, Sant Martí. Major roads: A, Diagonal; B, Ronda Litoral; C, Gran
Via; D, Ronda Del Mig/General Mitre; E, Ronda de Dalt.
electoral map helps balance off those places rich in symbolic meaning (above all in
Barcelona’s old town) with those areas of the city that are less picturesque, but
certainly more important in terms of electoral power and, for example, tax revenues.
So in what follows I provide thumbnail sketches of the 10 electoral divisions which
constitute the contemporary city, beginning with the Ciutat Vella and running
roughly clockwise around the map shown in Figure 1.
Ciutat Vella
For many, this is the real Barcelona, the site of its historic institutions, much of its
radical history, its Gothic quarter, many of its restaurants and bars, the opera house,
the Rambla, the port…yet in electoral terms it counts for little, with turnout
regularly falling below 50%, and with an ageing and marginalised population. In
1995, the PSC was easily the most popular party with a 46.6% share of the vote on
a 48% turn-out. The Ciutat Vella is one of the most resonant landscapes for the
Marxist Left, and as I discuss it in some detail in the following chapter I limit
myself to a few introductory comments here. It is defined by La Rambla (often
referred to in the plural, either Las Ramblas (Castilian) or Les Rambles (Catalan)),
the gently wending promenade of strollers, probably the most socially
heterogeneous street in the city, and a veritable nightmare at peak strolling times for
getting from A (Plaça de Catalunya) to B (the sea-front), and back, at
anything more than a shuffle. Gridlock is assured by the presence of countless
obstacles, including newspaper kiosks, flower stalls, lamp-posts, cigarette vendors,
street cafés, battery-hen bird cages, human statues (Roman centurion, Elvis, Virgin
Mary [I presume], etc. etc.), Euro-trash jugglers and the dozens of plane trees that
give the street its beautifully shadowed ambience. It’s all so charming at first….
Eixample
There have been other New Barcelonas. The first was probably that constructed
from the 1860s, under Ildefons Cerdà’s Eixample (extension) plan, which stretched
out around the old city gobbling up the land available between the Ciutat Vella and
the towns and villages a couple of kilometres outside the city walls—the likes of
Sants, Poble Nou, Clot, Sant Martí. With urban expansion came a new social class,
effectively satirised in Eduardo Mendoza’s City of Marvels, whose picaresque anti-
hero, Onofre Bouvila, rises ruthlessly from penniless peasant to arriviste local worthy
on the back of the city’s expansion between the two world fairs of 1888 and 1929,
harnessing every technological breakthrough, picking up on every investment
opportunity. As a subtext to the city’s Olympic rebirth, the message was clear: the
city’s rentier and political class would stop at nothing in their drive to valorise and
revalorise Barcelona. The book appeared in Spain at the moment at which the
Olympics had been given the go-ahead, and the pace of reconstruction would
suddenly step up several gears. Little surprise that much was made in the local papers
about mayor Maragall’s city of marvels.
Cerdà’s Eixample plan—another early (utopian) socialist plan—was soon seized
upon by the type of speculator represented by Mendoza’s Onofre. The model of
Marx’s assertion that all capitalists must, by definition, have begun their primitive
accumulation through robbery, Bouvila starts by buying a tiny lot in a remote part
of the new Eixample grid, sucking in a naïve punter by starting a rumour that a
high-class confectioner would soon be moving its premises to the benighted spot,
thus valorising—through coca and tortell18—the surrounding property values
meaning that ‘the entire city was at last moving outward, for in late-nineteenth-
century Barcelona nothing had the distinction and respectability of a high-class
confectioners’. And so his accumulation continues, as the Eixample’s empty lots
begin to be filled in:
With his profit from this first sale he bought more lots in another place. ‘Let’s
see what he’ll do now,’ said the experts in that kind of business… The lots
were far from the city center—at what is now the corner of Rosellón and
Gerona streets. ‘Who would want to live there?’ people said. One day, several
carts appeared; sunlight gleaming on lengths of metal could be seen by the
masons working on the towers of the Sagrada Familia not far from there.
These were streetcar rails. A team of laborers began digging trenches in the
stony ground of Calle Rosellón…
‘This time it’s for real,’ people said. ‘This area is going places without
a doubt.’ Within three or four days Onofre was relieved of all his lots for the
price he chose to name…a few days later, the same workmen who began laying
the rails pulled them up, loaded them back on the carts, and took them
away.19
The property developer has never been popular among the city’s socialists, at least
not until the Olympics forced a change of mind. They speculate, they make money
from nothing, they accumulate, they disfigure the face of the city and ensure that
the best-laid plans of social housing go astray. For two of the sternest critics of the
city’s Olympic development—Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Eduardo Moreno
—‘Barcelona has always been in the hands of the Right’, rescued from the hands of
military and monarchy by a new, rapacious, commercial bourgeoisie.20
The Eixample today reflects the results of this, built up to its eyeballs, every plot
of land built upon up to eight storeys high, with illegally added attics and super-
attics, with sheds and workshops filling the spaces in the interior of the blocks. Its
streets are roaring canyons, its chamfered corners claimed by the car. Split into two
main sections—Esquerra de l’Eixample (the left-hand, westward section), and Dreta
de l’Eixample (right-hand, eastward)—this is firm CiU territory. Polling 39% in
1995 to the PSCs 29.8% and the PP’s 17.4%, the Eixample still remains a bit of a
social mix, with up to a third of its sizeable population (c. 290,000 in 1986) of
working class occupation or background. In particular, the extreme edges of the grid,
and the district of Sant Antoni which is squeezed between the Paral·lel and the
Ciutat Vella, remain less affluent, exacerbated by the abnormally high rate of
residents over the age of 65 (almost 20% in 1986). At its heart lies Passeig de Gràcia,
an elegant if somewhat dull boulevard of office blocks, banks and pavement cafés,
spiced up by some superb Gaudí and art nouveau town houses. To the east is the
icon of Barcelona, the unfinished cathedral of the Sagrada Familia, which takes up a
whole block to itself.
Sants-Montjuïc
A medley of urban uses, this is probably the most diverse district in the entire city.
Dominated by the Olympic hill of Montjuïc, a fertile area of cultural and sporting
attractions, this was once a major manufacturing zone in the city. Included within it
is the Zona Franca, the site of the SEAT car factory for several decades and also
home to much of its workforce, stacked up in apartment slabs which line the foot of
the westward slopes of the hill. To the immediate north—across the Gran Via,
which links the city centre with the airport—lie Badal and La Bordeta, both
working class districts riven by subterranean motorways and train lines. Continuing
north, Sants—almost a town in itself—is the principal service and commercial
centre, and houses the main railway station, with its associated hotels, car parks and
offices. Finally, the old anarchist neighbourhood of Poble Sec remains one of the
most atmospheric parts of the district. Climbing steeply up from the Paral·lel, it
terminates at the green Olympic skirt of Montjuïc, and retains a significant cluster of
restaurants and bars. The district, unsurprisingly, is strongly behind the PSC—40.
8% in 1995, with CiU second with 28.6%.
Les Corts
Les Corts consists of two districts: Les Corts itself—a high-rise middle class
neighbourhood dominated by the huge expanse of FC Barcelona’s football stadium
and associated facilities—and Pedralbes, the most exclusive of the city’s
neighbourhoods and characterised by its luxury flats and villas. The two areas are
divided by the upper reaches of the Diagonal, which is lined with the faculty
buildings of the Universitat de Barcelona and, towards the city centre, office blocks
and luxury hotels. The area is firmly behind the Catalan nationalists (37.44% in
1995), though both they and the PSC saw a sizeable increase in the PP share of the
vote.
Sarrià-Sant Gervasi
The heartland of the city’s upper-middle classes, this is the only electoral district
where the PSC fell into third place in the city, trailing behind both CiU and the PP
in the symbolic landscapes of la zona alta. Dominated by the Ronda de General
Mitre which sweeps through a landscape of higher-end apartments, in the home
district of Generalitat president Jordi Pujol CiU polled a fairly astonishing 53.6% in
the 1991 municipal elections, but lost ground to the PP in 1995 (still retaining a
convincing 44.64% of the votes in comparison with the conservatives’ 24.22%). Away
from the main thoroughfares, both Sarrià and Sant Gervasi retain aspects of their
semi-rural past, before the huge expansion of the post-war period.
Gràcia
Proudly Catalan, and recording the lowest PP vote in 1995 in the whole of the city
(13.69%), Gràcia is renowned for its distinctive bohemian atmosphere, in parts
feeling genuinely village-like with its secluded squares, aged general stores, and an
annual festa, generally recognised as the best in the city. Predominantly middle class,
the municipal division also includes the sharply sloping and more proletarian
Vallcarca, which backs up against Parc Güell. It would be enough for any city to
possess a Parc Güell alone. The winding paths, sculpted grottoes, and gingerbread
houses that dot the wooded slopes of the park transport you far from the traffic-
choked streets below. From its vantage point on one of the hills which mark the
beginning of the valleys that skirt the city, you can gaze out over Barcelona, over the
black gashes of two of the Eixample’s main thoroughfares, Montaner and Via
Augusta, over the squat green slopes of Montjuïc, taking in the towers that jut
across the skyscape—the Sagrada Familia, the three jabbing points of the chimneys
at the Sant Adrià power station, the office blocks which flag out the path of the
Diagonal as it cuts across the city, while on the horizon vou can see the dirty blue
wash of the Mediterranean. Here the cameras whirr and click, and packs of French,
Italian and Japanese tourists crunch the gravel paths with ambling locals. On a
crisp, sunny winter’s day the park alone is enough to justify one’s presence in the
city.
Back down below, Gràcia, with a population of 133,000 (1985), votes primarily
for CiU (38% in 1995) and PSC (32% in 1995). And, less surprising given the
extent of the graffiti on the walls and the somewhat anarchic music festivals
occasionally held in one or other of its small squares, the youth-leaning ERC polls
better here than in the rest of the city, its 7% of the share helping it achieve two
seats in the current council.
Horta-Guinardó
One of the most heterogeneous of the electoral divisions, this is an amalgamation of
several distinct barris. The most physically dramatic is Carmel, a hilltop district with
a large Andalusian population, marked by its striking green tower-blocks a mere
chipped-tile’s throw from Parc Güell. To the north lies Horta, one of the historic
villages of Barcelona which was transformed by the in-migration of the 1960s, yet
which still retains a lush, cobbled core set around the Plaça d’Eivissa. Adjacent and
slightly west sits the Vall d’Hebron, one of the four sub-sites of the 1992 Olympics
and which underwent a considerable amount of new apartment and hotel building
both before and after the Games. Finally, to the south, after sweeping down from the
heights of Carmel you reach the district of Guinardó, which takes in part of the
Eixample. This is where the city’s electoral map turns decisively red, the PSC
polling 43.06% in 1995, with CiU lying second (25.67%).
Nou Barris
The only electoral district where the PSC achieved over half the vote (51.28%) in
1995, the ‘nine districts’ is the most solidly working class, and Castilian-speaking,
part of the city, consisting of almost 200,000 inhabitants. The ex-communists, IC,
achieved their best vote in Barcelona in 1995 in Nou Barris (10%). In the 1950s
and 1960s, this was the principal area of low-cost speculative building within
Barcelona proper, with profitability prioritised over environmental quality, service
and infrastructure provision. When many of these structures were proved to be
substandard by the discovery of aluminosis (a disease caused by humidity which

affects cement, and exacerbated by the cheap building methods), it would be Nou
Barris that would be among the hardest hit, local authority teams suddenly appearing
to shore up living rooms with scaffolding. Sliced hither and thither by giant
expressways—the Meridiana and the Ronda de Dalt—the area has been home to one
of the most active protest movements in the city, which demanded that the latter
road be covered for up to 60% of its surface to reduce noise and pollution. It wasn’t
lost on those critical of the Olympics that Juan Antonio Samaranch—the president
of the international Olympic movement—had been the driving force behind the
construction of the most marginalised of these districts, Ciutat Meridiana. In 1984
the neighbourhood associations held protest meetings under the title ‘Nou Barris
enfront de [against] la Barcelona Olímpica’, a clear statement that these peripheral
districts would be unlikely to benefit from the 1992 party.21 In the city council’s
defence, much of their urban policy of the 1980s was directed towards improving
the quality of life of these districts, attempting to provide coherence and dignity
with new public spaces, services and artworks.
Sant Andreu
Sant Andreu was tragically put on the world stage on 19th June, 1987 when a bomb
planted by ETA in the Hipercor supermarket on the Meridiana took 20 lives.
Ironically, Sant Andreu was an anti-Francoist stronghold during the Civil War, and
formed an important focus of clandestine struggle in the years leading up to the
dismantling of the dictatorship. The district is composed of solidly working class
areas such as Bon Pastor and Trinitat Vella, lying to the east, with the old cores of
Sant Andreu and Sagrera again retaining their historic hearts and a greater social
mix. In 1995 the PSC polled 45.7% of the vote, with CiU second (25%). The
landscape of the area around the Meridiana is particularly interesting: huge
apartment slabs offer an impressive vista as one enters the city; behind, however,
there are stretches of small, two-storey housing, workshops, small shops and bars as
well as a number of urban parks, considerable evidence of the architect-led
municipal regeneration of the early 1980s. Santiago Calatrava’s road-bridge— a
striking, glistening white monument to the council’s commitment to sprucing up
the city’s periphery—lies in the unlikely setting of backwoods Sagrera; nearby is the
Parc de la Pegaso, former site of the eponymous lorry manufacturers, and a genuine
oasis for the residents of the surrounding high-rises; a few streets away sits the Plaça
Masadas, a pretty arcaded square which is not without a film-set unreality. Sant
Andreu is particularly renowned for its social heritage of industrial struggle. As well
as housing Pegaso, the district was dominated by La Maquinista engineering plant,
along with SEAT in Zona Franca one of the major sites of industrial unrest during
the early 1970s.
Sant Martí
And finally, the Catalan Manchester. The second most populous district after the
Eixample, the amalgamation of Sant Martí dels Provençals, the sea-front Poble
Nou, the old villages of Clot and Camp de l’Arpa, and the 1950s and 1960s
highrises of La Verneda, La Pau, and the Barris Besòs makes this a PSC heartland
(46% in 1995, though having lost 9 percentage points since the 1991 election; the
rising protest vote for IC and ERC, but most notably for the PP, is a worrying trend
for the social democrats). Of course, it now contains the high-income Olympic
Village, which might help explain much of the electoral erosion. Again, this is an
area of enormous significance in the creation of a Catalan working class, once
dominated by the many textile factories which gave the city its Mancunian
reputation. The regeneration of parts of Poble Nou which marked the run-up to the
1992 Games saw the formation of Barcelona’s most striking post-industrial
landscape, something not lost on those proud of its socialist heritage.
✤✤✤
This brief account of the city hopefully provides some idea of the landscape against
which the following tales are set. The important point is that the New Barcelona is,
still, controlled by a social democratic Left which has governed in partnership with
the ex-communists of IC, and the Left republican ERC. That this could be
potentially defeated by an emerging CiU-PP axis is apparent from the overall results
from 1995, when PSC+IC+ERC won 21 council seats, and CiU+PP accounted for
20. Control of the city is still on a knife-edge, and we await 1999 with interest.
In the meantime, the work has been done. The New Barcelona has been a
creation of the PSC, and particularly its long-serving ex-mayor Pasqual Maragall.
The city is now replete with public spaces and efficient infrastructures. But this is
not a balance-sheet of the PSC’s period in office. It is instead an enquiry into how
the New Barcelona has been constructed by a variety of figures from various Left
traditions, and as such is an attempt to chart how this has, in part, been a struggle
over particular versions of the city. It has a modest objective: to cast a little bit more
light on some of the dilemmas and tensions facing the Left as the metropolises they
once sought to control are changing before their eyes. And this in turn derives from
a dissatisfaction with the way the rhetoric of the New Barcelona has been swallowed
whole: just as previous generations of the Left would act as ‘tourists of the
revolution’, blindly lapping up a Soviet Union of caviar and model factories, so
their present-day contemporaries rush to embrace their 1990s equivalent—neo-
revisionist social democracy—without any historical awareness or critical ability.22
This has been epitomised by the repeated homages made to Barcelona, which have
lacked the willingness to identify very real areas where political identity has been
renegotiated. It is time to separate out some of these themes, some of these polarised
strands of socialist praxis, in an attempt to shed some light on the New Barcelona.
Notes
1 Orwell (1938/1989), pp. 2–3.

2 Orwell (1938/1989), p. 216.
3 Urry (1995), p. 167.
4 Nick Rider and Ethel Rimmer, ‘Homage to Catalonia’, Time Out 18–25 September
1996, pp. 28–35.
5 Rajan Datar, ‘Barca bravo’ [sic], Guardian 17 June 1997, G2, pp. 4–5.
6 Pocock (1997), p. 312.
7 Dunford and Kafkalas (1992), p. 4.
8 David Taylor, ‘Londoners call for new mayor to oil the wheels’, Architects’ Journal 25
April 1996, p. 19.
9 Cited in Elizabeth Nash, ‘A capital vision—from Spain’, Independent 29 October
1996, p. 14.
10 ‘Homage from Barcelona’, Guardian 6 July 1996, p. 28.
11 Petras (1993), pp. 95–6.
12 Mendoza (1990), pp. 174–5.
13 Carr and Fusi (1981).
14 Riera (1993).
15 Balfour (1989), p. 55.
16 Ellingham and Fisher (1994), p. 512.
17 Much of the data that follows were drawn from Huertas (1996). The electoral figures
are from La Vanguardia 18 May 1995, p. 35.
18 Such delicacies—a kind of mini-pizza, and a jam and cream-filled pastry, respectively—
appear in Catalan bakeries to celebrate particular religious festivals.
19 Mendoza (1990), pp. 201–2.
20 Moreno and Vázquez Montalbán (1991), chapter 2.
21 La Veu del Carrer 10–11, November-December 1992, p. 25.
22 Enzensberger (1976).
2
Red heritage: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán as
socialist flâneur
And the General gradually passed away, a hypodermic needle in every

vein, every heartbeat going through a tube leading to eternity. Day after
day, the city sounded out the medical reports and imagined the dictator
dissolving in blood and excrement, a blood-stained surrealist agony. For
months before Franco’s thrombophlebitis, bottles of champagne had
chilled in insurgents’ refrigerators, their turbid joy contained by the
dictator’s merely biological resistance. […] Until, finally, we found out
that the dictator was dead and throughout 20 November 1975, the city
filled with silent passers-by, walls reflected in their eyes, their throats
dried with prudent silence. Up the Rambla and down. As ever. […]
Above the skyline of the Collserola mountains, champagne corks soared
into the autumn twilight. But nobody heard a sound. Barcelona was,
after all, a city which had been taught good manners. Silent in both its
joy and its sadness.1
Who else has written of the death of Franco with such venomous enthusiasm?
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s ‘surrealist agony’, so closely entwined with his
memories of Barcelona on that day in 1975, is as good a demonstration as any of the
biting urban prose which has become his trademark. His own biography is etched
into the walls, hills and asphalt of the city; his identity is indelibly marked by a life
which began in 1939, the year in which Franco’s Nationalist forces entered
Barcelona over the cordon of hills which ring the city. The legacy is in his prose:
Vázquez Montalbán’s voluminous output stretches across bookshop shelves and
column inches—20+ detective novels, poetry, treatises on politics, sociology,
gastronomy, history, including his formidable ‘autobiography of General Franco’,
and an account of his native city—Barcelonas—of remarkable fluency and vivacity,
chronicles of a changing Spain, several published dialogues about the city’s urban
politics, along with regular political columns for El País and other dailies. He
watches, listens, writes. Cooks, eats and drinks. He is a flâneur, nose, memory. He is
(was) a communist—now, as he puts it himself, a Grouchoist Marxist. Vázquez
Montalbán—socialist botanist of the asphalt. In his works we can smell, see, taste the
city and follow his psychogeographical wanderings and mental maps. And he is very
24 RED HERITAGE
Plate 1 ‘Franco ha muerto’: The death of Franco on 20th November, 1975, left the citizens of
Barcelona unsure as to the future (a period captured in the novels of Manuel Vázquez
Montalbán). (Source: Arxiu Fotogràfic de l’Ajuntament de Barcelona; Pérez de Rozas)
necessary. While most of the city’s intellectuals have achieved respect for their work
in the clandestine opposition to the dictatorship, Vázquez Montalbán has gained his
through his critique of the new Spanish democracy. While the 1992 Olympics
focused eyes on a Barcelona, refashioned by the Catalanist social democrats of the
PSC, and grouchy foreign journalists looking for an angle were quick to pick up on
motifs of a dual city, he went deeper, far deeper, digging through his memories to
evoke a soft city with very hard edges. These recollections—from childhood, from
adolescence—would gather meaning through a life which included the standard
imprisonments and beatings handed out to left-wing radicals, followed by the
desencanto, disenchantment, of the reality of post-Francoist liberal democracy. By
1992 he had emerged as the city’s head cynic, as one of the few critical intellectuals
who remained untouched by the PSC’s patronage or duties of office.
Here, as well as in chapter 5 when I draw on his criticisms of property
development and planning more explicitly, I want to use him as a guide to what I
identified above as ‘red heritage’, the position of Marxist political identities in
decreasingly red cities. His melancholy bitterness at the way his city is changing
before his eyes, taunting him with memories, eluding his possession, gives his books
a depth of insight and a rare poignancy. And so I begin this chapter by discussing
Vázquez Montalbán as flâneur, after a fashion—a learned walker, who observes,
smells, views and breathes the city. Yet he is, unequivocally, a socialist flâneur. He is
invaluable to my attempt to demonstrate how the city is a constant presence in the
RED HERITAGE 25
realities of political life, and in turn how the flâneur’s city is structured by invisible—
or rather, partially glimpsed—forces. The Barcelona of Vázquez Montalbán is a
unique fusion of asphalt, fiction and reportage. Here, I identify three of the
Barcelonas which form such clear motifs in his work. There is his use of his
childhood neighbourhood—the Barrio Chino—as a canvas to illuminate the links
between poverty, history, geography and memory—a microcosm of his over-arching
political themes. Here, Barcelona is the defeated city of los rojos (the reds), the city
of three sins that supported the wrong side in the Civil War. Then there is the city
of transition, tracing how the Barcelona of buoyant Marxist-Leninist optimism at
the end of the 1960s became the city of desencanto, as Spanish communism and
socialism self-combusted and hope turned to disillusion. Finally, he has often made
reference to the city as theme park, the Olympic city of 1992 representing a
disorientation, a move from the sensual to the sanitised city. All of these cities are
rendered in a powerful register of noir.
Barcelona noir
As a means of representing cities, noir has become particularly relevant in recent
urban geographies. The most fascinating chapter in Mike Davis’s City of Quartz is a
reading of the history of Los Angeles as a ‘dialectic of sunshine and noir’, an
interplay of boosterism and dystopian critique. The recuperation of Walter
Benjamin in recent years has, similarly, equated the ruins of the Left with the
shadows of the city street, murked by historical trauma. And in the genre of noir, a
story-teller is required, prepared to head down the mean streets of the metropolis.
This figure, the detective, has a lot of similarities with the flâneur, as Benjamin
himself noted, the two sharing an interest in smells, sights, traces, hidden histories,
the ability to read society through a ‘physiognomy of the streets’.2 Furthermore, the
‘image and activity of flânerie is tied to the emergence of the popular genre of the
detective novel and also to the literary practice and social justification of the labour
time of journalists’.3 What do these roles all share? For David Frisby, ‘a form of
looking, observing (of people, social types, social contexts and constellations), a form
of reading the city and its population (its spatial images, its architecture, its human
configurations), and a form of reading written texts…’.4 Here the city conceals all
sorts of hidden stories, and it calls for a dedicated, politically aware urban
archaeologist to reveal them, and reconstruct them.
Vázquez Montalbán fits this tradition comfortably. In his detective novels he
brings in all sorts of picaresque characters from the city’s underworld: pimps,
prostitutes, hairdressers acting suspiciously, petty thieves and boot-blacks. And he
also works in characters from the city’s progre middle classes, educated, materially
comfortable lawyers, industrialists, property developers, bankers and university
lecturers. He weaves these figures into a landscape drawn deep from the special
insights of the flâneur, ‘associated with the dream world of the surrealist perspective
on the city—an intoxicated world, a particular form of remembrance or recall of the
past as an immediacy in the present’.5 This surrealist (or, occasionally, magic
26 RED HERITAGE
realist?) Barcelona is sometimes far-fetched, under-plotted, and very masculinist. Yet

as a means of going beyond the modes of representation of the history book and
newspapers, Vázquez Montalbán’s fiction has no peers in its ability to get beneath
the city’s grimy political skin.
The figure who bears the weight of this tradition is Pepe Carvalho, Galician,
lapsed Marxist, a private detective with no friends beyond his prostitute girlfriend
Charo, his foetal personal assistant Biscuter, and his boot-black mole Bromuro.
First appearing in a satire on the Kennedy conspiracy (To Maté a Kennedy/I killed
Kennedy) (1972) Carvalho would emerge as a fully-rounded character in Tatuaje
(1974), which also marked the introduction of Barcelona as an evocative milieu
drawn upon throughout the series. Vázquez Montalbán thus employed the detective
novel as a means of communicating to a wide audience, inspired explicitly by
Gramsci’s concern that intellectuals should use popular culture as a means of
challenging the cultural hegemony of the established order. More directly, it allowed
a certain amount of leeway in evading—at least in the earliest works—the
censorship of the dictatorship.6 Carvalho functions to give the author critical
distance from his commentaries, allowing him to play with ambiguity and
contradiction (the detective has all manner of quirks and traits which his creator
presumably does not share: emotional immaturity, political nihilism, sexual
brutality, a penchant for burning books…).
The lifting of censorship in the transition would allow him to embark upon a far
fuller critique of Barcelona and Spanish society than had previously been allowed to
him, and led him to reflect on just how the Carvalho detective novels could be used:
From Los Mares del Sur [Southern Seas, 1978]… I realised that it served for all
I had wanted to do: to write a type of factual chronicle in which was reflected
a bit of the transition, not just the Spanish one but the European one too. It
was the transition of a Marxist-capitalist optimism which ran up against the
oil crisis at the peak of the capitalist boom.7
With Carvalho novels appearing at an astounding rate—almost annually—they

constitute a kind of chronicle, as detective, novelist and city age together. Each novel
reflects some of the psychological preoccupations of the time, taking the
temperature of the city streets, the snatched political barbs, the hidden worlds of
political corruption, police brutality, the harshness of city life, the deceptions and
disappointments of the transition.
Vázquez Montalbán’s method of chronicling history and change is in itself
worthy of note. He is obsessed with the interplay between urban popular culture
and more distant narratives. He achieves this with remarkable aplomb in his urban
history Barcelonas, where he is as likely to render his argument through poetry or
song or rumour as through statistics or graven historical record. He sees turning
points in the city’s pathways in the most unlikely sources; he describes the
historically crucial co-operation between the US and the dictatorship in the 1950s not
through an account of the diplomacy involved, but in the rather more uncouth
RED HERITAGE 27
arrival of the US marines in the 1950s ‘mingling with the whores in El Cosmos and
El Venezuela and the motley crowds of lumpens in El Cádiz, El Gambrinus and
Jazz Colón…horny, pallid adolescents who had entered the city’s history for their
piss-ups and their whore jokes’. The gradual, inevitable breaching of the regime’s
cultural defences is marked by the visit of the Beatles to the Monumental bull-ring
‘despite official misgivings about long hair, even the freshly washed fringes of the
Beatles who never showed an armpit or an arse like Mick Jagger’, and the
transvestites who ‘appear on Barcelona’s streets like snails, when historical
downpours abate’.8 This attention to popular culture is similarly repeated in the
detective novels, Carvalho’s investigations progressing through the—sometimes
unlikely—insights generated by gathering fragments of memory, jogged by song,
street or recipe.
Crónica Sentimental de la Transición (1985) reflects this method even more
directly, being a detailed account of the long transition running from the dying days
of dictatorship of the early 1970s, through to the accession of Spain to the European
Community in the mid-1980s.9 Within its 31 chapters, the world is recounted from
the vantage point of Barcelona in a way which disrupts the spatial neatness of
conventional political commentaries. Here Franco rubs shoulders with Faye
Dunaway, olive oil scandals sit by a growing Americanisation of Spanish life, and
the signing of Johan Cruyff by FC Barcelona stands, for the author, as the most
significant emotional-political event of the early 1970s. Crónica is a witness to the
path of Spain and Barcelona’s transition from optimism to desencanto, a diary of
historical mayhem: ETA and GRAPO terrorists mingle with the rise and fall of
Suárez and the UCD to a changing Abba soundtrack (Waterloo during the last days
of Franco, Chiquitita. backing the longest night of the 23-F of 1981), the shadow of
Reagan and Thatcher grows against the PSOE landslide, the canonisation of Felipe
González, and the return of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain.10
This attention to popular culture is thus a feature of Vázquez Montalbán’s works,
carried over into his poetry, collage-like pieces similar to the techniques he uses in
his fiction. The frequency with which such cultural insights appear makes his fiction
fascinating, but they occasionally jar too:
The chronicler and the poet, if not interchangeable, share the stamping
ground of media images and mass urban culture, like gumshoe detectives
gathering scraps and shreds of evidence from the wind-blown streets; their
testimonies are constructed with ephemeral materials, recovered in the texts
with a nostalgic insouciance which sometimes appears mannered.11
The concoction of songs, signs, landscapes and memories has strong echoes with the
work of Walter Benjamin—the landscape as a trigger for memory, the obsession
with tracing the workings of capitalism in an everyday register.12 There is similarity
too in the power with which he utilises autobiography: Vázquez Montalbán draws
heavily on his life experiences in his reportage and his Carvalho novels—a poverty-
stricken childhood in the Barrio Chino, his time as a communist activist, his own
28 RED HERITAGE
escape into fine food and wine, his cultured readings of the city street.13 So, we have
the detective, we have the flâneur, we have the social historian and we have
Gramsci.
The relationship between Carvalho and Vázquez Montalbán is intriguing. Both
are children of immigrants from elsewhere in Spain, Vázquez Montalbán’s father
and Carvalho’s parents being Galician. Both are obsessive gourmands. A prevalent
feature of the Carvalho novels is a digression into the preparation, cooking and
eating of food, and a frequent recourse to alcohol, a nod to the Sauternes here, a
glass of orujo there.14 Both live in Vallvidrera, the hilltop village which sits directly
above the city, from which one can see it spread out below. Both have suffered
under the Francoist regime. And many of the preoccupations of Carvalho emerge
from his author’s own desire to produce fiction which is also social commentary —
whether on football, the decline of Spanish communism, or the property speculation
which shapes and reshapes Barcelona. Many of the observations contained in
Barcelonas or Crónica Sentimental de la Transición reappear in the novels, adding to
the sense of time and place in Carvalho’s interpretation of Barcelona. Vázquez
Montalbán includes within his fictional works a political critique of actual figures
from local elites—Olympic president Samaranch, or Bança president Núñez, or
Catalan business magnate Carles Ferrer Salat—who all usually appear as hybrid
characters in the novels.15
It is this latter issue—the relationship of author and fictional subject to Barcelona
—which I want to explore briefly here. Inseparable from this is a concern with
memory, and the status of memory in everyday life. On a personal level, Vázquez
Montalbán’s childhood in the Barrio Chino, his awareness of having gone from an
underprivileged background to being an internationally renowned literary figure, his
political activism (including time in prison for clandestine opposition to Francoism)
have been intimately related to the subject matter of his writing. In particular, the
bitter experiences of poverty and repression under the dictatorship and the
experience of the negotiated democracy create a tension which continually emerges
in his work.
This is where the soft city of the fiction feeds from the hard memories of the
author. The shudder of fear every time Carvalho enters or passes a police station is
in no way vicarious. Vázquez Montalbán recounts one of his own detentions after a
1962 mani (demonstration) in support of the Asturian miners:
Los grises [the grey-coated police] detained me and gave me a brutal beating in
the middle of the university. I arrived semi-conscious at the Via Laietana
[location of the police headquarters] and there Vicente Creix received me with
a punch in the stomach, in the presence of my wife, who had already been
detained.16
Unsurprisingly, sadistic figures such as Creix, responsible for persecuting students

and Catalanists during the later years of the dictatorship, would reappear in the
novels, this time working in the service of the newly democratic state—another
RED HERITAGE 29
vestige of the desencanto which he expressed so well. And the detentions of Vázquez
Montalbán and his wife—without knowing what punishments were being meted
out to each other—were psychological tortures which would breed an almost visceral
hatred for the Francoist establishment. His detention in 1962 saw him imprisoned
in the inland Catalan town of Lleida, which he describes as a ‘university-prison’, a
period during which he was able to read and discuss politics and philosophy for 18
hours a day with militants of a similar level of education, and on his release in 1963
—amnestied on the death of Pope John XXIII—he was able to pursue journalism
and return to his militancy in the PSUC, the Catalan communists. He would finally
resign from his executive positions in the party at the beginning of the 1980s,
disillusioned with the day-to-day politicking: ‘After my direct experience as member
of the Central Committee and the Executive I realised I would end up with cancer
of the arse from having attended so many meetings’.17 It is tempting to think of
Carvalho’s nihilistic philosophy (his status as lapsed Marxist is a recurring feature of
the books) and retreat into gastronomy as being an expression of his creator’s
disillusionment with conventional Marxism.
This is of importance when one considers that perhaps the most persistent theme
in the novels is the issue of memory, its relationship to self-identity, and the
importance of place and landscape to both. As Caragh Wells has argued, ‘the
topography of the city contains the topography of Carvalho’s identity. The streets,
squares and buildings which surround Carvalho act as secure referents in his
conception of who he is. For the detective, Barcelona is full of memory spaces, in
which he can identify the scattered pieces of his past.’18 Wells notes that as the series
continues, Vázquez Montalbán pays increasing attention to the relationship between
the city and the detective, particularly as the latter ages and enters a mid-life crisis. As
Carvalho seeks to solve his cases, he moves simultaneously through the past and
through the contemporary Barcelona cityscape—reminiscing as he goes—gathering
clues. Yet as the series progresses, Carvalho’s bullish self-confidence evaporates as he
is unable to make sense of the rapidly changing Olympic city. As he walks through
the Chino, as he walks through Poble Nou, he is accosted by the sight of bulldozers
and industrial debris. And so with Vázquez Montalbán: the rehabilitation of the old
city—the widespread demolitions, the rebuilding, and the changing profile of its
inhabitants—makes it difficult for him to orient himself in the city:
What surprises me most of the latest changes that Barcelona has gone through
is that where before there were prostitutes now you find the Universidad
Pompeu Fabra…it’s one thing not to be nostalgic, you can’t glorify houses
without electricity, without running water, but you’re dealing with the
landscape of your childhood. If I now had to explain to you where I went to
the cinema when I was a child…well there is no cinema left. It’s all been
destroyed. I’m not complaining. I’m just stating a fact.19
30 RED HERITAGE
His identification with the district was political, rooted in his upbringing in the
aftermath of the Civil War, and its destruction consequently involves an erosion of
the political, and personal, relationship to place.
So, what I want to demonstrate through the works of Vázquez Montalbán is the
importance of the city to political identity, and how urban restructuring is affecting
long-held Marxist or socialist identities. In particular, his fiction and reportage
provide an unparalleled reading of how the new city, the (liberal) democratic city, was
and is felt psychologically, mapped in a kind of psychogeography, and how it
remains rooted in the memories of many of its citizens. These are political tales, and
we can now flesh them out a bit more.
The Barrio Chino and the triumph of the middle classes
The Spanish transition from the dictatorship to democracy was an

agreement between executioner and victim and the first thing the
executioner demanded of its victim was a loss of memory. In the long
run the final result of the civil war has been a triumph of the moderate
middle classes. The social classes that were beaten in the civil war have
been forgotten or defeated for good.20
Throughout the Carvalho novels, and in a good part of his Barcelonas, Vázquez
Montalbán pays homage to certain parts of the city which are dear to his heart. As we
shall see, districts such as Poble Nou and Montjuïc form important memoryscapes
in both his fiction and his autobiography. But it is the Barrio Chino and the Raval
that he revisits with the most poignancy. This is the district of his childhood, ‘that
museum of workers and riff-raff, history and poverty, nobility and savagery’21 which
has played such an important part in the city’s political history and in the author’s
own personal development.
The Chino is an almost constant presence in the work of Vázquez Montalbán. It
is the primary location of his Carvalho novels, leading the detective through
brothels and bars in search of clues, to restaurants in search of deliverance.
Carvalho’s office is located in the heart of the district, from where he can look out
of the window onto the Rambla, his thoughts intertwined with the flow of citizens
in the street below. Here the Chino seems to act as a kind of reaffirmation of
popular life in the city, a society reviled by many of the city’s wealthier residents,
and under threat from the growing Calvinism and hygienisation which Vázquez
Montalbán detects in Barcelona society. But the district also reflects the disappearance
of this culture, the destruction of his memories. This is part of the on-going process
of forgetting which he sees as being pervasive in contemporary Spanish society. In
one of his major Chino novels, El Delantero centro fue asesinado al atardecer (Off
Side) (1988), the boot-black Bromide, one of Carvalho’s long-standing informants,
laments his declining ability to take the pulse of the district, seeing this as a clearly
political trend:
RED HERITAGE 31
I don’t know what’s happening in the world, Pepiño. People have lost the
ability to remember, and it’s as if they don’t want to be reminded of things.
As if there’s no point in remembering. No point? If you take away my memories,
what’s left of me? As far as I’m concerned this is all a conspiracy of those
bloody socialists. They want everyone to think that everything started with
them. But they’re just like all the rest.22
In the remainder of this chapter I want to pursue these themes a little further: the
post-Civil War relationship of the district with the rest of the city, as a counterpole
to the wealthy areas of the upper town, la zona alta.
The Raval is hemmed between the major thoroughfares of the Paral.lel and the
Rambla, with much of its activity occurring on the Carrer Hospital and Carrer Nou
de la Rambla. The Chino forms a sub-section of the district, squeezed between the
port and Carrer Hospital, with its seedy ambience—generally of crime and poverty
—spilling across the Rambla and into the narrow streets around Plaça Reial and
Carrer Escudellers. Long a centre for popular entertainment, the district is also
indissociable from an image of crime and prostitution, since the 1960s harbouring
much of Barcelona’s drug distribution industries. As a centre for the informal
economy, for hawkers, boot-blacks, black marketeers as well as a dense
neighbourhood supporting all manner of local services, and for a long period the
home of theatres and cabarets, the Chino provides a noir landscape that Raymond
Chandler would have salivated over. With its proximity to the port, the Chino has
always been home to a medley of urban ‘others’, a district off-limits to those citizens
of more prosperous neighbourhoods wary of its tight streets, dark alleys, and
unknown inhabitants. Yet from its heyday in the good-time years before the
dictatorship, it has slipped from being genuinely popular to being definitely seedy.
Paco Villar’s history of the district documents its attractiveness for all sorts of
alternative pleasure-seekers. The ‘Chino’ soubriquet was coined in the mid-1920s —
invented by a journalist impressed with the earthy vibrancy of its bars, theatres,
brothels and cabarets, which reminded him of the Chinatowns of North American
cities—and it soon stuck.23 Bars such as the Marsella or the Pastís would attract
motley collections of radicals, workers, and writers (most famously Jean Genet) and
artists, the latter adoring the transcendental haze endowed by absinthe, an aniseed
and wormwood concoction which induced the imbiber to unrivalled creative
heights. In the 1960s, Plaça Reial became ‘Barcelona’s Greenwich Village:
existentialism, the “beat generation”, and jazz would seek refuge in its ancient
cellars’.24 Moroccan hachís was always easy to come by: today it retains its reputation
as a centre for trafficking in soft drugs.
Growing through the city’s industrial revolution in the mid-19th century, it has
remained a densely populated proletarian district, once a breeding ground for
radical working class movements. The cobbled streets of the old town were regularly
torn up to form barricades against the police and army and through the Setmana
Tràgica of 1909 to the revolution of 1936–9, the Raval formed a focus for the city’s
red myth, the ‘rose of fire’. It was here—along with the city’s other industrial
32 RED HERITAGE
Figure 2 Map of Ciutat Vella/old city. 1, Plaça Sant Jaume; 2, Plaça Reial; 3, Liceu (Opera
House); 4, MACBA/Casa de la Caritat; 5, Maremagnum; 6, Moll de la Fusta; 7, Carrer
Escudellers; 8, World Trade Center.
districts—that political unrest tended to ignite. A centre of anarchism, communism

and republicanism—adding to Barcelona’s reputation as ‘the city of three sins’—the
district’s radical profile meant that after 1939 it received the worst of the repression
from the invading Nationalist troops. Extreme shortages throughout the city led to
rationing, which in turn created a flourishing black market. Lack of machinery
energy and food left the district in dire poverty, with widespread tuberculosis
epidemics, homelessness, child prostitution, and an array of decrepit buildings of
RED HERITAGE 33
the most basic standard (many damaged during the bombardment of the port in the
Civil War). While the arrival of the sixth fleet of the US Navy in 1951 filled the
streets and brothels with marines, and signified a slight opening of the regime to the
outside world, life remained hard. Those who could get out—Vázquez Montalbán a
rare example—did so, discovering the world outside the Raval.
By the mid-1970s, the district was in a state of terminal decline. Hard drugs,
prostitution, organised crime and appalling housing conditions were the reality
behind the bohemian reputation. While it still housed some of the city’s best-known
restaurants such as Casa Leopoldo or Los Caracoles, the streets of the Chino, the
lower part of the Rambla, Plaça Reial and the area around Carrer Escudellers
became transformed by the arrival of heroin. Between 1983 and 1989 almost 350
people died in the Barcelona province from overdoses, and first hepatitis, then AIDS
would become a constant danger for addicts sharing needles. This was accompanied
by a rise in criminality: desperate ionquis (junkies) mugged to support their habit,
Plaça Reial became a theatre for knife-fights and running battles between rival drug
gangs, and it was common to see tourists being driven round the square in a police
car in the hope of reclaiming lost watches, bags and wallets. The foot of the Rambla
was no place for the unwary visitor as groups of transvestites, card sharps, quick-
tongued confidence tricksters, and straightforward muggers patrolled the area. The
effects on the neighbourhood were obvious: metal shutters on shop windows,
boarding houses offering beds by the hour, ‘to let’ signs appearing on property. A
couple of bloody murders of innocent passers-by prompted outrage from residents:
the legend of the Chino was nearing its end.25
And this has formed the backdrop for the Carvalho series. For Vázquez
Montalbán, the very desperation and seediness provide a lurid canvas for his
narrative. Yet the Raval is a district conveyed with affection, with considerable
sympathy:
A drunk is calculating the shortest distance between the roadway and the
pavement. Schoolchildren are returning from some mezzanine school where
the toilets perfume the whole environment and the children’s horizons begin
and end with an internal patio divided between the section for the dustbins, a
playground for rats and cats, and a number of inside passageways where the
washing lines seem to be perennially fall. Pots of geraniums on rickety
balconies; the occasional carnation; cages containing thin, nervous
budgerigars; and butane gas bottles. Notices advertising the services of
midwives and chiropodists. An office of the leftwing PSUC. Maite’s
hairdresser’s. A vile smell of frying oil: squid a la romana, fried seafood, spicy
potatoes, roast lambs’ heads, sweetbreads, tripe, rabbit thighs, watery eyes and
varicose veins. But Carvalho knew these people and their ways. They made
him feel alive, and he wouldn’t have changed them for the world, even though
at night he preferred to flee the defeated city and make for the pinewood
heights. There was nothing to beat the backstreets and alleyways that gave
34 RED HERITAGE
onto the Ramblas—tributaries feeding into a river which carries the biology
and the history of a city, of the entire world.26
It is reminiscent of Benjamin in Marseilles: ‘Every step stirs a song, a quarrel, a

flapping of wet linen, a rattling of boards, a baby’s bawling, a clatter of buckets’.27 Yet
it induces schizophrenia—a fondness and a desire to flee—which Vázquez
Montalbán has had to struggle with. Escaping to university becoming one of Spain’s
leading—and most commercial—novelists, cannot rid his head of the memories of
that childhood.
For residents of the Chino, the geographical divide of the city was always very
explicit. In the 1940s, when they bore the pain of having lost family members either
in the Civil War or in the post-war reprisals, they also had to contend with the
systematic bullying of the police, the tuberculosis epidemics and the grinding
poverty. Meanwhile, Vázquez Montalbán recounts, the richer districts of the city
turned Francoist out of opportunism. The city ‘survived and pretended not to hear
the firing squads shooting, not to notice the queues outside the Model prison, or the
systematic destruction of its own identity’.28 In the Raval, it was less easy to forget
the petty brutality of poverty:
Sometimes he [Carvalho] began to doubt the reality of his neighbourhood.

Looking back, he remembered it as a city that was poor and sunk in a kind of
bitter-sweet syrup. People who were defeated and humiliated, forever having
to apologise for having been born.29
The contrast with the richer districts—the Eixample, Sant Gervasi, Sarrià—was
striking, and Vázquez Montalbán has written about discovering the other world of
his university classmates, the world ‘on the other side of the Gran Via’ of the
Eixample, with its maids and sophisticated domestic routine, portraying it as a
journey to foreign lands.30 This tension between the cramped, dingy streets of the
Ciutat Vella and the otherworldly dwellings of the zona alta often appears in
Carvalho’s novels, Barcelona as a dual city.
Vázquez Montalbán reflects upon this most explicitly in his novel Southern Seas.
Here, Carvalho is on the trail of a missing businessman—a classic example of the
Barcelona^r0/jT£, a wealthy liberal—who seeks to discover life in the outlying
suburbs which he himself had been responsible for constructing. Based on an
amalgamation of existing Barcelona peripheral estates, La Pau and Bellvitge,31
Carvalho himself analyses the difference between his own world and that ‘where the
city loses its name’:32
The ugly poverty of the Barrio Chino had a patina of history. It was
completely different from the ugly, prefabricated poverty of a neighbourhood
prefabricated by prefabricated speculators. It’s better for poverty to be sordid
rather than mediocre, he thought. In San Magín, there were no drunks piled
in doorways, absorbing what little heat they could from those appalling
RED HERITAGE 35
stairwells. But this was not progress—quite the contrary. The inhabitants of
San Magín could not destroy themselves until they had paid all the bills
outstanding for the little corner they occupied in the ‘New Town for a New
Life’.33
Carvalho’s musings on the difference between the two areas perhaps reflect the
uneasy tension in Vázquez Montalbán’s work about exploiting the district as a noir
landscape, vicariously savouring the desperate lives of many of its residents.
However, as I shall show in chapter 5, one of his principal concerns has been the
lack of democratic control which local people have had on the planning process.
The extension to the Liceu opera house on the Rambla—to give but one example —
involved the compulsory purchase of several adjoining old apartment blocks, and
signified the local state’s attempt to regain control of the streets of the old city.
Attempts by the council and police to ‘zone out’ crime have added weight to
Vázquez Montalbán’s argument that the authorities are undertaking a
straightforward act of colonisation. The impetus was given by a sudden explosion of
urban unrest on 22nd February, 1988. Over the previous weekend, five people had
died through heroin overdoses, including two brothers of an important gypsy family.
At 7.45pm on the night in question, the streets around Plaça Reial, Carrer Avinyó,
Carrer Robador and Carrer Sant Ramon were turned into battlegrounds as large
groups of armed gitanos sought revenge on the black Africans suspected of supplying
the heroin, reputedly pursuing and beating any black people they found carrying
drugs. The police quickly restored order, making 50 arrests, and calling for
immigrant dealers to be deported. This triggered Operación Sant Ramon, a joint
attempt by police and city council to try to crack the drug trade, and to introduce a
mix of social classes and uses to the impoverished district. Their initial objective was
to wipe off the map the so-called ‘black island’, a block formed by the notoriously
heavy streets of Sant Ramon, Barberà, Sant Oleguer and Nou de la Rambla, an
objective achieved within six months through a combination of a permanent police
presence and round-ups, municipal regulation of the ‘boarding-houses’, and the
bulldozer. To reclaim the area for the forces of law and order, a police station was
built at the end of Nou de la Rambla.34
This was only the first step in the Ajuntament’s regeneration strategy.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the bulldozer and the crane have been
permanent features of the Raval’s landscape as the council pursues its philosophy of
esponjament, the selective demolition and rebuilding of the neighbourhood, opening
public spaces (see chapter 6) and providing social services such as sports centres and
social housing.35 The policy of the council was to try to rehouse in the same area
those affected by compulsory purchase. Public and semi-private bodies were also
encouraged to locate, and the district became dotted by university faculties,
particularly those of the recently founded Pompeu Fabra. In the northern half of the
Raval, the council created a culture quarter based around the MACBA (a new
modern art gallery) and a contemporary culture centre. Finally the Liceu opera
house—which had burnt down in a fire in 1993—was extended and is due to be re-
36 RED HERITAGE
opened before the end of the decade. Gradually the Raval has been gentrified and
redeveloped, and its identity in relation to the rest of the city will change.
So in the 1990s, the rehabilitation of the Chino and Raval puts Vázquez
Montalbán in an invidious position. On one hand, he sees the destruction of the
landscape of his childhood, a landscape of great importance to his sense of identity.
Yet he is aware that he himself has moved on, and is aware also of the difficulty of
defending the slum conditions which remain in the Chino. Asked if there is any
solution to the Raval’s problem apart from the wrecking ball and bulldozer, he
answers:
I don’t have any feelings of nostalgia for saving the degraded physiognomy of
the Raval, even though I have occasionally written ironically and irrationally
that they are taking away my city. I don’t have nostalgia that these streets are
disappearing, since you can’t live in them. But it worries me that behind this
sanitising effect on the Raval and old Barcelona there is a speculation aimed at
expelling the indians towards a new reservation on the city’s periphery.36
In other words, while the council has attempted to retain social housing, there will
be a gradual gentrification of the district. And this is often masked by a rhetoric of
sanitisation, of social improvement common to slum clearance projects the world
over, which has been a recurrent theme in the city’s planning history. The Eixample
grid was initially conceived of as a socialist project (before being sabotaged by
speculators), a means of defumigating the cramped old city. So too with the Via
Laietana—which was carved through a broad swathe of the medieval city in the first
decade of the 20th century—as Vázquez Montalbán comments:
The promoters of the operation justified it on hygienistic grounds, that they

should open spaces up to allow the air to circulate and purify the city’…but it
also had an ideological dimension,…of revalorising degraded spaces, by which
—making new streets and buildings—the type of population that was there
could be changed.37
So the progre belief in sanitisation often went hand in hand with speculation. In the
New Barcelona, the old town would be subject to the same processes as those of
times past. The Chino, as with the poor districts on the urban periphery, has always
been a geographical zone of the dispossessed, be they poor immigrants from other
parts of Spain or further afield. It is the residents of the richer areas of the city who
have won the Civil War, and they will inherit as reward the old city of the New
Barcelona.
This attempt to win back the city for the middle classes—replacing brothels with
art galleries and drug dens with university departments—has been satirised by
journalist Maruja Torres, another literary product of the Raval:
RED HERITAGE 37
The old city wouldn’t be a problem if it was on the periphery. The awful
thing about this district is that it’s in the centre, next to the architectural
jewels of other times. To make matters worse, several [civic] institutions are
embedded here, like the Palau de la Generalitat and the Ajuntament and the
Liceu [opera house]. And, you just have to put up with it, the Mediterranean
is here too, though how convenient it would be if it found itself between the
tennis courts of La Bonanova or the mansions of Pedralbes.38
And so disappears the world of Carvalho. The Chino is a metonym for the loss of
memory in the new city, the personal feelings of alienation he experiences, and a
certain bitterness that the victims of the Civil War, those who have long struggled
against Spanish conservatism, are now suffering from being left out of the social
truce of the transition. It is this truce, and the capitulation of the Left, that Vázquez
Montalbán describes in the city of his desencanto.
‘From the long march to the marathon’
Anyone who has not lived through a period which presages the fall of
Fascism, who has not breathed in the bittersweet atmosphere of a dictatorship
in decay, will never really know the true meaning of democracy… Maoist
columnists wrote for apparently right-wing newspapers and industrialists
offered to hold PSUC meetings in their mansions. Appeals on behalf of the
Red Cross, the Chinese, TB or cancer sufferers, or the construction of the
Sagrada Familia found to their cost that charity began at work where the trade
union Comissions Obreres was running lucrative appeals for Franco’s
prisoners.39
In the early 1970s, you could feel democracy in the air. The transition is commonly
said to have started before Franco had passed away: in that teleological smugness
that only Marxists qua religious fundamentalists can maintain, the end of
dictatorship was only a matter of time. This was not the dog-end of the 1960s, as in
much of Western Europe: love and patchouli still floated in the Barcelona air, social
freedoms were still to be won, sexuality flaunted. The proletarian revolution would
remain a long way off, however. Despite the waves of industrial action which
continuously paralysed the city’s factories, the melting Spanish hegemonic bloc would
soon re-solidify. For historian Paul Preston, this was a mere re-alignment of social
groups:
The forces which united in 1936 to save themselves were to split in 1976 in
order to save themselves yet again, albeit this time with an accommodation
to, rather than the destruction of, the forces of democracy. In death, as in
birth, the legacy of Francoism was political opportunism.40
38 RED HERITAGE
But in the heat of the transition, with the PCE and the PSUC in near total control
of the workplaces and the citizens’ movements mobilising thousands in cities across
Spain, the future stretched ahead, open. People spoke of la ruptura, democrática; the
establishment of popular democracy, the Eurocommunist political strategy which
was championed by the Italian, French and Spanish communists, by Berlinguer,
Marchais and Carrillo.
This was the transition. Dates vary, but Vázquez Montalbán’s account in Crónica
begins with the ETA assassination of Carrero Blanco in 1973, and ends in 1982
with the victory of the PSOE and the subsequent Spanish arrival in Europe and
NATO. This was the closure of a historical window which had promised so much,
but which had ended in desencanto, as capitalism emerged strengthened from the
straitjacket of the dictatorship. Barcelona was a capital of unrest in the early 1970s,
the anger of its citizens fuelled by any number of provocations as an increasingly
rudderless state panicked itself into brutality—the garroting of the young anarchist
Puig Antich in the Eixample’s Model prison; the fatal police shootings of striking
workers: Antonio Ruiz Villalba at the SEAT car factory work-in and Manuel
Fernández Márquez at the Sant Adrià power station. These years of constant
mobilisation kept the PSUC and the trade union Comissions Obreres in the
vanguard of change.41
What interests us here is how such a substantial proportion of the Left should
have repositioned themselves throughout the historic process, moving from the
‘long march’ Maoism of the most extreme revolutionary cells, to the planning and
organisation of the 1992 Olympics. Vázquez Montalbán is clear in his target: he
looks to Madrid and the fatal capitulation of Carrillo’s PCE, whose Eurocommunist
strategy of rejecting the Soviet road to socialism was replaced by one of loyalty to
parliamentary democracy. Optimism was high: in 1976 the Italian communist party
was at the peak of its popularity. Carrillo tried to capitalise on this by inviting
French communist leader Georges Marchais and Enrico Belinguer to a
Eurocommunist summit in the Spanish capital. The international coverage of this
‘Madrid Spring’, combined with the powerful grassroots and electoral base of the
communists, encouraged the new Spanish prime minister Adolfo Suárez to legalise
the PCE in 1977, to the revulsion of Francoist hard-liners in the government and
army.42 The hopes of the middle of the decade were of a democratic, peaceful
transition to socialism, led by an internationally co-operating bloc of
Eurocommunist governments.
These hopes were undermined, however, by two major blunders made by
Carrillo. The first was tactical. Following the Italian experience too closely, ‘the PCE
leadership managed to combine an underestimation of its real potential, which
would sooner or later have forced legalization on any post-Franco government, with
wild illusions that it might score 30 per cent of the vote once legalized’.43 This
would be cruelly exposed in the June 1977 general elections when the PCE received
a paltry 9.4% of the national vote. The second blunder followed in October, when
the major parties from all sides of the political spectrum signed the Moncloa Accords,
economic agreements over austerity measures. These accords—fruit of a ‘strange
RED HERITAGE 39
mutual infatuation between Suárez and Carrillo’44 —fatally overplayed the

communist hand. In keeping with their Eurocommunist line, the PCE had
envisaged a popular front with the centre-left (the PSOE, primarily) to ensure Left
hegemony in Spain, based on moderation and loyalty to the process of
democratisation. Yet González’s social democrats refused to be drawn into any such
pact, waiting to see how the transition would unfold (and aware of the yearning of
much of the Spanish electorate for a middle ground between dusted-down
Francoism and communist extremism). While the PCE vote recovered slightly in
the 1979 elections, internal splits between pro-Soviets and Eurocommunists saw it
collapse again to a dreadful 4% in 1982. The red carpet had been swept from
beneath the feet of the PCE, and the hopes of a ruptura democrática disappeared.
So by the spring of 1979, only two years after the triumphant legalisation of the
communists, the new mood of desencanto was prevalent throughout the Spanish
Left, and being expressed on walls throughout the country. To the PSOE’s
campaign slogan ‘Cien años de honradez’ (One hundred years of honour) was added
‘pero cuarenta de vacaciones’ (but 40 on holiday). While the ultra boot-boys of the
extreme Right graffitied ‘Con Franco estábamos mejor’ (Under Franco we were better
off), those on the Left were writing ‘Contra Franco estábamos mejor’: ‘We were better
off AGAINST Franco’.45 The meaning was clear: political commitment and loyalty
were stronger under the dictatorship than in the treacherously fluid days of the
transition, as sudden opportunities appeared for personal progress and enrichment.
While desencanto was expressed both in the cynicism of the still-committed Left,
such as Vázquez Montalbán, it was also increasingly referring to the nihilism of
pasotista youth: ‘Yo paso de todo’, ‘I couldn’t care less’.
Carvalho is definitely on the case: much of the detective series was set against this
backdrop of tension and distrust, walk-on characters used to embody and caricature
real shifts in Spanish and Barcelona society. In 1977, Carvalho’s hunt for the killer
of the Spanish representative of an American multinational took him through a
cross-section of the city’s progre middle classes, from a rich kid anarchist to a labour
lawyer, a yoghurt manufacturer to an eternal student, friends from university whose
paths had diverged variously, but who had all once shared the Marxist doctrine. At
this time, much political business was carried out in night-clubs, and Carvalho’s
visit to the fictional El Sot cues a bestiary of what became known as the gauche divine,
a liberal, middle class, intellectual Left:
A poet and ex-prisoner seeking in El Sot a double life that will give him back
part of the twenty-five years spent in prison; an extremely young official of
the workers’ commissions…; organizational and petitional ladies of the local
Left; professional night-owls of more than thirty years’ standing; a homosexual
novelist; a concrete poet who has read Trotsky; a chairman of political round-
table discussions…who can conjure up a synthesis where there wasn’t even a
thesis to start with; the occasional sensitive intellectual who turns up in the
hopes of l’amour fou…; wild and soon-to-be-rich youth; Uruguayans fleeing
the terror in Uruguay; Chileans fleeing the terror in Chile; Argentinians
40 RED HERITAGE
fleeing successive terrors in Argentina; one of Carrillo’s ten right-hand men;

an almost young ex-industrial engineer now publishing independent and
radical-Marxist thinkers; a few leftovers of the 1940s, nourished on a diet of
Stefan Zweig; puritan left-wing cadres hoping to come into contact with the
decadent and definitely scandalous Barcelona Left for just one night.46
Leftists as individuals, however cutting the caricature! While Carvalho was already a
mouthpiece for the cynicism of his creator, it is the introduction of individual
emotion into the debate that gives this work its edge. Beyond the dialectical power
games of structural Marxism, Vázquez Montalbán shows just what desencanto was
all about—psychological loss. Loss of faith, loss of hope, loss of enthusiasm, For the
Left’s desencanto was ‘rooted in an awareness of the discrepancy between the
enormous energy invested over the long years of the anti-Franco struggle and the
minimal concessions…gained as a result of the transition [:] …for many…the
response was a withdrawal from political activism in search of compensatory
fulfilments from a private life that had been for so many years “on hold”’.47
The fascination of the Carvalho novels as period pieces lies in the evocation of the
tension in the streets, and the machinations being carried out in flats and offices
across the city. In The Angst-Ridden Executive we see the city of 1976:
As night settled on the Ramblas, Carvalho began to register the symptoms that
marked the onset of the daily confrontation. The riot squad had begun
moving into position, according to the prescribed rituals of the ongoing state
of siege. Apolitical counter-cultural youth and young counter-cultural
politicos maintained their customary distance from each other. At any
moment a gang of ultra right-wing provocateurs might appear, and you would
see the militants of this and that party disperse and head for their now
legalised party offices… Between the hours of eight and ten the prostitutes, the
pimps, the gays and the crooks great and small would disappear off the streets
so as not to find themselves caught up in a political battle that was not of
their making.48
The following year, Carvalho’s search for his missing businessman in Southern Seas
takes him to the fictional ‘dusty, sweaty outskirts of San Magín’,49 where he seeks a
lead from the SEAT worker Ana Briongos. He meets the local priest, symbol of the
radical Catholicism that was dominant in Barcelona of the time— in beard and
pullover, his church holds Comissions meetings and has posters advertising ‘Christ
Stopped at Eboli’. Briongos, says the priest, is
…very, very radical—the kind who got all worked up about the Moncloa
Accords, and I’m not sure that she’s calmed down yet… She was in the
Model prison before she was out of pigtails. Her father went there to give her
a telling-off, and she told him to go take a jump. Too many people like that
just get tired though, and then they just dump all those years of work and
RED HERITAGE 41
effort. Now she goes around saying that she’s through, and that the
bourgeoisie’s got everything under control. All that kind of rubbish.50
The other side of desencanto was the feeling that the PCE had sold out. And had it?
Despite the sweeping communist victory in the first post-Francoist municipal
elections in 1979, there was widespread discontentment, a kind of psychological
panic at the new social order. Many on the Left had hoped that the end of the
dictatorship would mean an equality of access to Spain’s booming economy, but
global recession and political uncertainty had undermined these hopes:
unemployment rose to 7% of the active population, some 900,000 people. The
Moncloa Accords meant that businesses were no longer required to provide jobs (a
central feature of the corporatist labour policy of the dictatorship). The increased
poverty was matched by a rise in petty crime, and victims’ complaints of muggers
and drug addicts roaming the streets were said to be met in police stations with a
response of, ‘Well, you want democracy, don’t you?’.51 The most dramatic
demonstration of this fear occurred in 1981. On 23rd February, disgruntled army
officers attempted to restore a military dictatorship in Spain, the coup failing only
after the nation spent a long, agonising, sleepless night listening to transistor radios.
In May of 1981, an armed group took control of the Banco Central in Plaça de
Catalunya, holding 200 employees hostage. Passing themselves off as Francoist
ultras to win time in opening a safe, after 37 hours they were overpowered by
security forces. These were deeply troubling events, and the need to raise the spirits
and the prosperity of the city were the challenges facing the Left as they took the
helm of the city council.52
They were faced with a legacy of several years of political stasis. Economic
mismanagement provoked a wave of strikes (bakers, metro workers, footballers and
prostitutes being among those withdrawing their labour). There was a need to
reconstruct the shambolic and literally bankrupt municipal administration. And
with a long list of demands from the neighbourhood movements for new social
facilities, the council leadership under Narcís Serra felt that they had to find a
project by which they could reverse Barcelona’s economic fortunes. The perceived
solution was not long in coming, as Serra puts it:
The Olympic candidature was decided in the summer of 1980, when the city
was suffering a cultural crisis, a lack of projects, the misery of a fierce
economic crisis, and it was made public in May 1981, just after the attempted
coup of the 23-F, so we were very aware of the need to generate enthusiasm,
to set out some tangible goals that the population could see.53
And after several years of intense planning and lobbying they achieved their goal. In
Lausanne, in November 1986, Juan Antonio Samaranch, the president of the
International Olympic Committee, pronounced that the nomination for the 1992
Olympics Games would go ‘a la ville de… Barcelona!’. The decision was greeted
with euphoria by many in the city: crowds swarmed through Plaça de Catalunya, 20,
42 RED HERITAGE
000 volunteers signing up to help in the organisation of the event on the first day
alone.54
By the time of the victory, the city had been mobilised behind the cause. And
some strange bedfellows would come to play a very important role in the
construction of the new city. Figures who had recently been reviled by the Left for
their unprincipled speculation in local property developments were now at the
forefront of developing the new city, with municipal approval. Josep Lluís Núñez,
renowned for his huge, characterless middle class housing blocks which dominate
much of the Eixample, would become president of FC Barcelona; Josep Maria
Figueras—at the centre of many of the most controversial property deals of the
1960s—would take a 10% share in the development of Nova Icària; Roman Sanahuja,
whose cheap housing blocks in the city’s northern districts would be plagued with
structural problems, would be able to develop one of Barcelona’s prime sites for one
of the city’s post-Olympic shopping complexes. But most striking of all would be the
presence of Samaranch, who had a long if not altogether smooth record as a leading
Francoist functionary, at the unofficial centre of the city’s Olympic bid.55
Samaranch was Catalan, born into a family of rich textile manufacturers. By
using part of his business profits to host the 1951 world roller hockey
championships he was, at a stroke, able to kick-start his political career in the
regime’s political party, the Movimiento, and continued to use sport as a means of
popularising the dictatorship. By the mid-1960s, his success was such that Franco
appointed him as his sports minister, and he became one of the Spanish members of
the International Olympic Committee (IOC). While he fell from favour with the
dictatorship in 1970, being sacked from the sports post on account of leading
something of a playboy lifestyle, he was still an active member of the Barcelona
political class, heading the dictatorship’s regional government in Catalonia, the
Diputación. In addition, he was heavily involved in the property development
industry in Barcelona, and responsible for the building of Ciutat Meridiana, one of
the poorest-serviced, most peripheral districts in the city. The end of the
dictatorship would signal the end of his domestic political career, however. When
on 23rd April, 1977, a hundred thousand demonstrators marched on the
Diputación building chanting ‘Samaranch, fot el camp!’ (which could be loosely
translated as ‘Samaranch, bugger off!’), that November day in Lausanne in 1986
would be a long way off.
He was fortunate that his political allies in the UCD retained control of the new
parliamentary democracy. He was appointed Spanish ambassador to Moscow, from
where he was able to stage his final push to becoming the president of the IOC, the
number one job in the Olympic community. Elected in 1980, he wasted no time in
advising Serra of the possibility that Barcelona could stage the Games in 1992. The
staging of the Games in his native city would fulfil a personal goal for Samaranch. In
addition, Barcelona was a city unaffected by geopolitical problems, and was seen as a
good bet for restoring the credibility of the Olympics after the superpower boycott
of Moscow 1980.56
RED HERITAGE 43
And so it was that Samaranch—who only 15 years before had been hounded from
office by protesters in the streets—was able to sit at the opening ceremony of the
Games with the leaders of the New Barcelona. The protocol was significant. His
presence was as symbolic as that of the King: Barcelona was to be a loyal participant
in the reconstruction of Spain, and the Left—in the guise of the PSOE (and PSC)—
were to be the managers of the reconstruction. In turn, the Left dropped their
commitment to radical social change and accepted a constitutional monarchy. And
the private sector, no longer the enemies, were brought on board to build and
finance the hotels and stadia which housed the event. Fait accompli.
The Olympic essence crept into every corner of the city’s democratic
establishment. Many of those urbanists—politicians, architects, planners—who had
been at the forefront of the anti-developer, anti-Francoist resistance in the Barcelona
of the 1970s were now carrying out many of the projects, such as building ring-roads
and new middle class housing, that they had criticised so vehemently in the previous
decade. This time, they had democracy as mandate. They had the Games as excuse.
Vázquez Montalbán satirises this in his novel An Olympic Death, where Carvalho
mulls over possible contacts who could help him solve his case.
He…considered those comrades of yesteryear who were now working on the

preparations for the Olympics… […] …In this city, you were either working
for the Olympics or you were dreading them—there was no middle ground.
The ’92 Olympic Office, the pre-Olympic Office, the post-Olympic Office
and the trans-Olympic Office, were now employing people who in normal
circumstances would be the least Olympic of anybody… Anyone who has not
spent at least half an hour of their lives preparing for revolution will never
know how you feel when, years later, you find yourself employed in preparing
showcases for prize athletes from the worlds of sport, business and industry.
From the Sierra Maestra to Mount Olympus, from the Long March to the
marathon.57
The sense of lost comradeship permeates much of Vázquez Montalbán’s work. Bad
enough that the poderes fácticos (the de facto powers of army and police, state and
capital-owners) had survived the threat to their social dominance which had
appeared in the 1970s. What was worse was the apparent capitulation, or even
outright enthusiasm, of many of the ex-communists and Marxian socialists in
making Barcelona safe for capitalism.
While some members of the administration—such as Maragall and Serra—had
long been more heterodox and moderate in their political beliefs, certain others had
gone through a very rapid political conversion. Figures such as Josep Miquel Abad,
the council’s Olympic overlord, or Jordi Borja had not long before been militants in
the PSUC. Many of the city’s architectural establishment were now central to the
city’s Olympic elite, and with lucrative commissions dangling over them were less
prepared to provide the critical voice of before. As such, for Vázquez Montalbán,
‘Barcelona’s politicians have sacrificed the ethical obligations of their office under the
44 RED HERITAGE
pressure of completing the preparations on time. They stand accused of having

wasted the first opportunity in the history of this city to put a model of democratic
growth into practice, based on the objective needs of its inhabitants.’58 And in many
of his novels, his Colonel Parra character—an ex-Maoist revolutionary who ends up
in a well-paid bank job, forever justifying his career move by some arcane law of
dialectical Marxism—serves as a mocking sideswipe at those who had abandoned
the ‘long march’.
We can understand Vázquez Montalbán’s disquiet at these developments when we
bear in mind the importance of the urban fabric for the sustenance of historical
memory, and in turn the power of dominant social forces to shape both. And if
there is one thing which the changing landscape of the Olympic city demonstrated,
it was the reconciliation between the moderate Left and the remnants of the
Francoist state, the final, glorious, truce to end the Civil War a little over 40 years
after the fighting had ended. So the 1992 Olympics, from initiation to completion,
represented the symbolic transformation of old Barcelona. The grasp on the city’s
consciousness was such that it was only the isolated voices of the peripheral
neighbourhoods that questioned its validity, and this in terms of more bread and
butter issues of diverted funding and looming gentrification. But for Vázquez
Montalbán the Olympics also marked something dark in the city’s psyche, a
collective amnesia as Barcelona was transformed by the designer socialists of
posmodernidad.
Barcelona as theme park
Did the Gulf War take place? And the Olympic Games of Barcelona?
Are you sure that a Universal Exposition was organised in Seville in
1992?59
So asks the back cover of Vázquez Montalbán’s Sabotaje Olímpico (1993), a surreal
settling of scores with the Olympic city. The Baudrillard reference is no accident:
one of the emerging themes of the later Carvalho novels was the sensation that the
city was being turned into a simulacrum, a theme park presided over by ‘socialists
who don’t believe in socialism, and nationalists who don’t believe in national
independence’.60 The New Barcelona was a Disney creation at the end of ideology,
the logical cultural consequence of the loss of critical memory.
So while the PSC-led city council saw the arrival of the Olympics as a new
beginning for Barcelona, a symbolic restatement of the democratic renaissance
which had ended the city’s isolation from Europe and the world, for Vázquez
Montalbán they acted as a carnival mask. The Olympics were instead representative
of the social settlement which had emerged from the transition, the triumph of the
middle classes over both the extreme Right and the labour movement. He expressed
his hostility through his writings. Throughout the run-up to and the celebration of
the event itself he became the most outspoken critic of the Games, the first stop for
RED HERITAGE 45
the international press seeking a new angle on the Olympic story. A journalist
covering the Games for the New Yorker described how when he went to interview
him he arrived ‘just behind two TV crews, who interviewed Montalbán in Catalan
and French respectively, and just ahead of a third TV crew who…interviewed him
in Italian’.61
The redevelopment process of the Games would account for many of the
landscapes of the old city. Two districts were subject to particularly profound
transformations: the sea-front blue collar neighbourhood of Poble Nou to the east
of the city centre, and the green slopes of Montjuïc, which rise above the dense, old
neighbourhoods of the Raval and Poble Sec. The former would become the location
of l’últim barri, the final district that could be squeezed into the city’s packed urban
floorspace. As a means of ensuring that the Games would leave permanent benefits
for the city, the council zoned an area of Poble Nou for the creation of the Olympic
Village that would house the visiting athletes. On their departure, the Village would
be converted into a residential neighbourhood. Montjuïc would achieve world
attention as being the site of the main Olympic events themselves—the stadium
which housed the track and field competitions was located here, as were the diving
competitions, where the trajectory of the flying human fish would be traced against
the backdrop of Barcelona’s distinctive cityscape. Yet while the rebuilding and
designing of these two areas would radically reshape the city, the process would strip
away their historical resonance, their status as the repositories of memory which
Vázquez Montalbán sees as being so important a part of urban life.
Poble Nou had been the classical proletarian district, renowned as the ‘Catalan
Manchester’ both for its centrality in the Northern Spanish industrial revolution,
and for the concentration of textile factories which dominated the
Barcelona economy. Spurred on by its proximity to the port, the existence of
abundant water, and the development of Spain’s first railway which ran north along
the coast to the town of Mataró, it would grow from the mid-19th century into one
of the reddest districts of the city, a stronghold of anarchism and socialism. But from
the mid-1960s Poble Nou entered into slow economic decline and many of its most
important factories shut down or moved away, leaving behind a populous area of
apartment housing, small factories and warehouses. After initial attempts to
redevelop certain parts of the district as middle class housing were defeated by
neighbourhood resistance (see chapter 5), by the 1980s the council’s successful
acquisition of the Olympics would guarantee that one of the city’s industrial hearts
would finally stop beating.62 The council focused on the area as a site for large-scale
urban regeneration, a project carried out with the express aim of attracting
investment and middle class residents back into the city from the suburbs.
The task of developing the Olympic Village—the city’s biggest project since the
planning of the Eixample in the mid-19th century—was awarded to an important
local architectural practice, MBMP, which included one of the city’s leading
architects, Oriol Bohigas. The project’s viability was based on a mix of public and
private investment, with two high-rise (44 storey) towers—one a hotel, the other an
office block—and a marina and leisure complex providing commercial activity.
46 RED HERITAGE
Most controversially, the flats built for the athletes would be sold on the open
market after the Games, thus gentrifying one of the city’s most renowned
proletarian districts. Here would come the irony. The Village was located on the
spot where, two centuries previously, the utopian workers’ settlement of the
Proudhonist Etienne Cabet had been founded. The phalanstery’s name, Nova Icària,
was adopted by the district’s planners as a means of retaining a historical reference
to the colony. As the city council was at that time failing to live up to promises to retain
some of the apartments for low-cost housing, there was an understandable
perplexity over the reasons for the choice. As Robert Hughes remarked, You might
as well call an upscale condo block in Berlin the Rosa Luxemburg Tower’.63
Vázquez Montalbán makes the point fictionally, as one of Carvalho’s more
flippant clients in An Olympic Death passes a sign for the construction of the
Village:
‘Can you imagine it—one of these days, phalansteries being built by limited
companies. Or maybe that’s the only way of building phalansteries! Icària,
constructed by limited companies, with financial assistance from the
European Community and probably the IMF as well. How about this for an
idea— now that communism has gone down the drain, why not convert its
dream into a Disneyland theme park for the new bourgeoisie? Carvalho, what
do you reckon to the idea of setting up a Disneyland which is a model of the
perfect communist city, without the disasters of the communist cities whose
collapse we have just witnessed?’
Carvalho called to mind the faces of communists he had known and he had
a sudden desire to treat Lebrun to a kick in the balls.64
In An Olympic Death Poble Nou stands in a kind of Benjaminesque way for the
ruins of the Left, the destruction of landscapes changing the physiognomy of the
city, wiping away another layer of the city’s radical past—as in the Chino. As
Carvalho guides a client seeking a missing Greek lover65 between the ragged remnants
of the gauche divine—a wonderfully evoked and utterly precious 1968 theme party—
and the gloom of Poble Nou on a late 1980s night, they come across the zones of
transition where the industrial might of the ‘Catalan Manchester’ has been put to the
blade of the bulldozer:
After a while, despite the darkness of the night, their eyes began to be assailed
by the ambiguity of a landscape in which it was hard to tell where the
destruction ended and where the construction began. Cranes, big piles of
earth, bulldozers, levelled building plots, foundations for new flats, like the
shoots of bulbs peeking out from beneath the membrane of the dead earth, a
flat surface of hints about what the Olympic Village was going to look like
after a year or eighteen months, between the bare, ugly sea and the terrorized
leftovers of what remained of Pueblo Nuevo [Poble Nou]…What they saw
RED HERITAGE 47
before them could have been either Dresden or Brasilia—a landscape of ruins
or foundations….66
The novel’s meaning is clear. A disoriented Left, a fragmented landscape, and

Carvalho’s own mid-life crisis are all signs of the difficulty of adjusting to the new
city which the author himself identifies. It is what has replaced this industrial past
that has raised the hackles, and not just of Carvalho/Vázquez Montalbán. Travel
writer Michael Jacobs, touring the city as part of his journey through Spain, has
noted that Barcelona’s foreign admirers ‘can be divided into two main camps’
represented on the one hand by the ‘fashion-obsessed’ and on the other by ‘middle-
aged men…who fondly remember Barcelona in the 1960s…[and who] feel that the
city has become a colder, more superficial and anaemic place than before’.67 Jacobs
identifies Robert Hughes as being the prime example of this latter group, the
Australian art critic whose 700-page Barcelona history includes a visceral attack on
the shallowness of the city’s design obsession. He fondly recalls dinner at the
wooden restaurants on the beach in Barceloneta:
These restaurants are gone now, swept away by the socialist city government’s
redevelopment of the seashore. They were a popular institution then, and
cheap. The best of them was called El Salmonete, but they all had much the
same layout. One walked past the open kitchen, with its haze of smoke from
the roaring grills and crackle of sea things as they were dumped with a flourish
in tubs of boiling oil, and past the gargantuan display of ingredients—the
round trays of cigalas, each stiffly arched on the ice; the mounds of red
shrimp; the arrays of dentex, sea bass, squid, minuscule sand dabs, sardines,
and toad-headed anglerfish; the tanks of rock lobsters… One sat down as near
the doors to the sea as possible. One struggled with the Catalan menu.68
Victims of the refurbishment of the coastline, by 1992 these xiringuitos had gone
and the prawns were being served in plusher, pricier restaurants. The manner of
their departure was seen by Vázquez Montalbán as symptomatic of the feebleness of
the culture of the new liberal democracy, swept away ‘with a fatalism more
appropriate to the Franquist years… ZNot a single demonstration has been held.
The isolation of the small restaurant owners is a perfect example of the lack of
solidarity which typifies the Olympic city’.69
Frankfurt-Schoolers were quick to note the prominence of designers as the stars
of the new city. Their significance was probably overstated, but one figure in particular
did achieve celebrity status for a brief period. Awarded the commission to design the
Olympic mascot, Cobi, Xavier Mariscal was identified as the inhouse designer of the
Olympic city. With his studio in one of the Poble Nou warehouses, the cartoonist
represented perfectly the Spanish posmodernidad of which the Marxist Left was so
suspicious. Carvalho stumbles upon him designing a giant artichoke during An
Olympic Death, ‘even though he couldn’t actually remember his name. Marcial, or
Marisco…something like that’.70 Beginning with Merbeye in 1978, Mariscal was
48 RED HERITAGE
responsible for a substantial proportion of the cloying overdesigned bars which

spread through the Eixample and beyond, transforming the city’s pijo71 night
geographies. By the late 1980s the Valencian was everywhere—his enormous prawn
sculpture, sitting atop the glass-fronted Gambrinus restaurant on the Passeig
Colom, amused and appalled by turn as it forged the essential yuppie link between
conspicuous consumption and pop design. His crowning glory was the Torre
d’Avila bar on Montjuïc, described by a reviled Robert Hughes as having
…some claim to being the most seriously unenjoyable boîte de nuit in Spain,
or maybe the world… The Torre d’Avila is built on several levels…[the]
floors have holes in them, enabling those above to look down on those below,
while those below gaze up the skirts of those above…the tables are tiny, the
chairs penitential… On the floor below there is a circular glass billiard table,
next to which is the gents’ lavatory, a transparent glass enclosure. The urinal
is top lighted by UV bulbs, which turn your piss a lurid green. If you turn
around to zip up your fly, you find yourself facing the billiard players through
the glass.72
Somewhat chastened, Hughes lets fly on the city’s design obsession, ‘a peculiarly
nitwitted and lighthearted mode of design… This is the stuff of franchising clout
and media appeal, and it ramps over the city like kudzu’.73 While Madrid had its
movida, the initially raw combination of sexual freedom and punkie surrealism that
motored the early films of Almodóvar, in Barcelona the immediate response of post-
Francoist culture was represented by the Catalan yuppie, an altogether more
commodified personage.
In the run-up to 1992, Cobi—a scrawled, two-legged, endlessly
anthropomorphised dog—was everywhere. An inflatable version was moored on the
waterfront during the Games, and he was easily adapted to carry the names of
the Olympic sponsors: Cobi Coca-Cola, Cobi Cola-Cao, Cobi-Danone, and so
on.74 Michael Jacobs, seeking an interview with Mariscal, found himself embroiled
in a slightly surreal afternoon in his studio amongst the ruins in Poble Nou:
[As we sat in a small conference room ringed with Cobi dolls] I waited for
Mariscal to appear, but it became obvious after a few minutes that I was going
to have to endure a preliminary session with the two hostesses… They tried to
calm and indoctrinate me… A large blue catalogue of Mariscal’s work had
been placed on the desk in front of me, and its pages were turned one by one
with a reverence and carefulness normally reserved for the handling of
valuable incunabula… The much-awaited closing of the last page of the
catalogue was followed only by a display of Cobiana… Cobi plates, Cobi
statuettes, Cobi ashtrays, Cobi glasses and Cobi T-shirts began to cover the
table… There was a moment of dramatic tension when we got up from our
chairs, walked into the main studio, and headed towards a darkened corner
where a man who was unquestionably Mariscal was sitting. The moment
RED HERITAGE 49
passed, however, when we changed course and sat down in front of a video
screen to watch Cobi Discovers the Lost Planet. My glance wandered over to
Mariscal’s distant desk, where the designer himself could be seen at work. ‘…
As Cobi travels back from the lost planet he becomes happy when he sets eyes
once more on Barcelona…’. The desk was made of glass and glowed in the
surrounding darkness. Mariscal rose from his seat, opened the shutters
slightly, and returned to make a few quick gestures with his brash… As
Cobi’s adventures continued in our corner of the studio, I tried to look more
closely at Mariscal’s large head, but it moved continually, and eventually
vanished out of sight, whisked off by a Japanese businessman in a dark suit. I
had not even shaken the great man’s hand.75
Unsurprisingly, the Cobi image was appropriated by all sorts of anti-Olympic

graffitists and cartooning opportunists. Jordi Busquet’s critical almanack of Cobiana
contains Cobi with syringe, Cobi with bulging money-bag, Cobi with ‘Freedom for
Catalonia’ banner, Cobi freaking out. Cobi getting a doing from a grubby anarchist,
and Cobi getting torn apart by a savage cat, alongside the logo ‘La Barcelona del 93
ens donarà pel cul’ (The Barcelona of 93 will get us up the arse).76 Ironically,
perhaps, Vázquez Montalbán—while noting the shallowness of much of the
merchandising campaign—saw in the ludicrousness of Cobi a kind of counter-
cultural double-meaning, that Mariscal himself (with a background in the counter-
culture) was very aware of.77
In 1992 it was not only Poble Nou which was a site of symbolic change. On
Montjuïc, the primary location of the athletics events, there were all sorts of
meanings at play. The peculiar dominance of the hill over the old city, dropping
sheer into the sea at one end and sloping gently down to the Plaça d’Espanya at the
other, gave it a physical presence enhanced by some of Barcelona’s most curious
architecture. As the stage of the 1929 Expo and, still, the city’s trade fair, it has long
functioned as a showcase of both the local and the Spanish state. As I discuss in
chapter 6, the city council had clustered a lot of its aesthetic attention here: it had
reconstructed Mies van der Rohe’s minimalist German Pavilion, destroyed after the
closure of the 1929 Fair; it was the site of two of Barcelona’s most important art
galleries, the Miró Foundation and the Museu Nacional d’Art Català; the Olympic
ring had been controversially marked by Santiago Calatrava’s dazzlingly white
communications tower-sculpture; and the ring itself comprised several newly
designed or renovated sports facilities, such as Arata Izosaki’s Palau Sant Jordi and
Gregotti’s renovated Olympic stadium. It is a model of the council’s artistic
cosmopolitanism, a lush, sloping parkland of mysterious grottoes and municipal
signposts, populated by dog-walkers, cruised by slow-moving tourist coaches, and
dotted with reposeful neo-classical nudes and watchful middle-aged men.
But Montjuïc has an alternative history, a history at once more popular and more
tragic. Vázquez Montalbán remembers it as being the weekend refuge of residents
from the cramped, airless streets and apartments of the Raval, who would make the
pilgrimage down Carrer Hospital or Conde de Asalto (now Nou de la Rambla),
50 RED HERITAGE
across the Paral.lel, up through the steep streets of the anarchist district of Poble Sec
to the meadows and springs, before having a lunch of tortilla de patatas, potato
omelette. For those without housing in the old town, particularly the wave of
immigrants that arrived from Murcia before the Civil War, Montjuïc also housed
countless squatters, clustered around the mountain before such barraquisme was
gradually eradicated through the 1970s and 1980s. But most poignantly, the trees
and slopes and scattered buildings also hide some of the city’s most tragic secrets.
The Olympic stadium itself had been built for the 1936 Republican Games, an
alternative to Hitler’s official Berlin Olympics. But these were abandoned almost as
soon as they had begun, with the news that Franco’s troops had invaded from
Morocco and the Civil War was under way. And after the war, the castle which
stands at the pinnacle of the mount, overlooking the waterfront, would be the last
viewpoint from which many of those opposed to the regime—the anarchists,
communists and nationalists—would see their city before being shot, their bodies
dumped into the adjacent quarry. Today there remains a discreet shrine to the
unknown Republican dead, Beth Galí’s Fossar de la Pedrera, one of the least visited
of the city’s new monuments.
And this is all part of the culture of forgetting which has accompanied the
replacement of ideological struggle by the desire to consume. Vázquez Montalbán,
whose love and rehabilitation of Catalan and Spanish cuisine recurs throughout the
Carvalho novels, would surely cry out at the direction the city’s food culture is taking.
When the first McDonald’s arrived in Barcelona in 1981, it became a target for anti-
American sentiment, particularly to the scarved radicals who would run amok on
Catalonia’s National Day, this becoming such a tradition that it has to board-up
every 11th September. By 1996, fast food was taking on a different slant. When
Planet Hollywood came to town, hundreds of hopefuls responded to adverts
appealing for fluent English speakers and lined up beneath Frank Gehry’s giant Fish
sculpture in the Olympic Village to try and insert themselves in the booming
tourist-consumer economy. In the elegant boulevard of Passeig de Gràcia, a
grinning Joan Clos (then deputy mayor) could be seen shyly shaking hands with a
serene Claudia Schiffer as she and Naomi Campbell arrived to open their Fashion
Café. Nearby, huge formula tapas restaurants arrived which—along with ubiquitous
baguette kings Pans and Company—put a local twist on concept food. What can
we call this process? McTapasisation? Claudiaschifferisation? And now, there is a
Marks and Spencer, a Habitat and a Hard Rock Café in Plaça de Catalunya. Better
than the drab existing landscape of banks, but a nod to the international
consumerist homogeneity that is now a feature of all major European cities. Up at
the Camp Nou, ‘once a cathedral for a sporadic Mass’,78 the departure of Dutch
transition icon Johann Cruyff and the arrival of cheque-book Dutch and Brazilian
imports make Barça seem more like the Harlem Globe-trotters than anything else.
They still provide a mirror of Catalan society, however: but being a soci (a card-
carrying club member) is now a matter of social prestige, rather than political
commitment.
RED HERITAGE 51
These symptoms of globalisation would probably have happened anyway. But for
many it was the Olympics which acted as a watershed in the transition from the old
to the new, as post-industrialism and postmodern pop aesthetic began to dominate
the streets. It is in these sites of the new city—Poble Nou, Montjuïc— that Vázquez
Montalbán’s preoccupations come together, and it is here that he locates the ruins
of the Left:
Where are the state-subsidized houses? Where are the social policies which
might have started to erase the inequalities between North and South which
can be found in the same city? Where is the commitment to infrastructure
and cultural diversity as opposed to overspending on pretentiousness? Who
has rationalized the ‘market’ city?
But one cannot write down this inventory of suspicion and dissatisfaction
without being consumed by a terrible fear of making a complete fool of
oneself… When the future Olympic Village ends up as a radial centre for the
redevelopment of mile after mile of working-class housing, nobody will ask
whether things might have been different… The most inevitable of all is that
which is already complete.79
And with the completion of the Olympic landscape, so ends the hopes of the city’s
Marxist Left. Much of the baggage of the Left has been appropriated, then dumped,
by the city’s new breed of globalisation-conscious social democrats.
✤✤✤
The ruins of the Left. In the New Barcelona, the Left had been in control in both
central and city government for 18 years. Yet Barcelona no longer strikes fear into
the hearts of the bourgeoisie: the Chino is a museum, the Raval no longer a focus of
discontent and politicised radicalism, the flâneur is left to pick over the flotsam and
jetsam of its socialist past. Those beards who had struggled against the dictatorship
now make their own version of history, but not in the conditions of their own
choosing. Perhaps they overdosed on Marx: too much opposition too young. As
Vázquez Montalbán shows (and we will see this in more depth in chapter 5), the
anti-developer vanguard of the 1970s is now throwing itself with great gusto into
carrying out the very same projects it once excoriated, this time with the backing of
historical legitimacy and the righteous claims to being the popular pilots of
modernity. Old bugbears are forgotten: they are now changing the world, not
merely philosophising.
Was there an alternative? The hopes of radical Eurocommunism have receded on
the horizon. While there are some who have argued that this was due to the tactical
flaws of Spanish communism,80 the failure of the Left—or its re-invention in a
more moderate, pragmatic guise—has been a fact of European political life in the
1980s and 1990s. The rise of a neo-liberal Right (Reagan and Thatcher), the failure
of Gorbachev to control the changes he unleashed in the Soviet Union, the
economic liberalisation which has accompanied European integration, and the loss
of intellectual interest in Marxism after 1989 would surely have accounted for any
52 RED HERITAGE
democratic socialist alternative. Or has the Left submitted too feebly? Has it
embraced with too much enthusiasm the need to be competitive, the need for social
partnership with the private sector, the need to forget the recent past?
And so the New Barcelona is all about forgetting. Laughter and forgetting,
perhaps, bringing to mind Mike Davis’s account of the decline of the socialist
intellectual in Los Angeles, who comes to the city not to interrogate but to wallow.
Davis pinpoints the likes of Jean Baudrillard as an exemplar, for whom ‘what was
once anguish seems to have become fun’.81 The city as political funhouse is,
perhaps, a reflection of the disorientation of the Left’s cultural project. In Spain,
this is represented in the motif of amnesia, coupled with the happy acceptance of
capital back into the fold. Spain and Barcelona from the mid-1980s until the
recession of 1993 were places turned upside-down, catching up with the rest of
Europe in a frenzy of building, peseta-peddling and corruption scandals. With the
cult of modernisation came a culture of forgetting, absorbed into the individual
psyche, where the desencanto of those left behind goes beyond the disappointment
of failing to achieve political goals. Carvalho and, we presume, Vázquez Montalbán,
find their ability to relate to the city has dissipated in the themed shallowness and
municipal tidiness of the New Barcelona. They are disorientated, as much by the
psychological upheaval of rapid modernisation as by the physically transformed
landscapes. The memories of the beatings, the loss of liberty, the restrictions on
cultural expression remain alive in the minds of those who experienced them, and
who have to suffer seeing their erstwhile social enemies acting side-by-side with their
erstwhile comrades. In this country where schoolchildren apparently believe that
Franco was a member of the PSOE,82 in this city where the forgotten history of the
Republic lies beneath the rubble of the Chino or hidden in the overblown rhetoric
of the Olympic city, Vázquez Montalbán remains as conscience, as story-teller, as
socialist flâneur.
Notes
1 Vázquez Montalbán (1992b), p. 175; ‘walls reflected in their eyes’ probably refers to
the graffitied messages on the city’s walls which greeted the dictator’s death.
2 See Gilloch (1996) for an excellent commentary on this.
3 Shields (1994), p. 63.
4 Frisby (1994), p. 83, emphasis in original.
5 Frisby (1994), p. 85.
6 Cottam (1992).
7 Cited in Arenós and Saladrigas (1997), p. 298.
8 Vázquez Montalbán (1992b), quotations from pp. 154, 179 and 182 respectively.
9 Vázquez Montalbán (1985).
10 GRAPO (Grupos de Resistencia Antifascista Primero de Octubre) and the FRAP
(Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patriota) were radical Marxist anti-statist
terrorist groups responsible for an array of executions and bombings during the
transition, although they were also reputedly riddled with police agents provocateurs,
RED HERITAGE 53
providing a perfect excuse for increasingly harsh state repression. Their activities were
a ‘mere side-show’ compared with the paramilitary war taking place between various
Basque terrorist groups centred around ETA, and police forces; Preston (1986),
quotation from p. 151.
11 Rix (1992), p. 151.
12 Again see Gilloch’s (1996) commentary on Benjamin and the city; Caragh Wells
(1998) has noted the importance of the smells and sounds for Vázquez Montalbán:
‘[T]here is no aural memory left. Once I had to write a radio script about the Barcelona
of [past times] and I asked the station if they had a recording of the sounds of the trams.
They didn’t. And the speeches in the streets, and the old men who sang Machaquito or
Rosó… We need a museum of sound, maybe someone has it recorded. The bugle of
the rag-and-bone man, the cart wheel on the cobbles…’ (in Vázquez Montalbán and
Fuster 1985, p. 35).
13 For explicit autobiography, see Arenós and Saladrigas (1997) or Aranda (1995).
14 Orujo is a Galician firewater, of which Carvalho is particularly fond; for recipes and
excerpts from the Carvalho novels, see Vázquez Montalbán (1989).
15 See Hart (1987); Rix (1992); Chivite (1997) twists things around a bit by providing a
‘biography of Carvalho’.
18 See Wells (1998).
19 Cited in Arenós and Saladrigas (1997), pp. 304–5.
20 Translated interview with Vázquez Montalbán on the BBC Radio 4 series
‘Crimescapes’, 21 January 1996. Cited in Wells (1998).
21 Vázquez Montalbán (1992b), p. 205.
22 Vázquez Montalbán (1996b).
23 Villar (1996).
24 Villar (1996), p. 223.
25 Villar (1996), pp. 227–31.
26 Vázquez Montalbán (1990), p. 49.
27 Benjamin (1979), p. 210.
30 Arenós and Saladrigas (1997).
31 Quim Aranda (1997), ‘La Barcelona de Pepe Carvalho’, La Veu del Carrer 45, March-
April, pp. 4–5.
32 This is the name given to one of a series of books by Francese Candel, who played a
large part in documenting and bringing to broader attention the living conditions of
the non-Catalan immigrants in these ‘new towns’. See Candel (1963, 1985) for a
flavour of his work.
34 Villar (1996), pp. 238–9.
35 Ricard Fayos, ‘Una cirurgia guaridora’, El País 9 November 1995, Quadern, p. 3.
36 In Aranda (1995), p. 23.
37 In Moreno and Vázquez Montalbán (1991), p. 22.
38 Maruja Torres, ‘Barcelona: regreso a la ciudad de los prodigios’, El País 13 March
1988, partly reproduced in Subirós (c. 1993), p. 78.
39 Vázquez Montalbán (1992b), pp. 171–2.
54 RED HERITAGE
40 Preston (1986), pp. 5–6.

41 Vázquez Montalbán (1985).
42 Preston (1986), pp. 114–15.
43 Camiller (1994), p. 246.
44 Preston (1986), p. 114.
45 Vázquez Montalbán (1985), pp. 151 and 158.
47 Graham and Labanyi (1995), p. 313.
50 Vázquez Montalbán (1986), pp. 111–12.
52 For a brief account of this period of Barcelona’s history see Subirós (c. 1993).
53 ‘La ciutat dels alcaldes: conversa amb Narcís Serra i Pasqual Maragall’, in HOLSA (c.
1990), p. 283.
54 Subirós (c. 1993).
55 Rix (1992).
56 These accounts are drawn from Boix and Espada (1991) and Simson and Jennings
(1992).
57 Vázquez Montalbán (1992a), pp. 34–5.
59 Back cover, Vázquez Montalbán (1993); see Baudrillard’s (1995) argument that the
Gulf War took place on television, effectively not really ‘happening’ or at least only in
a virtual sense.
61 Cited in Ladrón de Guevara et al. (1995), p. 109.
62 Fabre and Huertas (1989).
63 Hughes (1992), p. 40.
65 An Olympic Death is redolent with Greek metaphors and allusions, allowing a playful
take on the city’s Olympic obsession. Carvalho even cooks moussaka at one point.
67 M. Jacobs (1994), p. 227.
68 Hughes (1992), p. 5.
70 Vázquez Montalbán (1992a), p. 98.
71 A pijo is usually a disparaging term signifying a spoilt rich-kid.
72 Hughes (1992), p. 49.
73 Hughes (1992), p. 48.
74 Busquet (1992), p. 11.
75 M.Jacobs (1994), pp. 234–6.
76 Busquet (1992), pp. 126–9.
77 Cited in Busquet (1992), pp. 123–4.
79 Vázquez Montalbán (1992b), pp. 10–11.
80 See Camiller (1994).
81 Davis (1990), p. 54.
RED HERITAGE 55
82 Hooper (1995), p. 73. He also cites an opinion poll which suggests that ‘less than half
of young Spaniards considered that Francoism had been a mistake’ (p. 78).
3
Battles for Barcelona
As a survey of the international press response to the 1992 Olympics shows, the
Games were an overwhelming success in publicity terms for those who sought to
stress Barcelona as being a Catalan, as opposed to Spanish, city. Whether in Time,
(‘Welcome to the Catalan Olympics’), the International Herald Tribune (‘Barcelona:
Catalonia’s appearance on the world stage’), or the less prosaic Il Corriere della Sera
(‘The people shout Freedom for Catalonia in the street… Freedom for Catalonia,
right in the King’s face’), the image and publicity campaign carried out by the
Generalitat immediately prior to the Games made a clear statement of Catalonia’s
difference from Spain.1 While this was seen as a necessary reaction to the impact of
1992 as the Spanish annus mirabilis, with Seville’s Expo and Madrid’s year as
European City of Culture, it also touched an emergent theme of European politics
in the aftermath of the collapse of state communism in eastern and central Europe.
The existence of economically powerful sub-central state actors such as Catalonia
and Baden-Württemberg had come to attention at a time when economic
geographers and policy-makers were re-asserting the potential of regionally
agglomerated industrial complexes as a possible antidote to global recession. This
had a political dimension as the growing profile of German, French and Spanish
regions within the European Community combined with the emergence of post-
communist states such as the Czech Republic to offer a new map of Europe.2
In the years leading up to the 1992 Olympics, the Catalan social democratic
party PSC, affiliates of the PSOE, and the right of centre nationalist CiU struggled
for control over its planning and staging, a period referred to in the local press as
‘battles for Barcelona’. The struggle was not merely for control of the Games,
however. It was a microcosm of a highly politicised and long-running story of
competing views on the role of Barcelona within a wider political space, be this
Catalonia, Spain or Europe. The battle was personified in the political leadership of
two men: Pasqual Maragall as the PSC mayor of the Ajuntament de Barcelona, and
Jordi Pujol as the CiU president of the Generalitat de Catalunya. The two had very
distinct visions of the relationship between the city and Catalonia, the former
arguing for the importance of the city-state as a political formation, the latter
downplaying this in favour of a nationalist/regionalist stance. It is these two
positions, in this case corresponding to a social democratic vs. bourgeois regionalist
dichotomy, which form the focus of this chapter.
BATTLES FOR BARCELONA 57
Barcelona has an ambiguous relationship with both Catalonia and Spain. It is

undoubtedly the second city of Spain after Madrid, whether viewed politically,
economically or in terms of population. As such, it has had a long and tortuous
relationship with the evolving Spanish state. And, of course, it is by far the most
important city in Catalonia, which has made it a key site of the development of
various strands of Catalan nationalism. Yet this, conversely, has also made it the
biggest obstacle to the development of a homogeneous Catalan national culture, as
we shall see. This chapter describes the evolution of contemporary Catalan political
identities over the 20th century. It explores the competing strategies and visions of
Pujol and Maragall, before examining how these were played out in the two key
‘battles’ for territory and for control of the Olympics, each central to Barcelona’s
growing political importance in the 1980s and 1990s. I begin, however, by locating
this within a wider debate about the growing significance of the city for sub-
national political movements.
City-states or bourgeois regions?
Is it mere coincidence that, as European parties of the Left lose national

election after national election, the approving references multiply in
this newspaper’s columns to something called Europe of the Regions?…
The notion of regional Europe is part romantic, part fashion. How
boring to be mired in alliance with nasty nation states, with their
armies and their male rulers in suits… Let’s form different alliances of
attractive sounding regions that we think might consist of free-thinking
people like us. Out comes the list of agreeable regions, so happily
coincidental with places we all like to visit: Catalonia, Lombardy,
Bavaria, Slovenia, Aquitaine. All, as it happens, have right-of-centre
governments. But don’t worry, facts don’t matter in this day-dream.
Why sully the list with places like Serbia, Lithuania or Ulster which few
people in their right minds would want to visit?3
Martin Kettle’s short Guardian piece captured with some venom the sloppy
thinking with which a rudderless (British) Left viewed European integration. That
Catalonia’s name is first on Kettle’s list of ‘favoured regions’ is unsurprising: the
boost given by the Olympics to its international profile has been substantial. Yet
Catalonia’s prominence in such discourse is problematic in itself: the approaches of
Maragall and Pujol are grounded in completely different political visions and world-
views. Both share the desire to lead Catalonia to ever greater influence in
international affairs, but there the commonalities end as their distinct political
projects clash together over territory and the mobilisation of place identity.
Regionalism has a deeply chequered political past, often rooted in opposition to
the modernising force of the nation-state and drenched in myths of blood and
tradition.4 While the micro-nationalisms which sprang to life in post-war Europe —
58 BATTLES FOR BARCELONA
be they Breton, Scottish, Irish, Basque or Catalan—could claim histories of

repression as justification, much of their contemporary profile carries some degree
of cultural exclusivity. And while regions such as Lombardy or Bavaria may fit
in with a new regional economic paradigm,5 the likes of Merseyside have had less to
celebrate, stuck on its ‘atlantic are’ periphery.6 So while the Left has promoted
regionalism for the possibility it offers of reducing the ‘democratic deficit’ in the
European Union, it is also important to recognise that a regionalist programme
holds dangers of an opportunistic’ “cocooning” which is isolating the more affluent
parts of Europe from the elements of solidarity inherent in the nation-state’. Chris
Harvie calls this ‘bourgeois regionalism’, perpetuated by the likes of the Bavarian
Christian Social Union, or the ‘Padania’ of Umberto Bossi’s Italian Northern
League, a blend of ethnic essentialism and economic dynamism.7
Regionalism should thus be defined, along with nationalism, as a means of
building a political project within a particular territory. All such projects contain an
inherent ambiguity, rooted in the inevitable tension between a sense of identity
based on ethnic purity or community (however ‘open’ a definition this may be)
versus a genuinely pluralist stance based on rights of residence.8 That these two
poles are rarely so clearly defined is an important reason to contextualise discussion
in this area, to illuminate the contours of specific nationalist-regionalist projects.
In what follows, then, I think it is useful to look into how Pujol and Maragall
construct Catalonia’s political identity and to consider a dual paradigm of European
regionalism—a citizen-based ‘city-state’ movement versus ‘bourgeois regionalism’,
the ‘particularism of the affluent’ that Chris Harvie has identified in the programmes
of many European regionalist movements.9 Both versions are often articulated with
reference to ideals of urbanity, of the role of urban modernity— both positive and
negative—in the construction of the regionalist-nationalist programme. While
narratives of national essentialism may look to selectively chosen ‘historic’
landscapes to tell a nation’s story, civic regionalists are more likely to look to their
cities as the crucibles of a newly formed image, with the new sacred sites being the
football stadium, the art gallery, the waterfront, the opera house, the museum—all
metonyms for regional cultural identity. Hence the growing importance of the
‘second city’ in contemporary Europe as a space which represents the new myths of
territorial identity: the informational economy, the cultural capital, the generator of
mass taste, all part of what Amin and Thrift have called the ‘institutional thickness’
of a city.10
Perhaps the city acts as a fault-line around which the city-state/bourgeois
regionalist dichotomy is arrayed. Across Europe, certainly, the city has—since the
onset of modernity—been a generator of both the wealth and economic activity that
sustains and disrupts the ‘timeless’ rural world, but those keen on mobilising such
essentialist myths also rely on that city for resources. In several cases—in the Paris of
the Mitterrand presidency, in the Eurocommunist cities of northern Italy, in the
London of the Greater London Council—the Left has been active in using the city
as a kind of political theatre, celebrating cultures of modernity and urbanity.11
However, it is also interesting to consider the extent to which nationalist politicians
may feel forced to ‘deny’ the city, fearful of the influence of cosmopolis on the frail
‘purity’ of ethnic identity. Robert Hughes has noticed the historic tendency of
nationalist governments to distrust port cities, open and anarchic in their mix of
peoples, unreceptive to metaphors of rootedness and timelessness.12 Barcelona is
such a city, and many of the tensions facing a regional Europe will become apparent
as we explore the two opposed camps in the on-going ‘battles for Barcelona’.
Barcelona as capital of la anti-España
…Barcelona was the city of three sins: separatism, communism and the
Republic.13
In Franco’s twisted mind, there loomed large the existence of what he called la anti-
España, embodied by the Second Republic. By contrast with the regime he
established and ruled from Madrid, which demanded the total unity of Spain, the
subordination of the labour force to a national ideal, and the enshrinement of a
Catholic, hierarchical society which was favourable to the eventual re-establishment
of monarchy, the nationalist and socialist identities prominent in Catalonia and the
Basque country were—literally—heresy. Barcelona was probably the capital of la
anti-España (although Bilbao would also have a justifiable claim). The proponents
of such ideas, and the cities which nourished them, were constructed as enemies of
Spain. So when Barcelona finally capitulated in 1939 to Nationalist troops, it was
clear that the power base of the Republic would suffer particularly harshly. As the
city of three sins, the repression taken out on Barcelona was fierce, enough to forge
lasting memories which still inform the political culture of the city of the 1990s.
Catalonia’s statute of autonomy, passed by the Republican government in 1932,
was repealed. Francoism was about the recreation of the Patria, the Spanish
fatherland, which stood in antithesis to everything that the Republic represented.
Through repression, autarky, policies to strengthen national unity and military
values, and a resurgence based on imperial and Catholic ideological concepts,
Francoism sought to perpetuate the Civil War through the persecution or expulsion
of people or ideas which besmirched the idea of a unified, pure Spain.14
Yet the eradication of such ideas is not easy and the sustenance of hegemony is
equally problematic. Barcelona remained, along with other urban centres throughout
Spain (including Madrid), an important centre of political and cultural opposition,
which ultimately provided a contradiction to the Francoist project. The period
running from the loss of the Spanish colonies in 1898 through to the establishment
of the Second Republic saw the city form a breeding ground for distinctive political
identities: the anti-Catalan Spanish nationalism of the Lerrouxist movement,
Catalan republican nationalism, and a revolutionary working class movement.15
The first three decades of the 20th century thus became a period of growing self-
confidence in Catalonia, with attempts to counter the long political hegemony of
Madrid in Spanish politics.
With…anti-centralist attitudes widespread, Barcelona became the focus for

all discontent, the ‘big city’ which challenged state omnipotence, as important
a symbol to anarchists or republicans as to staunch Catalan nationalists.
This meant Barcelona was characterised in a seemingly permanent way as a
centre of pluralism. However, this appearance of tolerance…was only due to
the fact that any political strategy…reflected the essential ambiguity of the
city’s status (i.e. the contradiction between its metropolitan scale and its
flimsy political authority as a mere provincial capital). Being politically
undefined, the Catalan metropolis seemed the key to any sort of large-scale
change in Spain.16
So, Barcelona has always had a dual role: as an important centre of European
radicalism, be it Trotskyist, Stalinist or anarchist; and as the capital of the Catalan
nation, cultural citadel and centre of its economy. The new dictatorship was well
aware of this, and set out with the specific aim of weakening the Catalan
metropolis.
This was easier said than done. Initially the dictatorship was faced with a war on
two fronts: as in the Basque country, they had to control a potentially volatile
working class, and suppress a vibrant and deep-rooted national identity. Through
the banning of Catalan, the exacting of revenge through the ‘law of political
responsibilities’ which allowed retrospective punishment for supporting the
Republicans, and the bureaucratic centralisation of the state, Barcelona was
effectively neutered. Castilian Spanish was to be the language of the city, and all
major decisions affecting it, all major appointments, were made from Madrid.
However, after the initial decades of repression, the regime’s line softened slightly as
it became forced to discontinue its policy of autarky and began to slowly integrate
itself into the world economy. Nonetheless, all political opposition still had to be
clandestine, and the hispanicisation of the city remained a fundamental part of
Francoism. Gradually, however, an opposition gathered among groups in society
which made unusual bedfellows. In the Eixample and Sant Gervasi, the enlightened
sections of the bourgeoisie sought to nurture and re-assert Catalan culture. In the
factories that dotted the blue collar neighbourhoods of the city, from Sants and Sant
Andreu to the peripheral estates and satellite towns of the 1950s and 1960s, a
disciplined working class organisation emerged, dominated by the mighty presence
of one of the jewels of the regime’s industrial policy, the SEAT car plant at the Zona
Franca.
The most organised clandestine nationalist movement fused catholic morality and
Catalan identity. 1954 saw the foundation of Cristians Catalans, a group which
sought to provide moral leadership and national reconstruction, whose initial aim
was to ‘fer Església’, literally ‘making the Church’, a refoundation of Catalan
Catholicism. Prominent in this was a young Jordi Pujol, who would become the de
facto leader of the Catalan nationalist opposition. Two events of note stand out in
this early period which show the beginnings of nationalist opposition to the
dictatorship. One was the campaign against the editor of the city’s daily La
Vanguardia, arch-Francoist Luis de Galinsoga, who had openly protested against

church services being delivered in Catalan by stating that ‘Todos los Catalanes son
una mierda’ (All Catalans are shit), an outburst which would ultimately lead to de
Galinsoga’s replacement.17 The other was els fets del Palau, the events which took
place in 1960 in the city’s Palau de la Música Catalana on the Via Laietana. At a
special concert commemorating the work of Joan Maragall, attended by some of
Franco’s ministers, a group of nationalists stood up and began singing the banned
Catalan hymn El Cant de la Senyera. The repercussions were severe: Pujol—despite
being absent on the night—was arrested, tortured, and sent into internal exile in the
northern Catalan city of Girona. While initially the aim of the group had been to
restore church services in Catalan, the acquiescence of the church establishment in
the rest of Spain to the police brutality radicalised them, and from ‘fer Església’ (making
the church) grew ‘fer país’ (making the nation).18
Aside from this vanguard, the giant football club, el Barça, provided a more
popular focus of national pride in the nation without a state, concentrating
opposition to the regime in matches against Real Madrid. Their old football ground
in Les Corts had long been the site of a passionately expressed nationalism, closed at
one point for having booed a royal procession. In the Camp Nou, inaugurated in
1957, all sections of Catalan society came to worship: many of the immigrants from
other parts of Spain drew new identities not from learning the Catalan language,
but through following the exploits of the blaugrana. In the expensive seats sat the
Catalan middle class enjoying the frisson of emotion that victory over regime-team
Real Madrid would bring. When Franco led the uprising of 1936, the president of
Barça, Sunyol, having the misfortune to be in Castile at the time, was arrested and
executed. As Vázquez Montalbán has put it, ‘When Franco’s occupying troops
entered the city, fourth on the list of organizations to be purged, after the
Communists, the Anarchists and the Separatists, was Barcelona football club’.19 And
so anti-centralist sentiment became enshrined in the club (as with Athletic Bilbao in
the Basque case). On-field controversy became mixed with suspicion of the regime’s
murky influence in the Spanish football federation, stirred up in a whole catalogue
of incidents: the Madrid side’s poaching of the great Alfredo di Stéfano from under
the noses of Barça, amidst claims of regime manipulation; suspicions as to the
allegiance of many of the league referees; the undeniable links between senior Real
Madrid representatives and the state; and, more recently, the fascistic leanings of the
Madrid side’s hard-core hooligan element, the ultrasur.20 This rivalry seemed to be
shared in the Spanish capital. After Barça’s Evaristo dived to head the winning goal
in the 1960–1 European Cup quarter-final against Real, a Madrid newspaper
seethed that ‘Barcelona has eliminated Spain from the European Cup’.21 ‘Més que
un club’, ‘more than a club’, they say of Barça: elections to the club presidency still
retain a strong degree of politicisation.
What really threatened the regime, however, was the fact that Barcelona was also
one of the most militant centres of working class activity in Spain, its industrial
complex being a crucial contributor to the Spanish economy. Franco had made
reference to ‘the huge and dangerous industrial concentrations of Barcelona and
Vizcaya’ in a speech in 1945, and his unwillingness and inability to assimilate these
cities into a less centralised, less essentialised vision of Spain can be seen as a major
contributing factor to the ultimate failure of his project. Barcelona had been the
scene of the first organised protests against the new regime when, in 1951, the
attempt to raise tram fares led first to a boycott and then to a full-scale general
strike. The economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s and the arrival of waves of
immigrants from other parts of Spain created a huge and potentially volatile
working class. The trade union movement began to re-organise in the city, to such
an extent that many local employers negotiated covertly (and illegally) to settle the
vast amount of pay disputes which accompanied the final days of the dictatorship. It
was the industrial action taken by many of these workers, such as the violently
repressed protests of the early 1970s at the SEAT car plant, which exposed the fatal
contradiction of late Francoist economic liberalisation and a conservative wages
policy. In Barcelona’s industrial districts, and in the ‘red belt’ of towns which
surrounded the city, it was the largely immigrant manual working class which
provided a major focus of hostility to the dictatorship.22
The idea of a ‘red belt’ was common to many European countries between the
1950s and 1970s, the social response to the de-industrialisation of the historic core.
With factories being located in greenfield sites to cut costs, and serviced by a pool of
ex-agrarian labour, the likes of Milan, Paris and Barcelona all witnessed the growth
of communist parties and trade unions, protesting against the often poor standard
of housing, and adverse working conditions. Around Barcelona, towns such as
Cerdanyola and Sabadell in the Vallés Oriental (eastern valleys), or the Cornellà/
Esplugues/Sant Joan conurbation in the Baix Llobregat river valley, were the
location of the industrial boom of the años de desarrollismo of the 1950s and 1960s.
The huge population movements throughout Spain from the rural south to the
industrial north completely transformed the fabric of many of these settlements: in
the Baix Llobregat the population rose from 96,000 in 1950 to 351,000 in 1970, as
labour flocked to the new engineering and chemical plants set up by both
multinational and indigenous capital. Clustered together in densely built estates,
facing the rigours of Francoist labour laws, workers were quickly radicalised. And in
Barcelona itself, factories such as Olivetti (in Glories), La Maquinista in Sant
Andreu, and SEAT in Zona Franca were a constant and threatening source of social
unrest and economic turmoil.23
The SEAT case provides an insight into the contradictions of Francoism as
ideology. Established in 1950, la Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo was
an early example of the regime’s growing economic liberalisation after an initial
period of autarky. SEAT was a classic fascist industry: it served a captive market, it
had a poorly paid workforce, it was managed by the military. But, crucially, it had
been set up with parts and technology contributed by Fiat, who insisted that the
factory had to be located close to the European market and with easy access to a
port. Against the regime’s better political judgement, the first factory was established
in the capital of the anti-España, in Zona Franca, and from 1953 would come to
play a major part in the city’s industrial life. When the first reliable, affordable
Figure 3 Map of Barcelona’s red belt.
model began to be mass-produced—the legendary SEAT 600, ‘Franco’s Beetle’—

from 1957, the horizons of Spanish society were transformed. By the mid-1960s
Zona Franca had a workforce of 10,000 and was producing 300 cars a day: the tiny
600 model had been adopted by a whole generation, including the designer socialist
gauche divine.24 The 600 meant mobility and modernity, and its popularity
contributed to the growth of the Spanish economy.
By the early 1970s the contradictions of a booming consumer society with the
rigidity of the regime’s labour policy were becoming obvious. Comissions Obreres
by now had considerable strength throughout Catalonia’s heavy industry, and
strikes were becoming widespread. In 1971, Zona Franca ground to a halt in protest
at the sacking of dozens of workers over a refusal to undertake compulsory
overtime, some 8000 workers occupying the plant. In the subsequent 13-hour battle
police used CS gas, horseback charges and live ammunition, injuring several workers
and fatally wounding one, Antonio Ruiz Villalba, who died in hospital 12 days
later. While work restarted, the regime was forced to make various concessions,
appointing a civilian management. Primarily, however, the outcome was symbolic,

showing the potential of unified industrial struggle and radicalising the public.25
The city was simultaneously a focus of less visible political networks. These
operated clandestinely, but their cumulative effect was enormous. Initially, the most
militant opposition had been in the University of Barcelona in the late 1960s, but
the suppression of this led to protest emerging elsewhere. In 1969 the Archbishop
of Barcelona set up a secret fund to look after the families of detained workers, and
to lobby for their release.26 As I discuss in chapter 5, the 1970s saw the
consolidation of previously isolated neighbourhood groups which challenged the
abuses, negligence and impact of unregulated property development. And across the
city an array of political groups—most of all the communist PSUC— operated
covertly to organise against the regime.
All of these forces—the unions, political parties and networks, the Church,
neighbourhood associations—came together to form a coalition, the Assemblea de
Catalunya, founded in November 1971 at a time of renewed repression. Based on a
simple four-point programme (amnesty for political prisoners, freedom of
expression, the re-establishment of the institutions of the Republic, including the
Generalitat and Catalonia’s Statute of Autonomy, and the co-ordination of an anti-
Francoist opposition), it achieved a unity unseen in the rest of Spain. Its truly
significant characteristic was its width of membership and commitment to Catalan
autonomy. Comprising socialists, communists, nationalists and trade unionists, it
also had strong representation from catholic church groups, womens’ groups,
professional organisations and, crucially, Catalan industrial and banking capital.
After the death of Franco in November 1975, it moved quickly and organised two
key demonstrations: on the 1st and 8th of February 1976, up to 40,000 protestors
took to the streets of Barcelona to face the batons of the police, and showed their
desire for the re-establishment of democracy.27 By the time that the referendum on
constitutional reform was approved in December 1976, the Assemblea’s role had
been fulfilled and Spain was about to become a multi-party democracy.
It is at this point that the political identities visible in contemporary Barcelona
begin to emerge. On the night of the 15th June, 1977, as the votes were counted in
the first democratic general elections since the Civil War, it became clear that the
Left in Catalonia had won a significant victory. Despite the overall victory of the
Francoist reformers of the UCD in Spain, the socialists took first place in Catalonia,
with the PSUC second. In all, 75% of the vote went to parties which favoured the
re-establishment of the Statute of Autonomy, Catalonia’s right to a degree of self-
government. Things began to move very quickly from here. On 11th September,
Catalonia’s National Day, over a million people demonstrated in the centre of
Barcelona for the re-establishment of the Generalitat, a direct challenge to the
government’s more limited proposals for autonomy. Prime minister Adolfo Suárez,
in an attempt to counteract the threat of a radical Left opposition in Catalonia,
negotiated the return from exile of the moderate nationalist ex-president of the
Generalitat, Josep Tarradellas. And on 23rd October, Tarradellas would emerge on
Plate 2 Throughout Barcelona and its metropolitan region, the early 1970s was a period of
industrial unrest and protest against the dictatorship’s labour policy. At factories such as
Olivetti at Plaça de Glories, street demonstrations were a common sight. (Source: Arxiu
Fotogràfic de l’Ajuntament de Barcelona; Pérez de Rozas)
the balcony in Plaça Sant Jaume to lead a provisional Generalitat, in an explicit

boost to the Catalan nationalist cause.28
However, the confidence of the Left remained high, and their political strength in
Catalonia was confirmed at the 1979 local elections, when the combined votes of
the PSC and the communists added up to 45%. Perhaps this bred complacency, for
when the elections to the Generalitat came around the following year, the polls
registered a shock victory for CiU. The PSC vote collapsed: it trailed in behind CiU
by 150,000 votes, having polled double the nationalist vote in the general election
of 1979. The reasons were numerous: a high level of abstention was detected among
the Hispanic working class voters of the industrial belt, attributed to an apathy to a
‘Catalan’ political institution.29 However, there was also a strong anti-socialist
campaign led by the Fomento del Trabajo, an employers’ organisation: one large
employer in the Baix Llobregat ran a full-page newspaper advert warning of its lack
of confidence in creating jobs in areas with Marxist electorates and councils.30 The
CiU was able to govern in coalition with the Left nationalists of Esquerra
Republicana, with Pujol fulfilling his dream of becoming president of Catalonia.
This success in the Generalitat would not be repeated in Barcelona’s municipal
elections, however. Subsequent polls saw Catalan voting behaviour develop into a
strange pattern of bi-party support. In Maragall’s first election at the head of the party
list in 1983 his party, the PSC, were again victorious, as would be the case in 1987,
1991 and 1995. In the Generalitat elections of 1984, 1988, 1992 and 1995,
however, CiU dominated, winning absolute majorities in parliament in all but the
last case. The stage was set for a lengthy period of cohabitation: both sides knew
that Barcelona was an enormous prize, as both the historic capital of the Catalan
nation and the nerve centre of its attempts to compete in the New Europe. And
both developed strategies in which the city was either all-encompassing (Maragall),
or noticeable by its absence (Pujol).
Pujol, Maragall and the National Question: two visions

It is important to emphasise that Maragall and Pujol both see themselves as being
defenders and, indeed, promoters of Catalanism. However, they identify with
Catalonia in strikingly different ways. In part, this reflects the important
generational differences between the two. Pujol, born in 1930, was part of a
‘forgotten’ generation which grew up during the fiercest period of political and
cultural repression, lived the dictatorship almost entirely in adulthood, acceding to
the democracy in their fifties. Those born in the 1940s, Maragall’s generation, had
no experience of the Civil War. They were culturally and politically rebellious,
heavily influenced by May ‘68, able to enjoy the growing material standard of living
and gradual internationalisation of Spain, often secular and Marxist in outlook.31
This is reflected in the biographies and political visions of the two men.
Pujol has his own place within the annals of the opposition to Francoism. We
know that as a result of els fets del Palau he had already established himself as a
leader of renascent Catalan nationalism. Politically, he was able to derive a power base
from two important social forces: Catalan banking capital and Catalan catholicism.
The two are not unrelated. His departure from the pressure group Crist i Catalunya/
Cristians Catalans with a small group of followers with the objective of ‘fer país’ was
based on an analysis which argued that without cultural institutions and nationalist
capital there would be no basis upon which to build a genuine nation. This was first
developed through the founding of a bank, Banca Catalana, established in 1959.
‘Without a bank’, he wrote, ‘a country has no possibility of creating large
businesses. It will always be in danger of seeing its strongest industries and
companies fall into foreign hands. It will always be in danger of colonisation’.32
This was accompanied through time by activities in the cultural field, such as the
establishment of publishing companies or the campaigns to get a Catalanist elected
as president of Barça. And at the end of 1974, as the clandestine opposition to the
dictatorship was at its peak, Pujol was instrumental in the founding of
Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC), a centre-left party with an
important social democratic strand headed by Miquel Roca. In September 1978,
CDC pacted with the Christian democrat Unió Democràtica de Catalunya (UDC)
to form the CiU coalition.
So the make-up of the coalition can be seen to emerge from strongly nationalist,
conservative and religious social groupings, and this has had clear ideological
dimensions. While CDC initially saw itself as being social democratic in vocation,
Pujol frequently stressing the attractions of Sweden as a model for Catalan society,
once in power the CiU coalition under Pujol’s leadership pursued a more
conservative set of policies:
Although the activity of the Generalitat is complex and, in many sectors,

oriented towards modernisation and economic competitiveness, the
ideological discourse of Jordi Pujol and a good part of his political strategy is
based on a historicist, essentialist, ruralist and anti-metropolitan script that
looks for and uses confrontation with Barcelona and the central government
to confirm and reinforce the autonomy and competences of the Generalitat.33
So how does this relate to Barcelona? In Pujol’s rhetoric the city is conspicuous by
its absence. The president’s repertoire could be said to revolve around four main
strands: history and timelessness; economic competitiveness and European
integration; linguistic difference; and low-intensity confrontation with Spain. His
speeches on Catalan National Day (which commemorates the 1714 defeat of
Catalonia at the hands of the future Bourbon monarch of Spain, Philip V, and its
absorption within the Spanish state) reveal some of the tropes used by Pujol to build
a Catalan identity. He draws succour, ironically, from defeat, noting the Catalan
willingness to channel their efforts to positive end, picking up the pieces the day
after the fall of Barcelona in 1714. This stresses the well-known Catalan stereotype
of pragmatism, mobilised as a foundational myth of the nation. It also taps into
pairalisme, ‘homesteading’, or the ruralism of excursionisme, the group activities of
hillwalking and mountain-climbing in the Pyrenees. Such an emphasis is intended
to differentiate Catalan history from that of the rest of Spain, stressing its membership
of Carolingian Europe as a contrast to Moorish Spain. He highlights the openness
of Catalans to values of modernity such as industrialisation, hard work and

commerce, again mobilised as a sign of difference from the rest of Spain.34
The second strand is an explicit emphasis on high technology, economic
competitiveness, and European integration where he has attempted to combine the
two tropes of historical awareness and international progress. An excerpt from his
speech on the Diada (National Day) of 1995 demonstrates this:
…it’s the moment to make Catalunya, on the basis of our timeless identity, of
our identity as a nation, on the basis of our desire to innovate and work that
has guided us since the 18th century, on the basis of the great progress made
since the recovery of our autonomy, on the base of the efforts of all, without
exception; on these bases it is the moment to make Catalunya the leading
country that we couldn’t do in 1714. A modern country, with good economic
growth, with wide and well-distributed social welfare, with balanced
territorial development, with well-trained people, a country of people with a
desire for taking the initiative. A country that can be a motor in Spain and in
Europe, and in the heart of the Western Mediterranean.35
While the combination of tradition and modernity is hardly unique in nationalist

rhetoric, it is interesting that Pujol makes the link in the same breath. The
Generalitat has opened commercial offices around the world, most notably in
Brussels and Japan, and has participated enthusiastically in forging regional alliances
across borders (with the French regions of Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-
Pyrénées) and with technologically advanced regions in the Four Motors alliance
(with Lombardy, Rhône-Alpes, Baden-Württemberg and, later, Wales). Pujol has
been very active in visiting state leaders—including Israel and the US presidency —
and in the evolving Committee of the Regions in the European Union.36
The third strand is that of establishing the Catalan language as the principal
means of communication in Catalonia. This was not easy given the degree of
linguistic repression under the dictatorship, and the huge numbers of Castilian-
speaking immigrants that arrived in the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1970s, it was
estimated that Catalan could be spoken by two-thirds of the region’s population,
and understood by 80%. However, it could be written by only around 10%, as
Castilian was the official language of education. Pujol’s intention was to normalise
the use of Catalan in education and administration, and to this end a law was passed
in 1983 in the Catalan parliament with all-party support. This was to be
consolidated by the Generalitat’s intervention in the media, most notably through
the establishment of Catalan language television channels. In 1983, TV3 began
functioning, followed by a second channel, Canal 33, five years later.37 Crucially
Pujol gained early support by stressing a relatively radical appeal that would
consider a Catalan to be someone who spoke the Catalan language, regardless of
their origin, arguing that ‘Catalonia cannot be fully restored without the
contribution of the working class’.38 Latterly, he has moved to a more conservative
rhetoric favouring assimilation above multiple identities, which explains the
reticence of large parts of Hispanic-origin working class Barcelona to vote for the
CiU.39
Fourth, and most controversially, Pujol has always had a troubled relationship
with Spain, playing a complex game of give and take with the central government.
While swearing loyalty to the Crown and participating in the unfolding of the
young Spanish democratic settlement, he was nonetheless involved in confrontation
with the PSOE government throughout its term in office. These conflicts were often
bitter. In 1981, in the tense aftermath of the failed army coup, the PSOE and the
Francoist reformers of the UCD sought to stall the autonomy process in Spain
through the Ley Orgánica de Armonización del Proceso Autonómico (LOAPA). This
failed, and gave the CiU ammunition to claim that the PSC was a mere branch
party (sucursal) of the PSOE. In 1984, shortly after the CiU’s outstanding electoral
success in the regional elections, the PSOE government unsuccessfully sought to
prosecute Pujol for alleged financial malpractice while a director of Banca Catalana.
This celebrated case was used by the nationalists to argue that Pujol was being
victimised, and that this was in turn an insult to Catalan identity.40 While the
autonomy process slowed down in the 1980s, the CiU continued to consolidate the
powers of the Generalitat. The general election results of 1993 and 1996 gave the
CiU—along with some of the other conservative nationalist parties from elsewhere
in Spain—the balance of power in central government, leading them to work with
both the PSOE and, from 1996, the Spanish nationalist Partido Popular. They have
used this to negotiate a greater degree of financial autonomy from central
government, demanding the retention of first 15% (under the PSOE) and then 30%
(under the PP) of the share of income tax raised in Catalonia.41
This fusion of historical myth, economic competitiveness, European integration
and technological modernity, linguistic nationalism and the speeding up of the
autonomisation process forms a key to understanding Pujol’s nation-building project.
Being aware of the potential criticisms of a mythicised rurality, which may imply a
desire to wallow in nostalgia, he has emphasised the importance of playing the role
of an advanced technological power in Europe. However, he stresses that Catalonia
is not a region, but a nation, existing within the Spanish state. Crucially, this is a
vision that for reasons of political expediency denies the primacy of Barcelona in
Catalan territory. This has been highly strategic: in the 1970s Pujol was making very
strident statements as to the centrality of the city to Catalan culture.42 But that was
before the arrival of Pasqual Maragall and the PSC to power in the mayor’s office of
the Ajuntament.
Maragall’s approach is distinct for a number of reasons. Born in 1941, he comes
from a ‘clan’ of the city’s liberal, secular intelligentsia. He arrived too late to ever
know his grandfather, Joan Maragall, who had died already canonised as Catalonia’s
national poet, noted particularly for his Oda a Espanya, an impassioned tirade
against the dominance of Hispanic culture in Catalonia and an implicit call to
refocus Catalan identity towards Europe. Joan Maragall’s work links the family name
irrevocably with a liberal, cosmopolitan nationalism. For the young Pasqual, his
grandfather’s fame gave material advantage, the family residing among the leafy
villas of Sant Gervasi. But he was soon drawn into the growing struggle against the
regime, becoming a Marxist militant at university, forging links with blue collar
activists in the city’s factories. He married another activist, Diane Garrigosa, during
the years of clandestine opposition, and he makes no secret of the pride he takes in
his grandfather’s reputation.43
And so, by the time of the restoration of democracy, he had for many years been
involved in the city’s affairs. An economist in the city council under the dictatorship,
he had a thorough grooming in the details of municipal policy, something he would
pursue academically, both at the New School for Social Research and at Johns
Hopkins University during the 1970s. His doctoral thesis was an exploration of
urban land prices in Barcelona. These formative years would have an undeniable
influence on his political doctrine once he became mayor. Plotting in cafés, an
enthusiastic supporter of FC Barcelona, studying and teaching at the city’s
universities, it is little surprise that in his acceptance speech as mayor he described
himself as a ‘devoted and painfully smitten son’ of the city.44
While Maragall’s immediate concerns may have always been to consolidate his
political power base in Barcelona, his broader strategies have been directed towards
developing a federal Spain. He has strong personal and intellectual reasons for this,
drawing on the tradition both of his grandfather and of the internationalist ideology
inherited from Spanish republicanism. Above all, he has inherited a nuanced view of
Catalonia as being defined in part by outside forces, Europe and Spain. Making
explicit reference to his grandfather’s most powerful work, Oda a Espanya, a lament
over the long and tortured relationship of Catalonia to Spain, he argues that the poet’s
final line ‘Adéu Espanya’ (goodbye Spain) should now be re-assessed. He speaks of a
‘Catalunya oberta’ (open Catalonia) as opposed to a ‘Catalunya tancada’ (closed
Catalonia) of ‘classic’ nationalism. He states that he is a Catalanist, not a nationalist.
This has several implications for his political project.45
First, one of his favourite aphorisms is that ‘Catalonia is a reality Spain is a
project’.46 Unlike CiU’s ambivalent attitude to Spain—striving for as much
autonomy as it can get within the Spanish state—Maragall stresses the potential
contributions that Catalonia can give to Spain. He begins from the conviction—
legitimate when one views its turbulent history—that Spain has never been a
completed project, a unified nation. The only way to achieve completion is to
recognise the plurality of identities which exist within its territory This is where
Catalonia can make a contribution. The modernisation of the Spanish state which
occurred from the end of the dictatorship—perhaps most significantly through the
de-politicisation of the army—has also demanded a modernisation of Catalan
nationalism. ‘[F]rom the moment when the phantom of a totalitarian and
oppressive Spain disappears, it is possible and necessary to think about Catalan
participation in the Spanish politics of building this unfinished reality’.47 This
demands a responsible, non-confrontational role for Catalonia, a move ‘beyond
nationalism’, and Maragall suggests that a ‘mature’ Catalan identity is able to cast
off its defensive, exclusive sense. ‘I think that we will hear more and more of
Catalanism and not of nationalism’, in the sense of a cultural identity based on a
Catalunya oberta.48 He speaks of the importance of a strictly federal Spain, as

opposed to the rather more Darwinian autonomisation process favoured by Pujol.
Second, moving beyond the nation still requires an alternative territorial power
base, and it is here that he envisages cities as being crucial. Barcelona should be the
capital of Catalonia, a capital in Spain (he is here questioning the need for nation-
states to have single capitals), and a major player in a ‘Europe of the cities’. These roles,
he argues, are all inter-related. As capital of Catalonia, the city can contribute to the
development of a cosmopolitan, non-essentialist Catalanism. As a reflection of the
city’s influence within Spain, and undoubtedly as a piece of political
entrepreneurialism as well, Maragall has suggested that the city should be the site of
the second house of the Spanish parliament, the senate. This ‘bicapitality’ would
reflect the plurality which exists in Spain (though needless to say this idea has been
received coolly by his socialist colleagues in Andalusia and Madrid, and has little
chance of being realised). But it is his role as a leading member of a putative system
of European cities that has been one of the distinguishing features of Maragall’s
political strategy. While this has a powerful economic rationale (see chapter 4), it is
also consonant with his belief in a greater political and cultural role for cities in the
emerging map of a New Europe. His protagonism in this area has been recognised
by his municipal colleagues throughout Europe: he was elected joint president of the
European Union’s Committee of the Regions, having cut his teeth on the lobby
groups of European municipalities, the Council of European Municipalities and
Regions and the Eurocities network. This combination of arguments in part reflects
his desire to expand his urban power base, to create for himself a wider political
space. But it is also consistent with his argument for cities in general to have a
greater input into the political life of nation-states, something which the expanding
European Union could allow.49
Third, and related, to realise a Catalunya oberta requires a greater emphasis on the
role of cities within society. Rather than adopting the ruralist, conservative tropes of
Pujol, he stresses the richness of urban culture. He argues that cities are the fora in
which tolerance and plurality can exist most easily, tapping into traditions of civic
humanism.
He celebrates cities as the fusion of different cultures, in contrast to Pujol’s
obsession with normalising Catalan. He downplays the role of language in the
formation of nations: ‘It’s very important, but look, the language of a country is not
just its tongue. It’s the way of life, gastronomy, landscapes, industries. So it’s not
just its tongue. To try to normalise all that is impossible’.50
He goes on to contrast the case of Catalonia with the separatist claims of the likes
of the Alto Adigio and Brittany, arguing that the latter examples lack major cities.
Catalonia has Barcelona, and it is this—he asserts—which makes Catalonia a nation.
To this end, his vision of Catalonia is undeniably one shaped by metropolitan
consciousness. The fruits of this can be seen throughout Barcelona: a commitment
to avant-garde art and architecture; the projection of the city internationally through
the Olympics; a stress on activating citizenship through the provision of public
spaces, festivals and cultural institutions. In many ways it is this celebration of urban
life, the city as a plural space, which marks his outlook. ‘I believe that Barcelona’s
richness comes precisely through its human density, and its major problem comes,
also, from this human density’.51 To solve such problems—pollution,
unemployment, congestion—the city should be given greater fiscal and political
autonomy. Thus the city forms the basic unit of his political vision. Concretely,
Barcelona’s hegemony in Catalonia prevents a slip into a Catalunya tancada.
Taken together, these rhetorical and strategic approaches to Catalonia
can provide us with an understanding of how Barcelona relates to the wider political
projects of Maragall and Pujol. As evidence, I now look at the two major conflicts
between the men which strained relations for much of the 1980s and 1990s, the
first over the territorial distribution of power between Barcelona city council and
the Generalitat, the second over control of the 1992 Olympics.
Battle I:
Barcelona vs. Catalonia?
Under the Francoist mayor Porcioles, Barcelona had always dominated its
surrounding area, and had an enormous weight within Catalonia as a whole.
Barcelona, as defined by its municipal boundary, had been gradually reaching
saturation point in terms of population, and in 1980 its population numbered 1,
752,627 people out of 5,958,208 in Catalonia as a whole. In the early years of the
new democracy, the area under the strategic jurisdiction of the Corporació
Metropolitana de Barcelona (CMB) had a population of 3,096,748 (1981),
accounting for 52% of the Catalan population. The Barcelona municipality itself is
at the heart of Catalonia’s employment, in the mid-1990s containing 42.2% of its
service jobs and 26.7% of those in manufacturing.52 Established in 1974 ostensibly
as a means of regulating the metropolitan region, the CMB was always seen as a
formalisation of Barcelona city council’s domination over the surrounding
municipalities, dwarfing the other 26 councils represented in the corporation. The
body’s competences were largely strategic, overseeing issues such as transport, water
provision and treatment, sanitation and pollution. However, the imbalance between
Barcelona and its smaller neighbours, the enthusiasm of Porcioles for siting
cemeteries and rubbish dumps on the land of the smaller councils, and the CMB’s
role in the uncontrolled speculation of property developers made it a target of the
Left for abolition. By the late 1970s, with the PSC and PSUC dominating the local
elections, it appeared that its days were numbered.53
The surprise success of the CiU and Pujol in the 1980 Generalitat elections
changed all that. Deprived of the power which they had assumed would be theirs,
the PSC had to re-assess their position vis-à-vis the issue of political control of
Catalan territory. The substantial weight of the CMB relative to Catalonia meant that
control of Barcelona city council would give its mayor considerable power to rival
the hegemony of the Generalitat, despite the fact that it covers only 1.5% of
Catalonia’s territorial area.54 And in the towns of the red belt, such as Cornellà,
Badalona, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, or Sant Adrià de Besós, there was an in-built

communist/socialist vote.55
But even before the PSC’s 1980 electoral debacle, Maragall was stressing the need
for a co-ordinated position which rebalanced the relationship between the central
city and its surrounding towns, outlining his strategy in a series of three articles
published in La Vanguardia. He began with a summary of the city’s urban geography,
arguing that in contrast to the suburbanisation of the rich in the US and many
European cities, in Barcelona the rich remain clustered in the centre. As a result, he
continues, the core is maintained and the suburbs are degraded, with a few
exceptions such as Castelldefels and Sant Cugat. To address this, Maragall argued
that there had to be a redistribution of services throughout the metropolitan area.
Furthermore, he asserted that the nature of the metropolitan region was such that
many people lived in one municipality, worked in another, and went out in a third,
leading to gross imbalances in resource distribution. His solution was for a personal
income tax levied at the metropolitan level which could then be redistributed
allowing for an equilibrium in service provision.56 As a highly active president of the
CMB, Maragall began to expand the body’s powers and prestige through projects
such as the Vallés technology park, or the assumption of new powers such as those of
public transport, along with a growing institutional recognition: the metropolitan
region’s mayors being received by the King, central government awarding it a
special funding regime, and the corporation reaching the zenith of its powers by
hosting a United Nations conference.
As the 1980s wore on Pujol continued with his plans to consolidate the power of
the Generalitat and linguistic ‘normalisation’, developing two Catalan language
television channels and achieving an overall electoral majority in the 1984
Generalitat elections. This was an uneasy cohabitation: there was a growing feeling
in the Generalitat that their powers were beginning to be directly challenged by the
CMB in some key areas. And within the CMB’s administration there was a fear that
they were overstepping the mark: the frenetic removal of the corporation’s banner
shortly before a visit from Pujol, a man who pays considerable attention to the
importance of flags as symbols, showed the climate of tension which existed in the
mid-1980s.57 With the Olympic nomination looming—which would give Maragall
an unprecedented raise in profile—Pujol realised that it was time to act. Having a
range of options at his disposal—reducing the competences of the corporation, for
example, while leaving it to control certain functional areas where a strategic
overview was important—Pujol decided on the maximalist course of action. In
April 1987 the nationalist-controlled Catalan parliament voted for the outright
abolition of the CMB, this despite the pleas of high-profile businessmen and a
strong press and publicity campaign mounted by the corporation against the move.
The obvious parallel with the Conservative response to the Greater London
Council’s political counterweight—rumbling on at the same time—was not lost
locally. And the lack of a co-ordinated replacement suggested that, as in the case of
the GLC, there had been little consideration as to how best the competences should
be shared out.58
The solution chosen by Pujol reflects many of the territorial preferences of the
Catalan nationalists. The CMB’s competences were distributed to new bodies,
principally the consells comarcals, which were seen as being an adequate level to
consolidate many of Catalonia’s tiny municipalities. The Generalitat retained the
power of strategic planning. But the creation of the 41 comarcas—medium-sized
territorial units akin to counties—led some commentators to pose a dichotomy: on
one hand, the ruralist, eternal Catalonia based on the new administrative divisions
(which in turn corresponded to the pre-Francoist situation); on the other, the
cosmopolitanism of the Olympic city-state. Under Pujol’s system, Barcelona was
but one comarca among many.59 This comarcalisme had led one enthusiastic
nationalist mayor of the pre-Pyrenean, rural centre of Vic to exclaim that ‘Catalonia
begins in Vic’, this belying the town’s relative insignificance against the urban giant
of Barcelona (Vic is more famous for its cathedral and sausage factories than
anything else). Such an attitude has been detected in many of the Generalitat’s
publications, as if there is a general reluctance to even accept the existence of the
metropolitan area. The Generalitat’s spending per capita is lowest in the comarcas of
the metropolitan region, and they have been very slow in formulating a regional
planning framework despite an unbroken spell in power since 1980.60
The scuffle over the metropolitan region represents a clear conflict in hegemonic
strategies for Catalonia. The failure of the PSC in the Generalitat elections of 1980
and 1984 allowed the nationalists to consolidate their control. Yet the urban power
base of the socialists increased the stakes in the municipal elections, putting control
of the city council at a premium for the future political strategies of the socialists
and the nationalists. And this gave rise to the second major battle for Barcelona,
that of the Olympics.
Battle II:
The Olympics
That the Olympics were to be held in 1992 was a source of some controversy for
political and cultural commentators both in Spain and abroad. The portent of the
year itself sent shivers through most Catalans, whether left or right wing; it marked
500 years since the putative discovery of America by Columbus (who returned from
his journey to Barcelona), which provided a founding myth for the Spanish empire
which was sustained under Francoism. The same year also marked the ‘reconquest’
of Spain by the Catholic monarchs, accompanied by the expulsion of Jews and
Muslims. This provided a founding myth of Spanish racial purity and religious
orthodoxy. The UCD government of Francoist reformers which ruled until 1982
had proposed a World Expo, to be held in Seville, for 1992, established with the
purpose of celebrating the quincentenary of the ‘discovery’. This had to be
ideologically recast somewhat by the PSOE, the leadership of which were
nonetheless delighted to indulge in some easy clientelism in one of its most
important power bases. With the Olympics going to Barcelona, this left Madrid
with the European City of Culture award for 1992. Taken together, the triumvirate
of events served to call world media attention to the emergence of a new, economically
buoyant Spain.
The spectres raised were not lost on the Catalans, who feared that the Games
would be used as part of a cultural and political Hispanicisation, a breaking of the
process of developing autonomous communities. The events were both cultural and
symbolic:
They were explicitly intended to celebrate Spain’s coming of age as a modern,

democratic European nation-state, marking the end of a period of political
transition (and uncertainty)… But these popular celebrations of Spain’s new
status tended to neglect the past and glorify the present. Indeed this seemed to
be part of an official attempt to represent Spain’s new, ‘modern’,
democratic national identity as if it were built on a tabula rasa, thus avoiding
confrontation with the cultural, social, regional and political tensions that
plagued Spain since its emergence as a nation-state.61
For the PSOE, the Olympics, as with the Expo in Seville, provided opportunities to
market both Barcelona and Spain as an expanding market and an investment
opportunity. The Games were also a chance to show that Spain was able to
participate fully in the international community after decades of isolation, an active
foreign policy being an essential component of the government’s strategy of
internationalisation and modernisation. This would also be accompanied by a cult of
technology, exemplified by the emphasis placed on developing Spain’s
communications infrastructure. This was focused on Seville, with the high-speed
train, the AVE, having its first branch between Seville and Madrid, and the city
receiving a massive airport expansion. Barcelona would also see its airport extended,
along with improved communications facilities and highway construction. 1992,
and the years leading up to it, would thus be a shop-window for a government
anxious to attract foreign investment, a means of rapidly modernising the country.62
But the Games were initiated in a very different political and economic climate.
As I described in the previous chapter, the city leadership’s stated reasons for
bidding for the Olympics were to give Barcelona’s populace a psychological boost,
and to provide a global project to focus the administration’s activities. However,
there was also a subtext of deep political significance. The plot to stage the Games
which took place between ostensibly polarised sides—between the ex-Francoist
Samaranch and the socialist mayor Narcís Serra—was not the only piece of political
conspiracy to be taking place in Spain at the time. The progress towards democracy
had provoked extreme responses from a range of political groupings. The Francoist
‘bunker’, the diehard supporters of the dictatorship concentrated mainly in the
army, some sections of the nobility and ultra-political cells, had long sought to halt
the reform process. Bloody and provocative Basque terrorism and the fears that the
autonomy process was leading to the break-up of Spain had in turn inspired bloody
and provocative police and army repression, and had led to a series of plots to
overthrow the democracy and re-impose dictatorship. The coup on 23rd February,
1981—the 23-F—was, therefore, not unexpected.63
In this context, the agreement between Samaranch and Serra made perfect sense.
It was apparent that to stage the Games successfully would require a lot of co-
operation between the old and new orders. The mayor knew that the successful
establishment of Spain as a constitutional democracy required the Left to moderate
their demands and work diplomatically with the so-called poderes fácticos, the
powers-that-be such as the army, monarchy and capital. Choosing the hugely
symbolic Armed Forces Day as the occasion to inform the King of his plans, Serra
effectively sought to establish Barcelona not as the capital of a separatist nation, but
rather as a city loyal to Spain, and to the consolidation of democracy. He made such
a favourable impression on the armed forces that he was made Minister of Defence
in the first PSOE government.64
Maragall’s subsequent accession to the post of mayor in late 1982 ensured
a continuity of this policy. This was bad news for the Catalan nationalists, for whom
control of Barcelona would have been priceless. Instead, as the conflict over the
LOAPA and Banca Catalana would prove, the 1980s were to be a period of socialist-
nationalist struggle, with Barcelona a key strategic command point in the
hegemonic strategies of both sides. Worse still, Maragall and the PSC could not
easily be set up as enemies of Catalonia, although Pujol would use the LOAPA as an
indication of the true, Hispanicist vocation of the PSOE. The PSC had been
ardently opposed to the proposed law, and was largely composed of activists who
had militated in favour of Catalan autonomy under the dictatorship. They were in a
position to unite both the city’s recently arrived Hispanic working classes and a
substantial proportion of the Catalan middle classes. And Maragall’s exploitation of
the post of mayor would provide a significant challenge as a figurehead to Pujol’s
presidency of Catalonia. This occurred in three main areas.
First, Maragall would use the Olympic success as a means of establishing himself
as a popular, moderate mayor. His rhetoric was always oriented more strongly to civic,
rather than class, identity. The victory in Lausanne in 1986, which was beamed
around the globe, showed the moustachioed mayor centre-stage, wildly embracing
colleagues and supporters. His appearance before cheering crowds in Plaça de
Catalunya on the night of the announcement would associate him clearly as the man
who had brought the Olympics to the city, Pujol hovering nervously behind him,
conscious of being the spectre at the feast. Maragall’s influence was decisively
increased by the Olympic statute’s assertion that the Games were, indeed, a civic
event, with the mayor of the host city being the political figurehead. In opinion
polls throughout the 1980s Maragall would rank as one of the most popular political
figures in the whole of Spain, aided by a genuinely disarming media persona. He
tirelessly lobbied his socialist colleagues in central government for more funding,
increasing the tension between himself and González in the process. Thus his
occupancy of the mayor’s office would be characterised by his attempts to identify
himself with Barcelona rather more than with a political party.65
Plate 3 October 1986: Pasqual Maragall takes the acclaim of the crowds in Plaça de
Catalunya having returned from Lausanne with the prize of the 1992 Olympics. Narcís Serra
is to his left; Jordi Pujol claps over-enthusiastically on his right. (Source: Arxiu Fotogràfic de
l’Ajuntament de Barcelona; Pérez de Rozas)
Second, under his leadership Barcelona would change enormously in terms of

physical infrastructure. As subsequent chapters will show, the city strengthened its
economic base and was endowed with vastly improved communications
infrastructure, arts facilities and environmental quality. Much of the funding for
this came to the city specifically for the Games. Thus in a period of intense
porkbarrel politics, the nationalists were almost entirely unable to gain any political
capital.
Third, Maragall tirelessly sought to maximise the opportunity of Olympic
leadership with a proactive foreign policy. His Europeanist vocation I have described
above. But he also looked further afield. In 1986, he had a quasidiplomatic meeting
with the then US vice-president George Bush, with the secretary-general of the
United Nations, with the Soviet ambassador to the White House, and with the
mayors of Boston, Chicago and New York, falling out with Ed Koch over Spain’s
favourable contacts with Cuba. He was then able to make a top-grade photo
opportunity jogging across Central Park with his two daughters in a ‘Barcelona ‘92’
running top.66 During the Games themselves, he was fully occupied receiving high-
ranking official visitors from throughout the world.
With Barcelona a keystone in the building of the PSOE’s New Spain, and with
Maragall forming an effective alternative vision of Catalanism, Pujol saw the need to
lead a counter-attack which could rein in Maragall’s Olympic ambitions. This had
two strands: he used the financial and regulatory powers of the Generalitat to hinder
the council’s project in various ways, and he mounted an alternative campaign

which increased the profile of the Generalitat and Catalonia. As a hindrance, the
CiU was able to use its overall majority in the Catalan parliament to slow the
infrastructural improvements which the socialists hoped to gain from the Olympics.
The spending breakdown of public sector investments shows that the Generalitat’s
contribution was only 22% of the total, this largely focused on the ring-roads, the
financing of sports infrastructure and the development of the sub-sites outside the
city.67 This was despite the fact that the regional level of government has a far
greater distribution of funding from the centre than do the municipalities. The
council wanted to extend the metro system to Montjuïc, the principal site of the
Games, with the intention of continuing it to the peripheral housing estates of the
Zona Franca, lying behind the hill. And it argued for a large expansion in the city’s
luxury hotel sector, pointing to Barcelona’s relative lack of high-class hotel
accommodation for the expected tourist invasion, particularly that of the prestigious
‘Olympic family’ of high-ranking sports officials. The first was refused funding, the
second went ahead only after a considerable delay as the Generalitat refused to
approve changes of use.68
The second line of attack had a far more visible, even dramatic, effect. It was
quickly realised that the publicity opportunities offered by the Games were
unprecedented. The Generalitat had to take advantage of them in presenting
Catalonia’s position as a separate nation within the Spanish state. This took two
forms: orthodox publicity campaigns combined with some carefully designed
political agitation.
The most notable publicity campaign took place in July 1992, as the Games were
about to begin. Digging deep in the Generalitat’s budget, Pujol undertook an
extremely ambitious piece of place marketing, running a two-page advert worldwide,
in Europe, Japan, Australia and North America. It appeared in, among others, the
Financial Times, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, The Times, Le
Monde, La Repubblica, Newsweek, Time, Fortune, The Economist, L’Express, Der
Spiegel and Stern. Running on two odd-numbered consecutive pages, the first page
showed a blank square with a dot labelled ‘Barcelona’. Nothing else in the square.
Underneath, the caption ‘In which country would you place this point?’. On the
following page, the square has been filled with a map of Western Europe in relief,
the territory of Catalonia filled in with black. Underneath, the caption ‘In
Catalonia, of course’. Below, in smaller writing, ran a short description of
Catalonia’s significance, its cultural identity, and so on. And in slightly larger
letters, the logo and name of the Generalitat.69
The agitation was equally high profile. There already existed a variety of groups in
Catalonia which sought to press both republican and separatist claims. A small
terrorist movement, Terra Lliure, had been operating for some years in Catalonia.
More publicly, the radical pressure group, La Crida a la Solidaritat, had revived as
the perceived Hispanicisation of the Olympics proceeded. It had first appeared,
born on 18th March, 1981, in response to the ‘Manifiesto de los 2300’, a petition which
claimed that the Castilian language was in danger of survival in Catalonia. This came
at a sensitive time, less than a month after the 23-F, which hinted at a likely stalling
of the process of autonomisation. La Crida had managed to draw together 1300
groups in a demonstration at the Camp Nou in June of 1981, and followed this up
with a demonstration the following year against the LOAPA. But it had failed to
resolve a basic problem of being a civic movement with a direct link to the
nationalists and an antagonism towards the socialists.70 Pujol was anxious to
marginalise the radical separatist groups, who he saw as being counter-productive
extremists, and to this end funded his party’s own youth movements on several
occasions to provide an on-street presence based around the media-friendly English
language slogan ‘Freedom for Catalonia’. This strategy was to backfire.
On the 8th of September, 1989, Barcelona was to open its Olympic stadium as it
hosted the 5th Athletics World Cup. Crucially, this was to be attended by the royal
family, the constitutional heads of the Spanish state, flanked by Maragall and
leading dignitaries of the PSC. Pujol had provided members of his own party’s
youth movement with 500 free tickets and Catalan flags in order to counteract the
powerfully symbolic ceremonial presence of the Spanish monarchy. With 2000
police—many brought in from outside Catalonia—surpervising an event attended
by 20,000 spectators, the climate of hostility and mistrust was sharpened by
frisking and the confiscation of nationalist flags at the entrances. In pouring rain
which inundated a stadium with a defective drainage system, and with the crowd’s
irritability increased by the late arrival of the royal family, the latter’s entrance into
the stadium was met with boos from the 2000 or so members of the nationalist
groups inside. The Spanish national anthem was then whistled by a substantial
proportion of the crowd. During the ceremony, unbeknown to much of the
audience who mistook them for fireworks, members of Terra Lliure launched rocket
flares over the stadium in a defiant—if feeble—show of resistance, before escaping
into the graveyard which backs onto the stadium. In short, the whole day—crucial
to the council’s attempts to launch the Olympic campaign successfully —was an all-
round fiasco, to Pujol’s jubilation. His joy would be short-lived. His son Oleguer
had been captured on film as one of the protagonists in the jeering of the monarchy:
the royal palace demanded, and received, a restatement of Pujol’s loyalty to the
Crown.71
The second prominent piece of agitation occurred on the eve of the Games, and
marked the arrival of the Olympic flame on Catalan soil. Television cameras could
not fail to capture the Freedom for Catalonia signs placed at strategic points along
the way, nor were the media slow to pick up on the fact that 6 out of 7 of Pujol’s
children ran with the Freedom banner on one of the stages: Oleguer Pujol’s face
featured heavily in the following day’s newspapers. Despite their failure to draw
mass support for the cause—only 1000 turning up at the torch’s arrival at the hearth
of Catalan nationalism, the monastery of Montserrat—they had attracted
considerable media attention. Again, the agitation had been funded by the
Generalitat, the CDC and the municipalities controlled by the CiU under the legal
heading of the Acció Olímpica pressure group.72
The realisation that the Olympics could fail, to the detriment of all concerned,
had already been enough to encourage co-operation. A pact was agreed shortly
before the Games began. On the 12th of June, 1992, Maragall and Pujol presented
a joint statement stressing the need for unity and the congruence of a pride in
Catalonia and friendship with visitors from other parts of Spain and the world.
Catalan was to be one of the four official languages of the Games (along with
English, French and Castilian), and was to be used equally with the other three. At
the opening and closing ceremonies, both the Catalan (Els Segadors) and Spanish
anthems would be played. When the King entered the stadium, the flags of Spain,
Catalonia and Barcelona would all be displayed on the pitch.73 A day later came the
Freedom torch stunt by the Pujol juniors: the subsequent fury of the socialists at the
nationalist ‘betrayal’ nearly threatened the truce.
Despite the nationalist flags and paraphernalia which so impressed the foreign
press, during the event itself it would be Maragall and Serra who were pictured at the
side of the royal family as they attended the events. Support from the participating
Catalan athletes themselves for the nationalist cause was muted: few followed the
example of Barça player Pep Guardiola in openly stating his distinct Catalan
identity. And for many the abiding memory of the Games came in the final of the
football tournament when Spain defeated Poland to win gold in front of a capacity
crowd in the Camp Nou. The sight of Catalan and Spanish flags being waved
together may have troubled the nationalists (Spanish flags being waved in the Camp
Nou!), but for many they marked the successful conclusion of a potentially troubled
Games.74
What the battle for political control demonstrated was the symbolic importance
which an event as large as the Olympics would have on the Catalan and Spanish
political process. Given that they were focused on the city, this unavoidably gave
credence to Maragall’s version of a city-state at the forefront of Catalan
development. While Pujol could claim that ‘[s]trictly speaking, these are the Games
of Barcelona. But spiritually, politically, and sentimentally, they are also the Games
of Catalonia’,75 there was little he could do to counter the boost that Maragall had
received from the Games. Despite a Spain-wide swing against the socialists, he was
re-elected as mayor of Barcelona in 1995, and the nationalists were left, yet again,
shut out of the Catalan capital.
✤✤✤
Barcelona has often acted as a pivot for competing Catalan identities. The city has
an influence that far outstrips its population or territorial size. As a focus of political
repression, it developed forms of political mobilisation and identity which still
inform today’s politics. As an electoral battleground it remains one of the biggest
prizes in Spanish municipal politics. As a conduit of economic flows it contributes
enormously to Catalonia’s high international profile. And it has important symbolic
dimensions in the way that both city and nation (Catalonia and Spain) are
constructed. The imagination and discourse of the major players— Maragall and Pujol
—are both spatial and historical, in that both mobilise and are mobilised by
particular interpretations of place through time, their own life experiences being
inextricable from the political strategies they have for harnessing both resources and
particular identities in Barcelona, Catalonia and beyond,
Separatism or devolutionary demands have often been refuted as a form of ‘special
pleading’ by detractors, often those on the Left who seek to use a nationally co-
ordinated macro-economic strategy to stimulate growth and redistribute income to
disadvantaged regions. However, recent events suggest that the regional level may be
growing in importance, something which the Left would be ill-advised to ignore.
What is distinctive about Maragall’s approach is not only that he is alive to questions
of cultural identity, but also that he tries to fuse this with a redefined European
social democracy which is constructed using the city as a lens. This programme—
which combines pragmatic realism with the ideal of cities as spaces of difference—is
the subject of the next chapter.
Notes
1 Cited in Ladrón de Guevara et al. (1995).

2 Harvie (1994).
3 Martin Kettle, ‘Regional Europe: a god set to fail’, Guardian 25 April 1992.
4 Nairn (1992).
5 See, for example, Cooke et al. (1997).
6 Meegan (1994).
7 Harvie (1994), p. 5.
8 Jenkins and Sofos (1996).
9 Harvie (1994).
10 Amin and Thrift (1995).
11 Bianchini and Schwengel (1991); Jäggi et al. (1977); Looseley (1995).
12 Hughes (1991).
14 Richards (1995).
15 Ucelay Da Cal (1995).
16 Ucelay Da Cal (1995), p. 146.
17 Balcells (1996), p. 140.
18 Lorés (1985), pp. 13–14.
20 Crolley (1997).
21 Cited in El Gran Album del Barça, supplement to La Vanguardia (1996), p. 70.
22 Cited in Balfour (1989), quotation from p. 9.
23 This account is drawn from Balfour (1989), pp. 124–36, who offers a taut account of
the varying traditions of industrial militancy in the towns of greater Barcelona under
the dictatorship.
24 See ‘SEAT: 40 años de Cataluña’, La Vanguardia Magazine, 12 December 1993.
25 Balfour (1989), pp. 173–7.
26 Balfour (1989), p. 198.
27 Francese Arroyo and Francese Valls (1997), ‘Una transición peculiar’, Memoria de
Catalunya, supplement to El País, pp. 17–25.
28 Balcells (1996).
28 See Candel (1985).

30 Sebastián Serrano (1997), ‘La victoria por sorpresa de Pujol’, Memoria de Catalunya,
supplement to El País, pp. 129–37, quotation from p. 133.
31 Febrés and Rivière (1991), p. 148.
32 Cited in Jordi Busquets (1997), ‘La refundación del nacionalismo’, Memoria de
Catalunya, supplement to El País, pp. 97–104, quotation from p. 100.
33 Subirós (c. 1993), p. 48.
34 Guibernau (1997), p. 102. This is a useful discussion of the various tropes used by
Pujol in the construction of his vision of Catalonia.
35 Jordi Pujol, ‘Cataluña, motor en España y Europa’, El País 11 September 1995.
36 Antich (1994); Walter Oppenheimer (1997), ‘La proyección exterior de Catalunya’,
Memoria de Catalunya, supplement to El País, pp. 241–8.
37 Antich (1994); Keating (1996), pp. 134–45.
38 Pujol (1991), p. 137, cited in Guibernau (1997), p. 104.
39 Guibernau (1997) provides a useful analysis of Pujol’s nation-building rhetoric, making
reference to how it has changed over the years.
40 Preston (1986).
41 Guibernau (1997).
42 Antich (1994).
43 Febrés and Rivière (1991).
44 Arenós and Saladrigas (1997), pp. 340–65; Capmany and Maragall (1983), quotation
from p. 23.
45 Febrés and Rivière (1991); Maragall (1987), p. 120.
46 Maragall (1987), p. 211.
47 Maragall (1987), p. 135.
48 Maragall (1987), p. 120.
49 Set out explicitly in ‘Les ciutats i Europa’, in Maragall (1987), pp. 151–61.
50 Interview with Tomàs Delclós (1997), Memoria de Catalunya, supplement to El País,
p. 236.
51 Maragall (1987), pp. 75–6.
52 Mancomunitat de Municipis (1995), p. 319.
53 See Fabre and Huertas (1985).
54 Figures from Cabré and Pujades (1985).
55 Riera (1993); Balfour (1989), especially chapter 2.
56 Pasqual Maragall, ‘Area Metropolitana: una ocasión histórica’, La Vanguardia 18
August 1979; ‘Area Metropolitana: una ocasión histórica II’, 19 August 1979; ‘Area
Metropolitana: una ocasión histórica III’, 21 August 1979, each partially reproduced
in Subirós (c. 1993), pp. 33, 72–3.
57 Lluís Unía (1997), ‘La batalla por el territorio’, Memoria de Catalunya, supplement to
El País, pp. 225–33, quotation from p. 227.
58 Lluís Uría (1997), ‘La batalla por el territorio’, Memoria de Catalunya, supplement to
El País, pp. 225–33.
59 Moreno, in Moreno and Vázquez Montalbán (1991), p. 83.
60 Moreno and Vázquez Montalbán (1991).
61 Graham and Sánchez (1995), p. 406.
62 Graham and Sánchez (1995); Harvey (1996); Hooper (1995), chapter 5.
63 Preston (1986).
64 Subirós (c. 1993).

66 In Febrés and Rivière (1991), pp. 62–3.
67 Brunet (1995), pp. 213–14.
69 Walter Oppenheimer (1997), ‘La proyección exterior de Catalunya’, Memoria de
Catalunya, supplement to El País, pp. 241–8.
70 ‘La “Crida”, moviment civic o politic’, Catalunya 1973–1983/L’Avenç., pp. 78– 9.
71 Antich (1994).
72 Antich (1994).
73 Subirós (c. 1993), pp. 66–7.
74 Rosa Regàs (1997), ‘Patria y fútbol’, Memoria de Catalunya, supplement to El País, p.
256.
75 Cited in Subirós (c. 1993), p. 93.
4
The gospel according to Pasqual: mayor
Maragall’s new urban realism
On the 9th of October, 1995, Barcelona’s citizens awoke to find that their city had
reached sixth place in the rankings of the most attractive European city in which to
do business. The annual Healey & Baker survey of executives of the 500 top
European companies—based on criteria such as quality of life and cost and
availability of office space—put Barcelona above the likes of Zurich, Milan and
Munich. Time was when the only rankings valued locally as an indicator of civic
strength were those of the Spanish football league. But by the mid-1990s the
insularity bred by dictatorship had begun to evaporate and, anyway, Madrid was
three places behind in the business poll.1
The high ranking was no accident. The city council had launched itself
wholeheartedly into partnership with the private sector and, in particular, real estate
as a means of modernising the city’s economy and repositioning it within European
space. In 1994, this was vividly illustrated in the Barcelona New Projects exhibition,
a lavish display of the city’s major redevelopment projects. Held in the Gothic
Tinell hall behind the cathedral, the council’s marketing department had set out to
impress foreign visitors. Carpeted with an aerial photograph of the city, flanked by a
booming bank of television screens promoting Barcelona’s charms, the hall was
dotted with little white models of the forthcoming office, leisure, retail and
infrastructural projects scheduled for construction. Here were the shiny Texan
towers of Carrer Tarragona, there the plans for the controversial extension of the
Diagonal to the sea. Plaça de Catalunya with its new commercial centre, the old
port with its World Trade Center, and the Illa shopping, office and hotel strip on
the Diagonal. As Joan Clos, at that time deputy mayor, put it, ‘[t]his exhibition
shows that we are counting on the support, the enthusiasm, and the initiative of
magnificent businessmen’.2
Such a warm embrace of the suits would appear surprising given the local
hostility to property developers under the dictatorship. By the end of the 1980s,
however, social democrats across Europe were warming to the private sector, and
Barcelona was no exception. Under the 15 years of Pasqual Maragall’s leadership,
the city council moved towards a strategy designed to engage proactively with the
restructuring international economy, a social democrat new realism blending a
discourse of internationalism with a thorough knowledge of the demands of the
single European market. Maragall talks up the market at the same time as he tries to
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO PASQUAL 85
throttle out planning gains throughout the city. He promotes the public realm and
values of citizenship and civility, all the while juggling them with the account book.
And he discusses all this in terms which reveal an acute understanding of the
pressures facing urban leaders in Barcelona, in Spain, and the New Europe.
Here I look at Maragallisme as a ‘new urban realism’, a specifically city-based
social democratic strategy which accepts capitalism as given, and seeks new ways to
extract some kind of public good from it. While chapter 3 set out Maragall’s particular
vision of the city vis-à-vis Catalonia, my focus here is on the city as a fiefdom of the
Left. It is clear that if nation-states are being buffeted by economic globalisation,
cities are even more vulnerable: squeezed by global flows on one hand and by
central government policy on the other. I begin, therefore, by situating Barcelona
within the wider Spanish economic and political space, particularly the formative
years of the 1980s, la decada socialista. Second, I look at how Maragall has located
his version of Catalanist social democracy within this, and draw attention to his
grasp of the strategic issues facing the European Left as a whole. Third, I set out his
understanding of globalisation and European restructuring, and describe how this
has affected the city’s urban policy. Fourth and fifth, I outline his attempts to
reshape the Left as a progressive political force at a time when socialism is facing a
crisis of legitimacy, describing how Maragallisme prioritises a public sector-led ‘art
of leverage’ and an internationalist conception of citizenship, respectively.
Barcelona in la decada socialista and beyond

On 28th October, 1982, Spain entered a decisive stage in its history by voting in a
social democratic government. Despite the fresh psychological marks of the
attempted coup of 1981, the PSOE achieved a staggering 48.4% of the vote,
gaining the support of over 10 million citizens. The result had an immediate impact
on Barcelona’s political scene. Narcís Serra, who had presided over the city’s
emergence from the transition, was immediately called to serve as Minister of Defence
in the new government. And so, only days after Spain’s dramatic turn to the Left,
Pasqual Maragall would, as deputy, step up to the top of the PSC’s party list and
assume the post of mayor.
Yet while the Left rejoiced, few were under any illusions that the triumph would
represent a turn to radicalism. In the cold light of day, it was apparent that Felipe
González’s government was not about to reverse the wrongs of 45 years of right-
wing rule. Following defeat in the first two general elections of the post-Franco
period—in June 1977 and March 1979—splits had emerged within the PSOE over
the party’s continued self-definition as a Marxist party. Centrists such as González
argued that such a commitment was alienating the crucial centre-ground of Spanish
politics. At the 28th party conference, in the immediate aftermath of the 1979
election defeat, González and his Felipista followers argued for the need to jettison
Marxism and pursue a more moderate, modernising direction. His proposal
defeated, González resigned as leader. Without an obvious successor, however, the
grassroots opposition had no alternative but to comply with Felipe’s call for a
86 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO PASQUAL
Spanish Bad Godesberg, and voted away its commitment to Marxist principles.
González was re-instated as leader.
The way became clear for the PSOE to present its strategy for modernisation,
which had as a core policy full membership of the European Community and
NATO (the latter a remarkable U-turn by González).3 Once in power, González
had been expected to follow the path of the Mitterrand government in France,
nationalising most major industries and services (including banks), and attempting a
Keynesian reflation of the economy. However, at the moment of the PSOE’s
greatest popularity the French experiment was running into crisis. Mitterrand’s
attempts to reflate the domestic economy had failed as the newly wealthy consumer
had used their extra spending power on buying imports, which did little to boost
the uncompetitive French private sector. Furthermore, the French socialists were
faced with the unwelcome truth that international investors had the ability to switch
capital elsewhere, thus precipitating a rise in unemployment.4 The PSOE
government took this as evidence that counter-cyclical reflation was not an available
option, both in terms of macro-economic efficiency and in maintaining cordial
relations with the private sector. They thus set about pursuing a policy of austerity
and rationalisation, arguing that social democratic goals could only be pursued at a
co-ordinated European level (and they stressed the importance of being in line with
other social democratic parties in Europe).5
PSOE strategists argued that Left policies could only be pursued in the long
term, through full and active participation in European integration, with their
‘ideological objectives projected forward in time to the year 2000 and beyond, and
in space to a united Europe’.6 Such teleology had a certain logic, and the first half of
the 1980s saw a general agreement between sections of the labour movement, the
government and the employers’ federation. Towards the end of the decade, however,
relationships between the government and the unions deteriorated to such an extent
that the country was paralysed by a series of general strikes. By the signing of the
Maastricht Treaty in 1991, the government was fully committed to an austerity
programme which would allow the country to meet the convergence criteria
required for membership of the single currency. But the costs of being such
enthusiastic Europeans were going to be great, and the PSOE found themselves in a
dilemma:
…in order to eventually give impetus to the European project of democratic

Socialism, Spain has first to catch up with the most developed member states;
but the restructuring needed to obtain economic convergence tends to
strengthen all those social and political forces which are less concerned with
ideology and more with instituting market reforms.7
Such modernisation was achieved through wholesale privatisation of state industries

and cuts in public spending, and despite an initial expansion of the welfare state, the
PCE and the PSOE’s dispossessed Left were soon muttering about how the
government had shifted into the terrain of the neo-liberal Right, a Spanish
Thatcherism, as many were led to remark.8
The pursuit of neo-liberal policy measures was one thing. More worrying for
those pursuing a socialist agenda was the realisation that the upper echelons of the
PSOE were effectively embedding themselves within a new elite, government and
party distinctions becoming increasingly confused, and linking in with Spain’s high
society and ‘jet-set’. PSOE politicians were regularly pictured in !Hola! magazine
with the rich and famous (los beautiful people, as they were known). For one
commentator, ‘the Socialist party was the vehicle for the coming to power of a new
class of upwardly mobile professionals whose only recourse to rapid ascent was
politics’.9 In addition, the government was particularly associated with Spanish
banking capital, seen as being the key sector where Spain could most successfully
integrate itself into the European market. The Spanish economy boomed through
the 1980s, and the PSOE won further electoral victories in 1986 and 1989, albeit
with reduced support. Between 1986 and 1991 Spain was growing faster than any
other country in the EC, and between 1980 and 1992 it had grown 40% richer in
terms of GDP.10 By contrast, the dismantling of the dictatorship’s corporatist
labour policy had far-reaching effects on the job market. Unemployment, only 2.3%
of the active population in 1973, soon sky-rocketed as state industries were
privatised. While the PSOE had inherited a crisis in 1982 (16.8% unemployment),
by 1994 this had reached 24.7%, young people being particularly hard-hit.11
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the PSOE policies, the effect on Spanish cities
would be profound. The government’s ‘hot money’ policy—where few restrictions
were placed on currency speculation on the peseta in return for a rapid increase in
foreign investment—meant that in the late 1980s the country would undergo a
property boom, both in luxury residential and tourist accommodation and, in the
cities, in a rapid growth in office and retail development and speculation. The full
trappings of a global consumer society were now on tap; the colour supplement
Spain of 1992 was a glitzy affair of fast cars, smart suits, Almodóvar chic and new
suburban apartments.
As Spain was gearing up for its 1992 fiesta—Expo, Olympics and Single Market
membership—the legitimacy of the PSOE was fast being eroded. Most seriously for
the government, it became associated with a spate of corruption scandals, perhaps
the inevitable result of such a long stint in power. While many of these related to
corruption in the banking sector, the most notorious was very heavy news indeed—
covert support to an anti-ETA death squad (los Grupos Anti-Terroristas de Liberación,
or GAL). These would finally see the party’s credibility undermined, and as boom
turned to bust and the Right pulled itself together as a coherent electoral force, the
PSOE lost their absolute majority in 1993, and succumbed to José Maria Aznar’s
Partido Popular in the 1996 general election.12
Yet despite this, Maragall and the PSC again emerged victorious in the 1995
municipal elections, bucking a Spain-wide swing away from the socialists. Local
newspapers attributed the success to the ‘Maragall factor’, the suggestion being that
—for a variety of reasons—significant proportions of the electorate were prepared to

continue supporting the PSC at a city level.13
Maragallisme as social democratic new realism

To recap, Maragall has deep roots in the city’s liberal intelligentsia. His upbringing
in Sant Gervasi and Sarrià can be contrasted sharply with that of, say, Vázquez
Montalbán. He is a child of la zona alta, and his impeccable liberal credentials
pervade his political thought. His fierce personal identification with the city has
strongly influenced his political ideology, an ideology which—I think it is fair to say
—has the political aggrandisement of Barcelona as its central principle. But it is
more than the poetic influence of his grandfather that ties Maragall to the city:
events have conspired to draw him in politically, and have endowed him with a power
base of votes, contacts and local knowledge which has allowed him to project
himself and his city beyond his immediate surroundings. What makes Maragall
reasonably distinctive as a European politician is that he is associated less with a
party or a nation than with a city, and this is why some commentators see
Maragallisme as being the reincarnation of the city-state of renaissance Europe, with
Maragall—appropriately enough—earning the nickname of ‘El Príncep’, ‘The
Prince’.
In common with most Catalan intellectuals of his generation, Maragall’s political
career began when he joined the anti-Francoist opposition, and from his student
days he became a militant Leftist involved first in university politics and then in the
Front Obrer de Catalunya (FOC), a Marxist (though non-Stalinist) party. Such
vanguard parties often recruited from the city’s progre middle classes, and would in
turn seek to strengthen themselves among the proletarian grassroots. As an activist
Maragall would tour the militant, grey districts of the city’s metropolitan area, a
period which he still recalls as being deeply formative:
For me it was tough discovering a world different to what I had known, a

world lacking in so many things… But it also had the attraction of being
new, with people with so much drive… It was students, and a good few more
workers, who created the conditions for political change, although they didn’t
put it into practice until the death of the dictator.14
In his speeches he often invokes this new world—travelling to clandestine meetings

in a SEAT 600—as an analogy for his contemporary exploration of Europe as a new
political space, of which more below.15 However, it was as a student activist, part of
the ‘generation of 1962’, that he cut his political teeth. Maragall—along with
present-day PSC colleagues such as Raimon Obiols and Narcís Serra—were among
those avoiding the baton charges and imprisonment by the police, as they sought to
forge a united Left movement in the city, organising movements and printing
leaflets.
I remember some print-runs as being quite amusing. One was in the

Diagonal, at number 469 or 496—it doesn’t come to mind exactly now—in
the house of Xavier Rubert de Ventós [a prominent philosopher]. Above
everything, up in the attic, there was a printing machine with which we
launched the university movement we created and called Moviment Febrer
1962. We made the leaflets in one night. Raimon Obiols, who was very good
at drawing, drew a Picasso dove and with a stencil produced them in blue, red
and yellow —the three basic colours. At midday the following day we started
throwing them from the tower in the law building, then started running.
Another printing was in a friend’s house, who had a very big house in the
Pasaje de Casablanca, and we set the machine up there…and we put on Bach
at full volume, then jazz and later rock or whatever it was, and we kept on
shouting as if we were having a party so the neighbours wouldn’t hear the
machine.16
This radicalism would become combined with a simultaneous pursuit of a

professional career which would effectively ground him in the business of running
the city, although he didn’t know it at the time. Graduating from the Universitat de
Barcelona in economics and law, in 1965 he secured a job as an economist within
the city council. After marrying, he spent six months in Paris, where he studied
urban and regional planning (one of his lecturers being Jacques Delors). On his return,
however, he found the reformist spirit of the early 1960s had been replaced by the
chilly repression of late Francoism, and in 1971 he left Barcelona for two years to
study at the New School of Social Research in New York. Another apprenticeship:
‘I learnt everything about the city because New York is The City’.17 His attachment
—the wonder of the urbanist let loose in one of the world’s most vivid cities—was
such that he once admitted a desire to write a history of the New York of the 1970s,
a period of rampant free market capitalism, of the counter-culture, the era of
Watergate, Vietnam and Nixon.18 He would return to the US in 1978 to Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore as a visiting lecturer, as well as lecturing at the
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Urban and International Economics,
receiving a doctorate in 1979 for a study 011 land prices in Barcelona.19
However, it was during the first visit—that stay from 1971 to 1973—that
Maragall became increasingly convinced that capitalism was capable of surviving,
and redeveloping, rather than lapsing into crisis.20 This ran contrary to the analysis
of many of his radical contemporaries, and would cement his identity as a social
democrat. He argued for a fusion of socialism with liberalism, retaining the
principles of pluralism and social justice but questioning the instruments of
centralised planning. As Spain’s economic prospects began to close in towards the
end of the decade, he would shift his attention ever more closely towards the
market, and began to look for ways in which both business and public funding
could be used to regenerate the city. Elected as number two on the PSC list in the
1979 local elections, he was given particular responsibility for reforming the city’s
administrative apparatus, and would become acutely aware of the glaring financial
limitations on future spending.
The departure of Serra in 1982 to the Defence Ministry would push Maragall
into the mayor’s office, and to the forefront of the city’s Olympic bid. He saw
immediately how the Games could offer the perfect vehicle for his inclusive, liberal
vision of how Barcelona could be developed, and set about extracting maximum
benefit from the opportunities offered by the bid. The city had celebrated a World’s
Fair in 1888 and an Expo in 1929, which offered very obvious precursors to the
1992 project. Maragall was quick to seize on the parallels:
…the expositions of ’88 and ’29—just like ’92 now—opened new frontiers for
the city. ’88 wasn’t only the Ciutadella, but also the Eixample, and ’29 was
Montjuïc. ’92 is more complex: on one hand, there is Poblenou and the
waterfront, but on the other there is [the need to] finish or redo what in ’88
and ’29 was done badly. Because in ’88 and ’29 a lot of things were built
without firm foundations.21
In other words, the Olympics fitted in with the stitching and clean-up operations
already at work in the city, and the bid marked a shift in scale from the localised project
based on provision of new spaces and facilities on a patchwork basis, to a ‘global’
vision of the city, the planner’s vision of how growth could be rebalanced or
distributed, how the outlying districts could be consolidated, and how
communication could be improved.22 In particular, it allowed the extension of the
city’s expressway system, the regeneration of Montjuïc, and the cleaning and
modernisation of the city’s de-industrialised waterfront, particularly in Poble Nou.
The private sector became heavily involved in the development process, co-
ordinated through public-private organisms such as VOSA (Vila Olímpica S.A.; set
up to co-ordinate the building of the Olympic Village), with the public sector
preparing the site and infrastructure.
Yet aside from the building projects, Maragall’s profile would soar as a result of
the Games, and he would engage fully in the Olympic spirit. In a survey published
La Vanguardia immediately after the Games, he was ranked equal top with King
Juan Carlos as having provided the most identifiable contribution in the running of
the Games.23 As one commentator put it in 1987, ‘[t]ime was when he was spoken
of as the grandson of the poet…[soon] they will start to speak of Joan Maragall as
the grandfather of the mayor’.24 The intense global television coverage of the
Olympics gave him a media profile far beyond that of many high-ranking members
of the Madrid government, and certainly above that of Pujol. His star rose with that
of his city. The infrastructure left in the wake of the Games—the new expressways,
the Olympic Village, the public art— smoothed over the post-’92 economic
recession, and earned him both adulation and grudging respect from across the
political spectrum, allowing him to enhance his profile both in Catalonia and in
Europe.
Indeed, the post-’92 period marked a very clear acceptance by Maragall of the
neo-revisionism at large throughout the social democratic movement. He would
speak more and more of the challenges of globalisation and the single European
market. In 1990 he stated that he wanted Barcelona to be ‘the Vienna of the
nineties’, the Olympic Village a latter-day Karl Marx Hof of social housing (and his
inability to deliver this must go down as his one great failure of the Games).25 By
1994, he was selling the city-commodity as staunchly as any city booster: ‘here you
will find an urban portfolio of the best quality in Europe and at the best price’.26 This
reconciliation with the market was a feature of urban politics in post-Keynesian
Europe, the Olympics laying the foundation for property-led regeneration, place
marketing campaigns, and the expansion of the tourism sector. However, this was
seen as a means of levering in resources for investment in the public sphere, in
services, spaces and culture, as I shall discuss in greater depth below. So it had a
quite clear rationale of redistributing surplus throughout the city.
Such pragmatism allowed survival in the 1995 municipal elections. As we recall
from chapter 1, a glance at the city’s electoral geography reveals that the PSC’s hold
on the city is far from secure. Entering the 1995 campaign, opinion polls suggested
that Maragall’s period in office was very probably about to end. Even the highly
proletarian Nou Barris had shown signs of deserting the socialists in the 1994
European elections, with a 10% drop in the socialist vote as many of its Hispanic-
origin residents switched allegiance (not to the Catalan nationalists, but to the
Partido Popular).27 In the event, the PSC’s vote did fall (from the very high pre-
Olympic levels of 1991), with the party winning its traditional areas— the working
class districts to the north of the city, Nou Barris, Sant Andreu, Sant Martí, Horta-
Guinardó—as well as Sants-Montjuïc and the Ciutat Vella. CiU would take the
predominantly middle class districts of Les Corts, Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, the Eixample
and Gràcia, which taken together form the continuous swathe across the hilly
western districts of la zona alta. While the PSC won 38.4% of the vote, the CiU
nationalist coalition was dangerously close with 30.5%, enough to threaten the PSC
hold 011 the mayor’s office. In the event, the PSC was able to form a coalition with
the parties to its left, the Left nationalist Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, and
the communist/green Iniciativa per Catalunya/ Els Verds.28
It was generally accepted that the Barcelona result in 1995 was due largely to
Maragall’s personal popularity. In Spain as a whole, the PSOE lost a 13-point lead
over the PP, the latter emerging with a 5-point victory and control over every major
city in Spain save the Catalan capital. It is this personal vote that Maragall has
sought to capitalise upon, using Barcelona as a basis for a wider spatial politics. He
has done so by closely monitoring the performance of the Left in the rest of Europe.
By 1998 he was looking with admiration at the redefinition of European social
democracy led by Tony Blair and Lionel Jospin:
Question: You have written articles about the French prime minister Lionel Jospin
and I’ve heard you speak a lot about the British premier Tony Blair. Who
do you feel closer to?
Maragall: Personally, although my grandmother was English I feel closer to Jospin,

because I know him better… Tony Blair I know less… The Labour Party
know that the Right were correct about some things…and they took them
on board. In Blair’s speech at Malmo, at the European socialist
movement’s conference, we had the family and law and order, the values
of the Right, and economic liberalism, with less state intervention. The
state has to learn to justify itself more and more, and that’s a medicine that
we have to swallow….
Question: Blair has used the idea of the ‘radical centre’. Centrism was criticised by
the Left but now seems to offer salvation. Is it the death of politics at the
hands of electoral marketing? How can the Left adapt?
Maragall: …in the manifesto that [Jospin] published in Le Monde he said ‘Il faut
mettre l’homme au coeur de l’économie’, and I thought, ‘How naive, this
guy will get a right beating, and nobody will vote for him’. But they did
vote for him…sometimes, the great truths and principles serve…to win.
That said, the discourse of Blair is much more modern and conscious of
the lessons the Right has made us learn and in this context I think he has
more future… Blair’s approach is the following: either the Left realise that
the working class and a good proportion of the middle classes act together
to follow a progressive politics, or there is no Left politics. If the middle
classes continue to be seduced by multinationals and minimal social
intervention, there is no citizenship, there is 110 progress, there is no
democracy, there is no Left. Therefore, the Left to be left has to be
centrist, has to position itself in the centre and has to capture the people
there…statistically, and make their values the values of the people. That is
Blair’s insight. And so the people’s values are law and order, for example. I
don’t just agree with that, I practice it.29
This assessment of his social democratic peers shows that Maragall is now fully
aware of the need to find electoral space through an appeal to market values, and
has floated the possibility of creating a new Catalanist party of the centre-left.
Drawing on the successful Italian communist-social democrat coalition of L’Oliva
as a potential model, this would attempt to fragment the CiU coalition by drawing
off support from the social democrats of the CDC.30 This he links to a (perverse?)
commitment to a Clintonised electoral politics, as he revealed at the end of 1997:
Question: …you speak less of the PSC than of a future American-style democratic
party.
Maragall: At the same time as the world is being globalised, parties will also have to
adopt other dimensions, as have businesses. There will be a few big parties
and then other parties specialising in ecology, pro-European referendum
parties etc.
Question: The North American model contradicts European democratic culture. It’s
a party built around a leader that looks for the media vote every four
years….
Maragall: But society is changing and the parties can’t remain outside these changes.
We’re now far away from the epoch when parties were the backbone of
society. Social democratic organisations at the start of the century in
Europe even looked for a flat for their activists. The parties today don’t
have to go flat-hunting for anyone, they have to put forward housing
policies.
Question: The American model appeals to you because the Republicans and
Democrats in the US compete in a shared electoral space?
Maragall: European parties have to lose their ideological sectarianism. The citizen
doesn’t just want politics. They have other interests. The party can’t give
him or her what they want, but simply suitable policies from a choice of
change or prudence.31
Should such a manoeuvre be successful—and at present he has had only lukewarm
support for his idea—it would allow the socialists the possibility of regaining a
national political majority in Spain, bearing in mind that it has been the Catalan
and Basque nationalists who have supported the last two coalition governments. At
the time of writing, he is yet to declare his aims. However, his decision to step down
as mayor in 1997 has been widely interpreted as being the first step in a campaign
for the Catalan presidency, a reflection of the importance of both Barcelona and
Catalonia in the electoral jigsaw puzzle of Spanish social democracy.
The turn away from class ideology to a citizen-based pragmatism is thus the
essential basis of Maragallisme. It will be interesting to see how the Catalan and
Spanish electoral landscape evolves in the coming years, and whether Maragall can
carry through this realpolitik at the level of the Generalitat. What is undeniable,
however, is that he has made an explicit redefinition of the relationship between the
city and social democracy, based 011 place competition, quality of life, and universal
citizenship.
Globalisation: Barcelona as competitive city

The Europeanisation of Spain was, as described above, very clearly manifested in the
changing economic profile of its cities. The magic year of 1992 was not only about
the Expo and the Olympics: it also denoted the completion of the single European
market which Spain had for so long sought to be a part of. Under the PSOE’s policy
of market reform Spanish cities found themselves under severe pressure, and
Barcelona was no exception. The economic crisis which had engulfed it by the early
1980s would be exacerbated by the government’s macroeconomic policy. The sale
of SEAT to Volkswagen had a disastrous impact on manufacturing in Barcelona,
the sell-off leading to the closure of the company’s plant in Zona Franca behind
Montjuïc with the loss of 9000 jobs, the biggest lay-off in Spain’s industrial history.
Other sectors were also affected: the Dutch chemical group Azko, which had
acquired the historic Barcelona company La Seda, closed its plant in the city in
1991 because of heavy losses.32 This reflected a historic downturn: between the late
1960s and 1985, the city lost 42% of its manufacturing jobs and 69% of its
construction jobs. New manufacturing sites tended to be set up outside the city,
partly as a result of government initiatives, and there was a noticeable tertiarisation
of the city itself, in 1990 almost 70% of jobs being in the service sector.33 In 1991
the city could boast an unemployment rate of 9.4%, six points less than in Spain as
a whole, and matching almost exactly the European Community average.34
During this period, we can also witness a change in scale in Maragall’s strategy,
which has very clear repercussions for his social democrat identity. We can recall
that the political strategy of the PSOE was to achieve the rapid modernisation of the
national economy, enabling it to play a full part in the process of
European integration and hence ‘to counteract at the supra-national, European level
the predominant tendency of neo-liberal deregulation and free market
integration’.35 This global project of the PSOE, while reflective of the new realism
prevalent throughout European socialism, still retains a strategic overview of the
structural forces constraining a Left politics. It is the distinctive municipal reading
of this made by Maragall which I turn to now.
Maragall was quick to accept as inevitable the economic pressures on the city,
making clear his interpretation of the reasons behind the SEAT/Volkswagen take-
over:
We mustn’t lose sight of what the crisis at SEAT means. It is an important

symptom of the new relations and balances in industry and in the European
labour market, and is a definitive proof of the internationalisation of the
economy to which we belong. The change demands an adaptation to the new
necessities and a strengthening of new bases.36
These new necessities required a new strategy, and there emerged within the council
an explicit and well-publicised awareness of the spatial dynamics of the European
market. The effects of deeper European economic integration for cities had been
illustrated by a number of studies, the most influential being that produced by the
French regional planning agency DATAR. Most of these studies argued that
Europe’s urban hierarchy would undergo significant change as national economic
boundaries became less and less relevant. New trade and investment patterns, and
the increasing importance of business travel through air and high-speed train
networks, would require city governments to reposition themselves in this European
market.37
The DATAR study had a profound impact on the council’s thinking, and was
frequently drawn upon in policy documents as illustration of the city’s new location
in European space. Jordi Borja and Manuel de Forn—both prominent advisers to
the mayor’s office—produced strategy documents outlining the future architecture
of a ‘European system of cities’. Here, the importance of being competitive
internationally was stressed:
Inter-city rankings, in fashion at present, not only show competition between

cities, but also what factors are considered to be more significant, like: the
presence of multinational companies, higher education centers, research and
development centers…; communications infrastructures and services for
companies and citizens; quality of life; international relationships—agencies’
head offices, holding congresses and symposiums, cultural interest etc.—and
the existence of a wide range of service centers for companies.38
Likewise, de Forn discusses the impact of the Single Market on the Spanish and
Barcelona economy, and stresses the need for concentration on the city’s most
competitive sectors, for training policies, and for forceful city marketing strategies.39
Initially, the Olympics were seen as an opportunity to modernise the
city’s infrastructure while retaining redistributive goals. However, it has been
suggested that the council’s development strategies became successively more
systematised (and boosterist) as the Games approached. In 1990, this was made
concrete when the council unveiled the Barcelona 2000 Economic and Social
Strategic Plan. This civic booster’s charter pulled together a who’s who of the city’s
elites, among them the city council, chamber of commerce, employer’s federation,
Trade Fair, Port Authority, trade unions and various other groups. Its ‘strategic
lines’ sought to reposition the city in a European macro-region (based around the
northwest Mediterranean), to improve quality of life, and to support industry and
advanced business services. It initially sought to include reference to ecological
sustainability, but such aims were subsequently dropped as being uncompetitive. In
1994 this was taken further with the approval of a second strategic plan, which
demonstrates a harder focus on competitiveness. Major infrastructural goals such as
the expansion of the airport and the container port—both of which threatened
serious environmental degradation—were prioritised regardless. Focusing on the
attraction of business tourism, real estate investment, and expanding flagship
cultural facilities, the city council now pursues an aggressive boosterism aimed at
becoming a highly competitive player in the new ‘Europe of the cities’ identified in
the DATAR study.40
This involved rewriting the city’s position within Europe. The council embarked
on elaborate place marketing campaigns, which—as with the likes of Glasgow’s
Miles Better programme—were aimed both at residents as well as at foreign investors
and tourists. Early projects included the 1985 Barcelona Posa’t Guapa (Barcelona
Make Yourself Beautiful) campaign, which focused on public-private co-operation
in the cleaning and restoration of many of the city’s architecturally notable facades.
Then came the Olympics and Mariscal’s Cobi emblem, and the unique opportunity
to take advantage of unprecedented global media coverage. This would be followed
up by the Barcelona més que mai (Barcelona more than ever) slogan, and the
Barcelona New Projects exhibition, which aimed to fill the post-Olympic gap.
(Groups opposed to the boosterist project were quick to subvert these marketing
campaigns which, along with the cartoons of Cobi being savaged and beaten up,
gave us ‘més que mai contra la Barcelona Olímpica’—‘Against Olympic Barcelona

more than ever’).41
Back in the council think-tank, however, the Games were seen as a unique
opportunity to link Barcelona into the European economy on the ground, as well as
on paper. Major infrastructural projects were set up through partnership with other
state levels: central government, Generalitat and the city council formed a
partnership to expand the port around the delta of the Llobregat river to the west of
the city, co-ordinating rail, airport and road connections and consolidating the
city’s leadership over the other major Mediterranean ports of Genoa and
Marseilles.42 Emphasis was placed on linking into the European high-speed rail
network, with connections north to the French system and south to Madrid (and
hence Seville). The city’s trade fair, La Fira, was doubled in size in an attempt to
promote exports and draw in international business tourism.43
In addition, the council pursued a number of initiatives designed to increase the
city’s integration into the newly relevant cross-border regional economy. One such
was the C-6 network, linking Barcelona with Palma de Mallorca, Zaragoza,
Valencia, Toulouse and Montpellier. This included co-operation in a variety of fields,
such as joint projects on university training, sharing experience on tourism and
financial management, and improving transportation links between the cities. In
other words, the intention was to promote a cultural and functional integration
between the territorially propinquitous cities, preparing for the gradual economic
integration that would take place as the single European market matured.44 These
issues of co-operation had long been on the mind of Maragall. In 1986 the city
council had got together with the city councils of Rotterdam, Birmingham, Lyon,
Frankfurt and Milan to form the embryo of what would eventually become the
Eurocities movement, which attempted to share the cost in practical projects which
addressed common urban problems (such as computerised traffic management
systems), and aimed at providing a lobbying voice for cities in the European
Union.45
While the Olympics were the initial focus of the regeneration strategy, after 1992
the council had to capitalise on the stimulus it gave to the local economy. Its
strategy of courting further private investment—particularly in the service sector—
could be seen in the New Projects campaign described above. Companies such as
Marks and Spencer are now being drawn in, attracted by the fact that only 15% of
the Catalan retail market is held by the multiples. New shopping complexes —the
Illa, a 56,000-square metre site close to Pedralbes, Sarrià and Sant Gervasi, the city’s
richest districts, Glories (serving the northeast of the city), and the ‘golden triangle’
in Plaça de Catalunya (site of the now-demolished Café Zurich) —seem likely to
revolutionise the retailing sector, to the detriment of locally based traders and the
famed municipal markets. It remains to be seen whether the political weight of these
traders—who traditionally support the CiU—is enough to stop the onset of the
‘French’ model of suburban malls.46 And the planning department has continued to
intervene in the city’s built environment in what it calls la segona renovació, the
‘second renewal’, facilitating the expansion of university sites, undertaking housing
improvements in Nou Barris, continuing to redevelop the Ciutat Vella, and—

perhaps most significantly—the building of a high-speed train interchange in
Sagrera.47
So the logic of globalisation—whether through the arrival of VW or of foreign
retail capital—is an essential component of Maragallisme. However, several
commentators have argued that this proactive, offensive strategy of making cities
more competitive is merely involving them in a process of undercutting each other,
‘hostile brothers’ that overplay their hands in the race for pole position in the new
Single Market:
…this ‘ritual incantation’ of the need to compete in a ‘globalised’ world has

been gradually accepted and even celebrated by the new breed European
social democratic movement, this despite the strong evidence which suggests
that localisation is undermining, rather than empowering, localities.48
Maragall has several responses to that, however, which help mark out a distinctive
stance on neo-liberal ‘new localism’, and which point towards a social democratic
version of local boosterism.
Beaches, malls and office blocks: the ‘Barcelona model’
In the last few years, effectively, the city has made a qualitative leap.
From the ‘Olympic and metropolitan’ city that we demanded in 1982,
we have passed to a Barcelona that, once Europe’s internal borders are
removed, is the centre of a euroregion of 15 million inhabitants, and
that aspires to be the gateway to southern Europe and one of the
European cultural capitals.49
I remember reading somewhere that the North Korean communist party once had as
a slogan the phrase ‘rice is communism’. Maragall could—if he so desired —equally
boast that ‘beaches are municipal social democracy’. Not quite the pith of the
Koreans, perhaps, but Barcelona’s sandscapes epitomise the benefits brought to the
city by the Olympics. As you lie and bake and feel the salt cake in your throat and
try to avoid catching sight of the city’s over-exposed elderly, you may be unaware
that all this is a very recent arrival. The planked walkways which bound the beaches,
the showers, the litter-bins, the tractors that come at night to hoover the sand (or
whatever it is that they do) are all the result of the city council’s generous approach
to public space.
But before the advent of the Olympics released funds to refurbish the coastline,
this beach culture was as alien to the city as it was to the inhabitants of land-locked
Madrid. While the city has 12.7 kilometres of coastline, the sea was all but hidden
from its citizens by the warehouses and docks of the industrial port. It is a
commonplace to read how the city ‘grew with its back to the sea’, its watery
mysteries only to be visited on the occasional trip around the harbour on the
golondrines (pleasure-boats). Instead, you had to pile on a train and head north
towards the Maresme and the Costa Brava. But the city’s planners had long seen the
possibility of establishing a Catalan Copacabana, creating a beach which could link
up with those beyond the city’s northern boundaries. After all, of all European cities
only Naples could boast a greater length of beach within its municipal boundaries.
The only problem was its condition: effluent, rubbish, shanty-towns and erosion
were all obstacles to the creation of this golden paradise.
The strategy to clean the coastline was given a boost by the winning of the
Olympics, of course. The opportunity afforded by the construction of the Olympic
Village would include the removal of polluting industries and the regulation of sewer
outflows, Maragall even taking the plunge to prove to his citizens that the water was
now, finally, clean. The strip of beaches running from Barceloneta (2.2 kilometres),
Somorrostro (0.7 kilometres) and Mar Bella at Poble Nou (2.7 kilometres) would
eventually be cleaned, giving the sea back to the city.50 And in 1997 it would even
welcome its first nudist beach (at Mar Bella), although on its first, chilly day of
functioning there were reputedly more reporters than there were clothesless.
From Barceloneta beach you can see where the money came from. North lie the
twin high-rises of the MAPFRE tower (which immediately upon completion fell
victim to an urban myth which stated that it was, ever so slightly, leaning) and the
Hotel Arts, softened by Frank Gehry’s giant copper-coloured fish sculpture. Look
south and you see the Port Vell (old port), whose name belies the activities which
cluster around it. Dominating the view is Maremagnum, the flipside to Barcelona’s
public space programme: a model of development popularised in the ailing seaports
of North America and slicking nastily across the murky waters of old European
ports. Whether you be in Liverpool, Cardiff or Genoa, the same combination of
high-yield office building, car parks, heritage museums and marinas dot the quays
of these obsolete ports.51 In Barcelona, industrial activity has slid around Montjuïc.
From certain points on the hilltop you can look out over the shimmering, yellow-
hazed containers and cranes of the city’s working port as it stretches past the Zona
Franca and the Llobregat river towards the airport. Back down in the old city, the
Port Vell twinkles with its formula restaurants, its cinemas and moored yachts.
Maremagnum is reached by a stylish planked boardwalk which crosses the water to
join the Moll d’Espanya, the revivified quayside. This promenade—the Rambla del
Mar—forms a continuation of the Rambles, an extension of the classic stroll from
Plaça de Catalunya past the statue of Columbus, and out over the final, lapping waves
of the Mediterranean. Negotiating this can be difficult—Saturday night and Sunday
afternoon see pedestrian sovereignty gone mad, tailbacks spilling onto the quay—
but once over, the rewards are plentiful. Security guards and pricey squid help deter
the rabble.
The waterfront is a concrete manifestation of the council’s economic strategy,
which is explained with a robust, neo-Marxian logic. For public spaces and services
to be provided in a time of macro-economic austerity, the private sector has to be
attracted in and part of their surplus skimmed off to serve the common good. This
Plate 4 The Olympic Village from Barceloneta. The rigorously maintained beaches which
stretch from Barceloneta northwards to the municipal boundaries of the city are a pay-off
from the arrival of corporate capital in the Olympic Village. To the left is Rebecca Horn’s
public art sculpture, and in the distance are Frank Gehry’s Fish and the twin towers of the
Village. (Source: Vicky Webb)
approach, dragging in the private sector and different levels of government to pay for
infrastructure improvements, has been repeated throughout the city. Conceived
before the winning of the Olympic nomination in the mid-1980s, the policy—
known as Àrees de Nova Centralitat (New Downtown Areas, as the council translates
it)—was intended to relieve the concentration of economic activity in the Eixample,
moving it out to 10 newly created sites in the city.52 As well as the sea-front towers,
major office developments have appeared at Plaça Cerdà (on the way to the airport),
at Diagonal-Sarrià, in Carrer Tarragona (billed as ‘Barcelona’s Wall Street’), which
runs past the main railway station at Sants, and in the four Olympic sites. A massive
new culture zone has been created at the Glories motorway interchange, featuring
Ricard Bofill’s enormous, white neo-classical national theatre. The council has also
tried—though to date without success—to develop a major site at Diagonal-Mar,
where the Diagonal finally ends its cross-city path as it reaches the sea. These were
all valorised by the complete renovation of the city’s motorway infrastructure as a
result of the Games. The policy has certainly been successful in attracting investment:
one study notes that between 1993 and 1996 a total of 175,000 m2 of new space
was scheduled to come on-stream in the ‘new downtown areas’, but that this was
combined with an increase in the over-supply of office space from 5% in 1985 to
15% in the mid-1990s.53 Whether investment equals sustainable growth remains to
be seen.
The Olympic Village encapsulates the council’s approach, part of a bid to halt
what they have called the ‘Marseillisation’ of Barcelona, where a middle class flight
to the suburbs is compounded by a growing pool of unemployment and a shrinking
tax base. The city’s population has been falling steadily since the 1980s, and the
council identified the need to provide a supply of quality housing to counteract this
trend, enticing in high-income earners. Maragall has favourably contrasted the
‘Barcelona model’ with the North American urban experience, the former being ‘the
unsegregated city, in which diverse uses cohabit…and which don’t constitute
unbreachable barriers that separate rich from poor districts, as happens in the US’.54
However, critics have contested this, and Maragall’s response to the suggestion that
Barcelona is too expensive to live in is telling:
That’s another issue. We often identify living with sleeping and this confusion
is bad. There are a lot of people who don’t sleep in Barcelona, but ‘live’ in it.
That makes us think of the city as a wider space. And so we see the
importance of the metropolitan areas, that will never be sufficiently well
structured if the fiscal regime is limited to paying taxes only in the place
where you sleep.55
This interpretation—of the city as a space to be shared by all—is used to justify

a fairly orthodox regeneration strategy aimed at maximising revenues. For Maragall
and his council, the motivation for the Olympic bid was from the outset a means of
gaining access to central funding for infrastructural improvements and public
services. The establishment of a joint venture public body, HOLSA, comprising the
city council and central government allowed the construction of city ring-roads, sewer
networks and sports facilities, as well as attracting investment from other public
bodies such as the railway and telecom companies. Around two-thirds of total
spending on Olympic-related projects was publicly funded.56 The four main Olympic
sites corresponded to the priority ‘new downtown areas’ referred to above, the
objective being to decentralise economic activity from the Eixample grid, the
traditional business centre. Thus the targeted regeneration of particular urban areas
was undertaken through the excuse of the Olympics, but with longer-term benefits
seen as an integral part of the project.
This is only to be expected, Maragall argues. Not only has he sought to capture
funds from the centre, he has also spent a lot of time articulating a rationale, almost
an ideology, which serves to justify the spending of public money by city
governments. He draws a parallel with the ease with which national governments
can legitimate military spending during wartime, or diplomatic crises, and argues
that in peacetime these arguments disappear, thus freeing money for the local:
…the strength of local government is a barometer of democracy, as well as of

efficiency. Of democracy, because a greater part of public resources are spent
closer to the citizen. Of efficiency, similarly: no-one really knows if spending
Plate 5 Carrer Tarragona from Hostafrancs. The high-rise office blocks of Carrer Tarragona are
an example of the council’s ‘new downtown areas’ policy, attempting to decongest the
Eixample and regenerate various parts of the city. (Source: author)
on embassies is a little or a lot, but everyone knows very well if sanitation has
improved, and if it has improved more than the corresponding tax rise.57
Again, the city is a more concrete site of public spending than the more abstract
nation-state, and this transparency adds to its potential for strengthening democracy.
Maragall also has his eyes fixed firmly on the distribution of funding between centre,
region and municipality in Spain, suggesting that the Generalitat’s share is too great
(although presumably he would alter this argument should he become president of
the Generalitat). He has also formed a lobby with the mayors of Spain’s seven
largest cities (by the mid 1990s the only socialist representative) to argue that such
cities are underfunded given their need to provide services for non-residents,
primarily tourists and commuters. In other words, they have to subsidise museums,
pay for wear and tear on roads, for added pollution. In the mid-1980s, it was
estimated that commuters filled 13% of all jobs in Barcelona (160,000 people
making the journey to and from the city every day) but who paid nothing towards
the cost of local services. In nearby municipalities such as Sant Cugat or Badalona, as
much as 36% of the population worked in Barcelona itself.58 As these people were
generally seen to benefit from the lower prices of the metropolitan belt, and formed
part of the decline of population in the city proper, Maragall has raised the
possibility of introducing taxation—a kind of toll —aimed at regular users of the
city who are not contributing to the tax bill.59 While his 1997 proposal quickly
disappeared from view, its message is clear: Barcelona is underfunded by the
Generalitat, the argument runs, and needs a greater share of public spending within
Catalan political space.
The battle over the distribution of public funds is given an added twist in
Barcelona by the extreme sensitivity attached to gaining political credit for the
successful completion of projects. This has always coloured Maragall’s political
relationship with prime minister González, which was always—it is rumoured
— uneasy, due to the former’s persistence in going to Madrid with cap in hand. As
we saw in chapter 3, the Generalitat showed a great reluctance to fund certain
projects linked with the Games due to their (justified) fear that Maragall would
accrue the credit. And so, in Maragall’s first meeting with José Maria Aznar after the
latter’s general election victory in 1996, few promises were forthcoming about
funding to the city, with Aznar particularly sensitive to agreeing to anything which
would offend Pujol, his principal coalition partner.60
Nonetheless, the Games were so successful in terms of place marketing and
releasing public funds that in 1996 the council announced their intention to bid for
an Expo in 2004. When it was realised—to some embarrassment among the
normally super-efficient council—that the rules governing an Expo prevented one
being held in that year, Maragall enlisted the backing of UNESCO and announced
that the city would stage, in 2004, an Expo-type event designed to regenerate the
northern and eastern reaches of the city, the Mediterranean waterfront east of Poble
Nou and to clean up the Besós river and its surrounding districts. Just as Serra had
bequeathed him the Games upon his departure in 1982, so Maragall would leave his
successor, Joan Clos, with the chance to make his name through a major spectacle.61
In keeping with the party spirit, on the night of 16th October, 1996, the council
organised a spectacle commemorating 10 years since the winning of the Olympic
nomination. Not of holding the Games, of winning the nomination. Four giant
video screens above the Avenida Maria Cristina—the broad boulevard which runs
from Plaça d’Espanya to the foot of Montjuïc—projected a specially commissioned

film showing the Olympic highlights: Samaranch reading the nomination result in
1986, the jubilant Maragall, the major building works, the arrival of the flame, the
opening ceremony, the flaming arrow that reputedly lit up the big bunsen burner
above the stadium, the Spanish medallists, Cobi and, of course, Freddie Mercury
and Montserrat Caballé singing ‘Barcelona’. Judging by the turn-out—a pretty
reasonable 180,000 citizens—the party atmosphere is one that the inhabitants
like.62 Who knows what surprises await in 2002, let alone 2004.
So, Maragallisme could almost be defined as the ‘art of leverage’, as the mayor has
spent much of his time tapping possible channels of external funding. For social
democratic urban regimes this has been the post-Keynesian challenge: to push, prod
and cajole central or regional governments to provide them with more resources to
spend on infrastructure or public services, and to lever in private investment.
Glasgow used the City of Culture to regenerate its arts infrastructure and remarket
itself, Manchester and Birmingham have made bids for the Olympics, Lisbon and
Seville have turned to Expos. But what is the relationship of these urban spectacles
to social democratic goals? Is there a distinction to be drawn between social
democratic big events and those with little public sector control? Deyan Sudjic
makes reference to ‘the two extremes of Los Angeles and Barcelona’ in manners of
organising the Olympics, the former being staged more as a virtual event geared
towards merchandising and global advertising, the latter providing a basis for a
fundamental transformation of the city’s physical environment with a clearly
defined public strategy.63 It is this latter aspect which gives Maragallisme its
redistributionist profile, with the public again being defined as essentially classless
users of the city.
Europe, solidarity and citizenship

Maragall’s 15-year reign in the city council has demonstrated that he is a
consummate politician, with an ability to follow through projects of considerable
complexity—such as the building of the Olympic Village—as well as to remain a
popular figure both in the streets and at the polls. His international reputation was
also cemented by the successful staging of the Games, his eloquence and statesman-
like approach evidently bewildering journalists more used to the grunting
parochialism of British town halls. As one Financial Times reporter cooed:
While the public image of Pasqual Maragall is that of a can-do mayor…the

private persona is a deeply reflective scholar. Mr Maragall is something of a
philosopher mayor, who likes to discuss Sir Ralf Dahrendorf in the way that a
philosopher king such as Frederick of Russia talked about Voltaire.64
His repeated (and often repetitive) forays into the publishing world have ensured
that the city’s second-hand bookshops will be kept well stocked with his words of
wisdom for years to come. What is notable about his period in office is the
willingness—expressed in such books as Refent Barcelona (Remaking Barcelona)

(1986) and Barcelona, la Ciutat Retrobada (Barcelona, the Rediscovered City) (1991)65
—to commit his thoughts to paper. And what these works demonstrate is the degree
to which he has developed a clearly theoretical approach to ruling Barcelona which
goes beyond the day-to-day running of the city. What I want to do in this final
section is to look at this approach, and to draw out what I see as being a very
explicit politics of space which goes beyond the rather more resource-driven or
boosterist strategies described above. In particular, Maragall has promoted themes
of solidarity and collaboration, and has sought international fora which give cities—
rather than the usual nation-states—a voice.
The key problem facing social democrats in cities is this: they believe to a certain
degree in the redistribution of wealth (if not now in class terms), but are faced with
the need to act as managers of growth, fighting with their ‘hostile brothers’, their
erstwhile allies, in town halls across Europe.66 The bleakness of this destructive ‘zero-
sum’ competition (where the victory of one city comes at the expense of another) has
been a source of particular anguish to a Left accustomed to thinking in
internationalist terms. Of course, this puts them in a double bind: social democrats
were once preoccupied with effecting the redistribution of wealth within cities; now
their attention is focused on the scope for redistribution between cities. Maragall has
used Barcelona as a kind of laboratory on this issue, which has given him a
distinctive perspective on the problems facing social democracy as a whole. His
thinking is consonant with the likes of Jordi Borja and Manuel Castells who have
seen cities as a kind of defence against an increasingly chaotic global capitalism. As
Castells has put it:
Because European cities have strong civil societies, rooted in an old history
and a rich, diversified culture, they could stimulate citizen participation as a
fundamental antidote against tribalism and alienation. And because the
tradition of European cities as city states leading the pace to the modern age
in much of Europe is engraved in the collective memory of their people, the
revival of the city state could be the necessary complement to the expansion
of a global economy and the creation of a European state.67
Whether or not one agrees with some of the questionable assumptions in this
statement, the thrust of the approach is clear. City-states could re-emerge which
promote citizenship and solidarity and could organise on a European level, thus
helping to account for the waning of the nation-state as a source of identity. As I
explore in the next chapter, there is close proximity between the work of Castells
and Borja and that of Maragall: here, it is worth recognising the shared analysis of
cities as agents, and it is this which gives a more libertarian version of the future
social democratic project (contrasting with the authoritarian tones of the Blair
government in Britain). I suggest that Maragall’s ‘foreign policy’ is based around
four strands.
First, he has embraced the European Union as an inevitability, and has forcefully
suggested that cities should be at the forefront of subsidiarity, the taking of
decisions as close to the citizens as possible. Thus, while Maragall has been active in
forming lobby groups with Spain’s other major cities, he has focused on Brussels as
the appropriate level to deal with the issue. One early example was his argument
that the European Community should be subsidising cities, rather than agriculture,
a Common Urban Policy instead of a Common Agricultural Policy: ‘Europe has to
recover a certain urban militancy. Paying for food surpluses is expensive and has to
be done every year. Paying for the cities is also expensive, but cities are already
there: they are not produced yearly’.68 Such a militancy is evident in the debate
about the gap in credibility and democratic accountability between the European
Union and the individual. ‘We have to strengthen the values of the city as
collectivity, as an entity, as a governmental unit to strengthen the principle of
subsidiarity. Just as the great continental blocks are being formed, so it’s [also]
necessary that politics is situated at a level closer to the citizen’.69
His second, fairly radical, proposal relates directly to Barcelona’s subordination to
Madrid within Spain. He argues for the redistribution of the resources and duties
from capital cities to the second cities in any given nation-state, given the changing
spatial logic of a European ‘system of cities’. In this (overplayed?) scenario, capital
cities will lose much of their weight as the nation-state is subsumed by European
integration (and we can recall the academic weight that the DATAR study offered
here). Taken on a tour of London by the Financial Times, he reflects on this:
The taxi slows and Maragall joins the tourists watching the changing of the
guard. The Royal parks and Buckingham Palace are illuminated by a spring
sun… ‘When I see all this, I think, God it’s beautiful. It is the summit
of humanity, but I also think, how unfair. Why is it that it is always capital
cities that have the wealth of nations to spend on themselves? What will
happen to London when it is not the capital of a sovereign state when the real
nation is Europe?’70
To achieve this redistribution, Maragall has protagonised in pioneering new

political movements where the voices of cities can be heard. As discussed above,
Barcelona has been prominent in the Eurocities networking movement, a body
which seeks to strengthen the position of cities within a Europe where the nation-
state has long been the orthodox centre of political activity. Eurocities has acted
both as a forum for developing common political stances as well as allowing for the
development of joint projects related to urban policy. Through his protagonism in
this network, Maragall was elected joint president of the Committee of the Regions,
the body established by the Maastricht Treaty to provide input from sub-national
levels of government, a mandate he held for two years. With the European
Commission viewing them sympathetically, urban leaders have been active in
developing joint lobbying projects.71 The municipalities’ claim for special treatment
has been met with their inclusion into the membership of the Committee of the
Regions, and the establishment of a funding programme—URBAN— dedicated to

tackling specific problems facing cities.
Third, a strong European system of cities will give greater leverage at the global,
or international, level. Maragall’s presidency of the Committee of the Regions
allowed him to continue his Olympic role as a kind of diplomat for cities, and he
was active in promoting the perspective of big cities in meetings with United
Nations president Pérez de Cuellar. The UN-sponsored Habitat II conference, held
in Istanbul in 1996, set out possible grounds for that organisation’s intervention in
promoting issues such as sustainability and multi-culturalism in cities around the
world.72 Maragall has also been quick to point out the willingness of the World Bank
and other agencies to embrace the ‘catastrophist discourse’ on uncontrollable urban
growth, which sees cities as being uneconomic. In turn, he suggests, their policies
are geared towards an (authoritarian?) response of ruralisation. This is entirely
reactionary, argues Maragall: ‘The global village will be a world of cities or it shall
not be’. He extends this cosmopolitan analysis to attack nationalism, citing the
‘tension between the global and local, which carries a perception of distance as
difference, a difference that can be used demagogically…as has happened in the case
of Bosnia’.73 Cities are a place where this tension can be resolved.
The rhetoric is interesting, and it is clear he is aware of the problems faced on his
own doorstep. When one witnesses the sullen cabezas rapadas (skinheads) which
litter the city’s streets—both affluent and poor—with their bomber jackets,
scooters, and wilful ignorance; when one hears the monkey noises meted out by the
crowd at the Camp Nou against visiting black Real Madrid players; when one talks
to certain ‘educated’ citizens of middle class Barcelona with their rarely veiled
Catalan supremacism; when one reads in La Vanguardia of the regular racist attacks
perpetrated against North African immigrants, often in the satellite towns of
the metropolitan region far from the civilised urbanity offered by the Rambla, it is
apparent that the city has a long way to go in living up to its ‘cosmopolitan’ image.
Precisely because of this, Maragall’s political agenda has been the development of a
kind of municipal foreign policy which aims to show solidarity with other cities
around the world.
So, fourth, along with the boosterist place marketing that the city has pursued,
Maragall has also followed a kind of diplomatic boosterism, using visits to Sarajevo
to set up an ‘embassy for local democracy’ under the auspices of Eurocities, and
lobbying the International Olympic Committee for funds to help reconstruct the
destroyed residential district of Mojmilo, which had acted as the Olympic Village in
the 1984 Winter Games.74 He also looked further afield than Europe. In 1992,
Maragall signed a joint declaration with the mayor of Rio to mark the prominence
of the two cities in that year (Rio hosting the Earth Summit), part of which stated:
‘[i]t is not positive that resources generated in a rich business centre or a high-income
suburb should not go back to the neighbourhoods where most people live and
work. This would be the greatest lack of solidarity of all’.75 As well as these, the city
is part of various co-operative networks with cities in Latin America and the
Mediterranean, and has signed friendship treaties with cities as diverse as Havana
and Boston.76
Thus international solidarity and the defence of international citizenship is at the
heart of Maragall’s vision of the future of social democracy, both as a movement and
in terms of ideology. The city acts as a flagship, with the cultural weight of the old
city-states, as a means of expressing a culture of citizenship (of responsibility as well
as individual rights).
Barcelona is today, effectively, a reference point for Europe and the world.
That you see when you visit the United States and they’re making a film…
called ‘Barcelona’ [Whit Stillman’s 1994 production], and everyone is asking
you about your city. Or when the mayor of Asuncion in Paraguay affirms in
front of President González that Barcelona is the example to follow. Or when
the new mayor of Rome, a ‘green’ who managed to beat his neo-fascist
opponent, says that he wants to achieve the same citizen involvement that we
have achieved in Barcelona.77
The message here: that Barcelona acts as a laboratory to promote a new European,
and global, citizenship. This is socialist internationalism of a deeply committed sort,
a doctrine which is aware of the constraints of structural forces, yet which maximises
the limited power available to pursue strategies of solidarity. This aspect of
Maragallisme is exemplary.
✤✤✤
On 26th September, 1997, Maragall resigned his post as mayor. He returned to his
academic life on a year’s lecturing post in Rome, giving courses on ‘the Barcelona
model’ and on a ‘Europe of cities and regions’.78 Meanwhile, back home, the city’s
political classes pondered over whether he would return from his period of exile to
stand as the PSC’s candidate for the forthcoming elections to the Generalitat, a
potentially decisive vote for a post-Pujolist Catalonia. There is little doubt he would
be wel received: his reputation has grown with that of the city, and Maragallisme as
doctrine is man and the city merged into a political package. It is at once a
discourse, a strategy, and an ideology. By way of conclusion, I want to discuss each
of these in turn.
When we look at how Maragall discusses Barcelona—the ‘Barcelona model’, the
‘city is the people’, the Eurocity, the gateway to southern Europe, a capital of Spain
—it is worth noting how prevalent the trope of the city is within his speeches,
interviews and writings. This is relatively rare: socialist politicians have often been
associated with other discourses-class, welfare, services, jobs—as a focus for political
strategy and ideology. The city is the lens through which Maragall views the political
landscape. This, of course, is due to his reliance on Barcelona as power base: it both
informs and is in turn shaped by his political project. In his capacity as mayor, he is
undoubtedly the prime shaper of discourse on the city on the international stage.
This has a lot in common with identities based on dwelling in a place such as
nationalism (see chapter 3), rather than occupation or social class, and his
pronouncements on these matters take the form of a kind of political place

marketing. This has also involved a redefinition of the city over time: Catalanist,
not nationalist; social democratic, not socialist; cosmopolitan, not essentialist;
European, more than Spanish. So it is crucial to note that the city is a signifier for
other distinctive strands of his political approach.
This, in turn, is highly strategic. What Maragallisme represents, above all, is the
realisation that in cities where old working class areas are being gentrified and where
location and quality of life issues are paramount, there is no longer an in-built
socialist majority. In the case of Barcelona, the hold of social democrats on the council
remains tenuous. And given the importance of the city for the social democratic
project in Catalonia and Spain, it would appear that the electoral aspect of ‘new
realism’, of appealing to middle class voters, is the only way to retain control of one
of its key fiefdoms. The city is thus constructed not as a needy recipient of
government funding, but instead as a strategic space to be controlled. By definition,
the city is multi-class, a space for citizenship as a basis of identity, rather than being
bourgeois or proletarian. This is tied in with the Left’s search for new social
constituencies (as in Maragall’s discussion of Jospin and Blair). To talk up the city is
also a prelude to controlling it politically, in terms of both attracting votes and
levering investment and resources.
Finally, this is ideological. The adoption of a new realist/neo-revisionist approach
targeted towards achievable goals is constructed as being inevitable and necessary.
This fits snugly with the ‘new localist’ literature referred to above: competitive cities
seeking a place in the world. Maragall’s trick has been to compete less with the
‘hostile brothers’, and he has sought to make zero-sum gains against, primarily,
nation-states, the Generalitat, or the Common Agricultural Policy. His emphasis on
citizenship, solidarity and collaboration is an ingenious solution to the shrinking
political landscape facing social democrats. The key to success is through combining
competitiveness with a strengthened civil society. But this aspect of Maragallisme
has its own tensions, as I now explore.
Notes
1 Felix Badia, ‘Barcelona desplaza a Zurich y es la sexta ciudad europea preferida para los
negocios’, La Vanguardia 9 October 1995, p. 47.
2 Ajuntament de Barcelona (1994b), p. 13.
3 As Holman (1996, p. 101) points out, in 1976 González ‘argued that NATO was
nothing but a military superstructure introduced by the US with no other reason than
to guarantee the survival of the capitalist system.’
4 See, for example, Sassoon (1996), chapter 19.
5 The Socialist International—the umbrella group of the European social democratic
movement—had seen in Spain the potential for a strong ally, and had provided the
funding which allowed the PSOE to emerge from near obsolescence to becoming the
strongest challenge to the PCE of the array of Left parties which existed in the
mid-1970s. González was the key to this support: Willy Brandt (German chancellor
and leader of the SPD) had seen in the young Sevillano the future of the Spanish
movement (Holman 1996, pp. 84–5).
6 Holman (1996), p. 122.
7 Holman (1996), p. 124.
8 Navarro (1997) suggests that this is not entirely fair, given the limited expansion of
the welfare state and the (limited) attention paid to the unions.
9 Petras (1993), p. 95.
10 Hooper (1995), pp. 57 and 62.
11 Figures from Heywood (1995), p. 221.
12 Petras (1993) suggests that the clientelism and corruption was such that the PSOE had
more in common with the Mexican ‘socialist’ party, the PRI, than with northern
European social democratic parties.
13 In Spanish municipal elections, the mayor is elected by the councillors; however, in
the election campaigns it is always clear that the number one in the party list is the
‘presidential’ figurehead.
14 In Arenós and Saladrigas (1997), p. 352.
15 Maragall (1997a), pp. 139–40.
18 Febrés and Rivière (1991), p. 69.
19 Arenós and Saladrigas (1997), p. 363.
20 Febrés and Rivière (1991), pp. 67–9.
21 In HOLSA (c. 1990), p. 285.
22 For an overview see Acebillo (c. 1993).
23 Botella (1995), p. 147.
24 Bastardes (1987), p. 87.
25 Maragall (1991a), p. 146.
26 In Ajuntament de Barcelona (1994b), p. 7.
27 ‘Nou Barris, el objeto del deseo’, La Vanguardia 18 May 1995, pp. 19–20.
28 Figures drawn from La Vanguardia, 29 May 1995, p. 35.
29 In Alvaro (1998), pp. 51–3.
30 It is worth bearing in mind that the PSC is a very young party, and its abolition/
reform would tug fewer heartstrings than the renaming of, say, the Labour Party; on
the new party, see ‘Maragall resucita su proyecto de partido socioconvergente del 2000’,
La Vanguardia 21 February 1996, p. 13.
31 Pasqual Maragall interviewed by Tomàs Delclós (1997), Memoria de Catalunya,
supplement to El País, pp. 234–7.
32 Tom Burns, ‘Labour laws weigh heavily’, Financial Times 16 November 1993,
supplement p. iv ; ‘VW expects Seat pact today’, Financial Times 15 December 1993,
p. 3.
33 Sánchez (1997), pp. 188–95.
34 Ajuntament de Barcelona (1992), p. 71.
35 Holman (1996), p. 207.
36 Maragall (1994), pp. 17–18.
37 See Newman and Thornley (1996), pp. 14–17.
38 Borja (1992), pp. 22–3.
39 de Forn (1992).
40 Marshall (1996).
41 See Busquet (1992).

42 Marshall (1994) provides an excellent summary of the complex inter-institutional
negotiations behind this project.
43 Marshall (1996); Pradas (1998).
44 Morata (1997).
45 Marlow (1992), p. 28.
46 Pradas (1998), pp. 203–7.
47 See Ajuntament de Barcelona (1996).
48 Harvey (1989); Peck and Tickell (1994); quotation from Lovering (1995).
49 Maragall (1995), p. 15.
50 Data from Febrés and Rivière (1991), p. 47.
51 See Jauhiainen (1995).
52 Ajuntament de Barcelona (1991). This was subsequently extended to twelve, adding
Montjuïc and Diagonal Olympic sites.
53 Riera and (1995), p. 240.’
54 Maragall (1995), p. 16.
55 Maragall in ‘Un regalo que Barcelona se ha hecho a sí misma’, round-table discussion
with J.A.Benach and M.Rivière, in Ajuntament de Barcelona (1993), p. 13.
56 Brunet (1995).
57 In Bastardes (1987), p. 88.
58 ‘La capitalidad metropolitana de Barcelona se extiende más allá de la Region 1’, El País
7 April 1997, Cataluña, p. 4.
59 For a very critical view, see Agustí Bosch, ‘Una Barcelona de peaje’, El País 20 April
1997, Cataluña, p. 2.
60 Enric Juliana, ‘Aznar recibe a Maragall pero evita cualquier compromiso que pueda
soliviantar a Pujol’, La Vanguardia 29 October 1996, p. 29.
61 Formally launched as ‘El Forum Universal de les Cultures 2004’, with the theme
‘Cultures for peace’, and with cross-party support. Lluís Uría, ‘Barcelona recupera el
espíritu olímpico y aprueba per unanimidad el Forum 2004’, El País 26 April 1997,
Cataluña, p. 1.
62 Marta Ricart, ‘Noche de nostalgia en Montjuïc’, La Vanguardia 17 October 1996, p.
34.
63 Sudjic (1992), p. 260.
64 Tom Burns, ‘Philosopher speaks with the voice of reason’, Financial Times 16
November 1993, p. 7.
65 Maragall (1986) and Maragall (1991b) respectively.
66 Peck and Tickell (1994).
67 Borja and Castells (1997); Castells (1994); p. 32; similarly, Amin and Graham (1997,
p. 427) argue that one impact of neo-liberalism on urban debate has been to see cities
as ‘an economic liability—pits into which public subsidy and social support must go to
prop up ailing and anachronistic urban areas’. This view ‘seriously underestimates the
economic costs of unemployment, crime, fear of crime, depressed demand and a
declining urban fabric… Ultimately, the state of the entire urban collectivity feeds
back into the circuit of economic activity. But our case may be strengthened by the
argument that a sense of place and belonging taps into hidden potential and the
sources of social confidence that lie at the core of risk-taking entrepreneurial activity’.
This new realist socialist stance does not, however, take us much beyond solving the
conflicts between exchange and use values which arise in most boosterist strategies.
68 Cited in Hughes (1992), p. 37.

69 Maragall in ‘Un regalo que Barcelona se ha hecho a sí misma’, round-table discussion
with J.A.Benach and M.Rivière, in Ajuntament de Barcelona (1993), p. 15.
70 Jimmy Burns, ‘Man with a plan tries to make sense of London’, Financial Times 5
June 1993, London supplement, p. x.
71 See, for example, McAJcavey and Mitchell (1994).
72 Borja and Castells (1997), chapter 9.
73 Maragall (1997b), pp. 89 and 83.
74 Eugenio Madueño, ‘Barcelona condiciona la ayuda oficial a Sarajevo a que haya
elecciones democráticas’, La Vanguardia 14 March 1996, p. 28; Lluís Amiguet, ‘El
modelo catalán para los Balcanes’, La Vanguardia 16 December 1996, p. 30.
75 Ajuntament de Barcelona (1994a), p. 44; Borja and Castells (1997).
77 Maragall (1995), p. 27.
78 Alvaro (1998), p. 6.
5
Manuel Castells in the Eurocity
[M]ajor cities throughout Europe constitute the nervous system of both

the economy and political system of the continent. The more national
states fade in their role, the more cities emerge as a driving force in the
making of the new European society…[and so]…we will be witnessing
a constant struggle over the occupation of meaningful space in the main
European cities, with business corporations trying to appropriate the
beauty and tradition for their noble quarters, and urban countercultures
making a stand on the use value of the city….
(Manuel Castells, 1994)1
The intensified restructuring of urban space and the growing importance of city-
states for social democracy have been themes that I have already addressed. Here I
want to consider the idea of struggle or contestation over urban space, one of the
central concerns of Marxist urban theorists and neighbourhood groups. The work
of Manuel Castells is particularly relevant, given his prominence in the annals of
urban sociology in the last two decades. As I noted in the previous chapters,
Maragall’s conception of a city-state as a haven for the centre-left in a period of global
neo-liberalism has powerful echoes in Castells’ work. And Castells’ personal
intellectual trajectory has close parallels with those of his generation who are now in
power in Barcelona’s city council. He came to international attention in the early to
mid-1970s at the same time as neighbourhood protest groups were reaching their
peak in Spain’s major cities; one of his key theoretical works—The City and the
Grassroots (1983), an attempt to formulate a ‘cross-cultural theory of urban social
change’—was constructed on the basis of his experience as an activist in Madrid.
From the late 1980s, however, he has grown more and more involved in charting
the spread of the ‘informational city’,2 the technopole,3 and has most recently
argued of the importance for the Left of addressing globalisation wholeheartedly,
rather than adopting an ostrich-like stance.4
Similarly, Barcelona’s social democratic leaders have undergone a transition from
radical Marxist analysis while in opposition in the 1970s, to a more moderate —
even boosterist—stance in the 1980s and 1990s, after the re-establishment of
democracy. This has culminated in a political strategy which has sought to
MANUEL CASTELLS IN THE EUROCITY 113
establish Barcelona as an international business centre, a Eurocity laterally linked to

firms and agencies across the continent. These parallels are by no means accidental:
Castells retains close personal ties with politicians and advisors in both Barcelona
and Madrid, and has acted as an advisor to the Spanish government on issues such as
the 1992 Seville Expo.5
In this chapter, then, I want to use Castells as a guide to the changing
relationship between urban social movements and socialist political parties in
Barcelona over the last 20 or so years. The development of his thought, moving
from localist critique to a more synoptic vision of the informational restructuring of
the world economy, can be fruitfully contrasted to that of more localised critics of
the direction of the Barcelona Left, such as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Eduard
Moreno, and the Federació d’Associacions de Veïns de Barcelona (FAVB), the
federation of neighbourhood-based social movements. So I begin by outlining the
development of Castells’ interpretation of urban change, emphasising his attempt to
retain his Marxist commitments of the 1960s and 1970s at a time of global neo-
liberalism. This acts as a frame for a sharper focus on the Barcelona experience: I go
on to describe the political regime led by mayor Porcioles which decided the city’s
urban policy under Francoism, and which gave rise to widespread grassroots political
opposition from the late 1960s; I then discuss the characteristics of this organisation
as it grew in size and influence throughout the 1970s, becoming a crucial front
against the dictatorship and a cultural cradle for democratic participation; next, I
trace the diverging path of the Left in power and the neighbourhood movements
following the re-establishment of democracy and the regeneration drive launched by
the Olympics; finally, I examine the state of urban protest in the democratic city
today, reflecting the continuing contestation of the social democratic ‘Barcelona
model’ of the Eurocity.
Manuel Castells and the Barcelona Left

1997 saw the publication of Local and Global: the Management of Cities in the
Information Age, a collaboration between Castells and Jordi Borja which continued
the former’s concern with the relationship between processes of economic
globalisation in the contemporary city.6 The book is significant for being arguably
the most explicit attempt to show that globalisation and informationalisation are
processes that have to be taken seriously by the Left, rather than dismissed out of
hand as being negative consequences of neo-liberalism. It makes interesting reading:
as I noted in the previous chapter, it spoke of the importance of cities as being
crucibles in which global processes could be grounded, in which the increasingly
shaky nation-state could be replaced by the city-state as both the active promoter of
citizenship and a generator of economic activity. Far-reaching in its attempts to
think through ways that cities can get a handle on globalisation —through inter-city
networking and the involvement of the United Nations, for example—it draws on
the practical work undertaken by the authors in both developed and developing
economies (and Barcelona features heavily as a model of good practice). It could
114 MANUEL CASTELLS IN THE EUROCITY
almost be a handbook of Maragallisme. There must be little that the ex-mayor could
disagree with here.
This said, its enthusiasm for embracing globalisation will lead some to brand it
neo-revisionist, accommodationist and anti-radical. Reading it side-by-side with the
work authors were publishing in the 1970s reveals a fascinating set of insights into
changes of vocabulary, of horizons and of strategies of addressing capitalism.
Castells’ crucial insight was to argue that struggles over collective consumption, over
the reproduction of labour power, were often as important as organisation over the
means of production (as Marx and Lenin had prescribed). Here, the doings of the
property developer become the major target of the political activist, rather than the
wages paid by the factory owner. This can be expressed in a conflict over exchange
and use value, where the developer seeks to maximise profit on land (exchange value),
while the worker/resident seeks to defend the use value, non-monetary attributes
such as environmental quality, subsidised housing, public services. The urban social
movements that Castells documented—most notably in The City and the Grassroots
—thus focused their struggles on the role of the state in mediating between property
capital and grassroots demands. This is a long way from Castells’ recent position,
which stresses the importance for city councils of working with the private sector.
I would argue that we can identify three broad stages in Castells’ political
analysis. The first is that of optimism, seeing the neighbourhood-based social
movements as the possible vehicle for a Eurocommunist transformation of society.
The second is drawn directly from his experience in Spain, where he witnesses the
co-optation of these movements into party politics, with a resultant erosion of their
social power. Here the 1979 local elections act as a turning point in the Spanish
Left, beginning a progressive distancing of the socialist parties from the civil society
which had sustained them under the dictatorship, and initiating a clear divide
between professional politicians and grassroots demands. The third stage is marked
by the acceptance of the need for city councils to act both as mediators of social
conflict—with the capital-community relationship still a very prominent subtext—
and as generators of wealth, as urban entrepreneurs. This is based upon the
conviction that the impact of global neo-liberalism has ended the rationale of urban
conflict between capital and consumer, and envisages the large city as being an
increasingly prominent political actor (thus worthy of recognition by central
governments and supra-national organisations). I want to sketch these stages out in
a little bit more detail.7
Castells began his political life as an activist in the Barcelona student movement
(which also touched, quite profoundly, the lives of two other figures in this book —
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Pasqual Maragall). Expelled from Spain in 1962,
he settled in France and found a position as an assistant professor at Nanterre
University in Paris. He would consequently be found in the middle of the events of
1968, where student protest would directly challenge the stability of the French
state. Temporarily expelled from France, he would return to write the book which
would make him famous in sociology departments around the world: La Question
Urbaine (1973), published in English in 1977 as The Urban Question.8 This found a
resonance at a time when faith in the industrial working classes as agents of change
was waning. The French experience had demonstrated that struggle over production
was not necessarily the key to social revolution: the majority of the working class
and trade unions had shown considerable distaste for the students’ radicalism. As
noted, the significance of Castells’ book was in its elaboration of the idea of
struggles over collective consumption, over the role of the state in ensuring the
reproduction of the labour force and the latter’s attempts to gain improvements in
the field of housing, welfare, the environment and public services. And at the
forefront of these struggles were tenants’ associations and locality— rather than
workplace—based groups. These groups were seen as being potentially key actors in
the class struggle, a complement to industrial militancy.
By 1975, however, he had begun to modify his political line, and began to stress
the role of neighbourhood movements in building cross-class political alliances.9 As
we saw in chapter 2, this was a period of great optimism, certainly in Spain, given
the potential strength of Eurocommunism as a parliamentary road to socialism. He
had, however, abandoned the idea of the working class acting on its own in bringing
about change, and began to consider the role of the petty bourgeoisie in creating a
broad front for democratic change. Between 1977 and 1979 Castells was back in
Spain as a key figure in the strategy-making of the Madrid citizens’ movement. An
account of this experience can be found in The City and the Grassroots, where—
along with the likes of the 1871 Paris Commune, the 1915 Glasgow Rent Strike,
and the protest movements in the Parisian suburbs of the 1960s and 1970s—the
Madrid case study provides the lynch-pin of his theories on the role of urban
political protest under capitalism.
Castells was quick to stress the social diversity of the movement. He discussed the
mobilisation of shanty-town suburbs such as Vallecas and Orcasitas, and the huge
working class estates and towns of Madrid’s periphery such as Getafe and Mostoles.
But he also identified the revolt of the middle classes against the environmental
degradation and anonymity of their newly constructed urban retreats, and the
campaign to defend the historic quarters of the central city, such as Malasaña.
Ultimately, however, the lessons he drew from the Madrid movement were largely
negative. The movement found it too difficult to retain its political independence
from the institutionalised political parties. Through a process of co-optation—
where activists became councillors—or through the simple absorption of the
movement’s concerns into council policy, the oppositional spirit was eroded. In
particular, the establishment of democracy in 1977 reduced the need for co-
operation, and the movement fragmented. Parties such as the PCE began to siphon
off their activists, and when a socialist-communist coalition won power in the
municipal elections of April 1979 the contradiction between party politics and
grassroots mobilisation became too great. As a result, the movement saw its local
associations either disappear or retreat into less political tasks. Castells’ conclusion was
telling: the Madrid movement took with it ‘to the deep’ the ‘century-old dream of
revolutionary parties as agents simultaneously expressing both social movements and
political strategies’.10
With this failure in mind, and influenced by the simultaneous development of

Silicon Valley—‘I really felt that something extraordinarily important was going on,
and was diffusing very quickly in the rest of the world’11—Castells
increasingly switched his attention to the role of information in society, and the
simultaneous disintegration in the social structures of the industrial age. Having
moved to Berkeley in the early 1970s, he maintained his interest in urban-based
social movements while attempting to theorise the impact of technological change
on the spatial development of cities. He was employed by the Spanish government
to work as policy analyst for the development of the Cartuja ’93 technology park, the
legacy of the 1992 Seville Expo.12 His search for a progressive take on global neo-
liberalism, and his continuing interest in urban social movements, led him to
identify the potential role of increasingly dynamic and entrepreneurial city-states as
the possible key to his analysis. He emphasises the importance of such actors in a
period in which the nation-state is increasingly unable to control capital flows. Each
metropolitan area requires a ‘combination of technological infrastructure, human
resources and flexible management systems, for without it they will be subjected to
the wild and increasingly destabilizing ups and downs of the global flows of the
economy and communications’.13 This in turn requires that capital, or business, has
to be integrated within any municipal economic project. Cities such as Barcelona
are seen as pioneering a resolution of the demands of the citizens’ movements with
the requirements of business. Castells argues that the philosophy of the Barcelona
city council is that
…participation—so-called citizen participation—should not be understood in

the old terms (and I would say almost sectarian terms) that only poor
neighbourhoods have the right to participate… I don’t think we are in an era
in which the purpose is to eliminate, for instance, business participation. From
the left point of view, in which I include myself, the idea is to broaden the
participation beyond the usual partnership with business into broader
participation of society, but not eliminating at all the business input.14
The acceptance of the importance of business in city life is unsurprising, reflecting a

model where the needs of business and citizens are channelled through the local
state, where large cities ‘are the multinationals of the twenty-first century’.15 This
stress on economic competitiveness is combined with increased interest in the
potential for citizen involvement in the state, including arguments for the right to
privacy, the decentralisation of public services, and genuinely progressive calls for
the rights of immigrants to vote and participate fully in public life.
And so to The Local and the Global. The collaboration between Castells and Borja
goes back a long way. We remember Borja from the previous chapter: his account of
the changing economic geography of Europe has formed a central plank of the
strategy of the Maragall councils. What is interesting is that this collaboration
reaches back to the late 1960s, when Castells was beginning his rise to prominence
within French, and subsequently anglophone, urban sociology. Borja, present in
Paris at the zenith of the student movements, would take on board much of the
Castellsian analysis and apply it to conditions in Barcelona. In the 1970s, he was
behind the PSUC’s attempts to politicise the largely spontaneous neighbourhood
movements.16 With Castells simultaneously responsible for the strategy of the
Madrid movement, there was a close relationship between theory and practice for the
two men. Borja would follow a similar research agenda as a geography professor at
the University of Barcelona.
Local and Global shows some of the results of this. But it also tells us something
else: the degree to which both Castells and Borja have shifted from envisioning the
urban social movement as a contributor to a Marxian political transition, to seeing
the city re-assert itself as a cross-class political agent which must compete (boost
itself?) to ensure even a minimum level of social provision. In short, the shift in
stance of Castells over two decades tells us a lot about the changing goalposts of the
Left in the city, and suggests that the Barcelona Left has adopted much of the
Castells analysis (on, for example, globalisation).
This is a long way from the Parisian days of 1968. There are good grounds for
accepting Castells’ and Borja’s assertion that cities ‘increasingly depend on the forms
of articulation with the global economy as regards their standards and modes of
living’,17 justifiably pointing to the ability of capital flows to escape democratic
control. But this rationalisation of the need for cities to compete sits uneasily with
Castells’ continuing interest in the involvement of the social movements that once
formed the centrepiece of his theoretical framework. Does the direction of his
current work demonstrate a logical conclusion to Marxist urban analysis: that it
provides a better means of understanding how to manage, rather than overthrow,
capitalism? And what about the demands of the neighbourhood groups in Barcelona
who still struggle against the globalisation-obsessed social democratic state long after
the death of Franco? These questions I will attempt to address in the remainder of
the chapter.
Porciolismo 1957–76: the developers’ city

It was on the 18th March, 1957, that Josep Maria Porcioles was appointed to the
post of mayor of Barcelona, a post he was to hold until 11th May, 1973. In this
time, this 16-year period in office, the city was to change beyond all recognition, for
it was the 1950s to the 1970s that saw—even in Franco’s Spain—the golden age of
post-war European capitalism shed some of its dust on Barcelona. It was during this
period that the early autarky of the dictatorship gave way to a greater engagement
with the international economy, and the country began to be modernised. The
spread of mass car ownership, given its distinctive shape in the locally produced
SEAT 600, would transform land use as the existing urban fabric became unsuitable
for hugely increased numbers of private cars. And as the economy grew, so
thousands of landless agricultural workers and their families streamed into the big
cities and towns—to Madrid, to Bilbao, to Barcelona. During his spell in office
Porcioles had to contend with an increase of 300,000 in the city’s population, this
in one of the most physically constrained cities in the world, hemmed in by the sea
and the mountains. All these changes were bound to affect the mayor’s urban
policy: cars needed new roads, immigrants needed housing.
This period, which I extend to 1976 to encompass the short reigns of his successors
Masó and Viola, left a deep imprint on the city’s history. Porciolismo, as it became
known to a generation of urban radicals, was a creed with three defining
characteristics. First, it gave spatial form to the archetypal model of anarchic
capitalism, as the city became a site of sprawl and destruction, high-rise housing and
expressways which snaked around and over any attempts to submit it to rational
planning criteria. Second, the city’s elites would be swollen by an array of property
developers, all becoming rich through a simple formula of land purchase and high-
density building. This was licensed by a city council completely removed from any
democratic supervision, the rotting underbelly of Franco’s morality crusade. Third,
it would be remembered for its voracious appetite, as the city’s elites looked out
beyond the Collserola hills and sought to create ‘la Gran Barcelona’, a metropolitan
giant full of opportunities to build and build and build.
A large amount of money was to be made from housing the waves of immigrants
that descended on Barcelona—along with the other major cities in Spain—to escape
from the poverty of the countryside. For them, the possibility of scraping together
enough money for a deposit on a new home created a demand for cheap housing
gratefully satisfied by the developers. And so the 1950s and 1960s saw the rapid
growth of whole new areas of the city: the high-rise estates created by the partial
plans, modifications to the Pla Comarcal of 1953.18 The poorest groups of
immigrants who couldn’t afford even the cheapest of the new flats settled in shanty-
towns (barraques) scattered throughout the city. Montjuïc was a popular site, as was
the beach. These were faced with official hostility and those sited on the beach, such
as Somorrostro, were subject to regular flooding with resultant health problems. In
1972, there remained around 3500 of these huts, and the attempts to house the
shanty dwellers in newly built flats in districts such as La Mina and Vallbona have
failed to solve the problem of poverty.19
The building boom was a general phenomenon in the Spain of the 1950s and
1960s. With a captive housing market, there were gains to be made both in
providing housing for the incoming working classes in peripheral estates, and in
securing land in desirable areas to house middle and upper-middle class families.
Today, it is still wondersome to travel along the Travessera de Dalt or Ronda de
General Mitre and view the high-rent, low-aesthetic landscape of Les Corts and
Sant Gervasi, grey, luxurious residential towers. The current president of Barça,
Josep Lluís Núñez, became renowned for his vast blocks on the left side of the
Eixample ‘satisfying…the petty bourgeois bad taste of his clients (the terrace
running the full length of the facade, the parquet in the hall…the lacquered lift
doors…)’, according to the chic Marxists of the anti-Francoist vanguard.20 By
purchasing land in these areas, and then maximising the number of flats on them —
often exceeding the density dictated in the plan—developers could amass hefty
profits. On the periphery of the city, the shanty dwellers were either moved to social
housing under the Patronato Municipal de la Vivienda, or forced to put down

deposits to live in privately constructed flats. These were inevitably built without
any public services—no roads, lighting, minimal standards of sanitation, very little
running water, no public transport. The new estates were expected to rely on
existing schools and health facilities, which were often both remote and over-
subscribed. And the flats didn’t come cheap, as Castells describes:
Families paid, on average, 30 per cent of their income over 15 years to buy a
poorly constructed 70 to 100 square metre flat with no basic facilities. Many
of them had to purchase their flats one or two years before construction was
completed, based solely on sight of a model flat. Needless to say, the whole
development was riddled with abuses, massive defaults, and bankruptcies, and
caused a great deal of misery and hardship.21
For all sectors of society, save the very rich, the post-war environment of Barcelona
was characterised by poor environmental quality, the transformation of long-
established neighbourhoods, and—above all—an extremely high level of density,
making the city one of the most congested in Europe.
This was compounded by the lack of democratic accountability in the planning
process, reflected by accusations of nepotism and corruption in the council offices as
expressed in the rhyming ditty of the 1960s:
Si quieres edificar hoy, pregúntale a Bordoy,

Si quieres edificar sobre las aceras, pregúntale a Soteras,
Si quieres edificar sobre los viales, pregúntale a, Briales.
Which, translated into a less poetic English, runs as follows:
If you want to build today, ask Bordoy,

If you want to build on the pavement, ask Soteras,
If you want to build on the street, ask Briales.22
Bordoy and Soteras were chief architects in the city council planning office. Briales
was a member of a construction company involved in motorway and tunnel
construction whose office happened to be underneath the municipal roads
department office. In addition, he was the son-in-law of Porcioles. The mayor’s
other son-in-law, Miquel Vall, was the president of one of the city’s major property
developers. Porcioles himself was a notary, a job he failed to relinquish while he
served as mayor, with the result that a visit to his office was seen as being a good way
for a constructor to get his development project approved. It was this tight circle of
power, which included two banks (Condal and Madrid, the latter an interest of a
certain Juan Antonio Samaranch), which many cite as the distinguishing feature of
Porciolismo, a movement characterised by constant accusations of nepotism and
corruption in the running of the city’s planning regime. By the time Porcioles left
office, he was reputed to be the tenth richest man in Spain.23
These conflicts of interest and collusions reflected the complete lack of
democratic safeguards against abuses of the planning process. In Spain, as Castells
notes, the whole development cycle was driven by the state: ‘it bought the land, lent
the capital, paid for the construction, channelled the demand, granted fiscal
exemptions, and “forgot” to control the standards and legal requirements of the
urban infrastructure’.24
And so in Barcelona. The planning regime inherited by Porcioles was contained
in the Pla Comarcal of 1953, which laid down land use requirements, and the Llei
del Sòl of 1956. As these often restricted the use of land for residential or industrial
purposes, pressure was exerted to find a way around the legal framework they
contained. The answer was found in the Plans Parcials, 41 of which were drawn up
between 1956 and 1970, and which legalised alterations to the Pla Comarcal. In
addition, single blocks and buildings could be exempted, allowing the growth of
high-rise offices in the city centre. Changes of use from open space to residential
development were common, and allowed the emergence of cunning property
developers such as Josep Maria Figueras who were able to seize upon the laxity of
the planning regime. When FC Barcelona decided to move to the Camp Nou, it
vacated its nearby ground, which would eventually be sold—not for sporting
purposes, but for intensive residential and commercial use—to Figueras’ Habitat
group. This change of use would ultimately substantially finance the building of the
Camp Nou, but was premised on the continuing erosion of the city’s open spaces.25
The third defining feature of Porciolismo was expressed in the mayor’s attempt to
expand the city’s influence into the surrounding towns and municipalities. By the
early 1960s, the pressures caused by the waves of immigration pushed Porcioles to
seek solutions outside the city’s boundaries. Granted a special set of powers in La
Carta Municipal he lifted his eyes beyond the Collserola hills and set about
imposing the will of his urban giant on adjacent municipalities, moving the
municipal rubbish dumps, creating a new cemetery, and propagating even more
peripheral estates to house the immigrants in the likes of Bellvitge or Sant
Ildefons.26 He was also set on propelling forward the city towards the valleys by
proposing three tunnels through the Collserola hills which envelop the city,
although by the time of his departure these were still to be realised. And to cement
this image of a greater Barcelona, he sought to organise major events which would
project the city internationally, such as the Olympics—in a bid which was sabotaged
by Madrid—and an Expo, destined for 1982, which would also fail to see the light
of day.28
By the time Porcioles left office in 1973, Franco had a bare two years to live, and
the heat of the transition was beginning to be stoked. His successors as mayor, Enric
Masó and Joaquim Viola, were left with an ever-increasing list of demands as the
protest movement grew. The approval of the Pla General Metropolità in 1976, also
known as the Pla Comarcal, took place in a rarified climate of insatiable developers
and increasingly confident neighbourhood associations. Masó’s undistinguished
period in office had been characterised by attempts by developers to influence the

zoning provisions of the Pla Comarcal. Confidence was hardly raised when he was
succeeded by Viola, another member of the council of the Banc de Madrid. It was in
this period, when the shouts on the streets were of ‘Viola a la cassola’ (Viola to the
cooking pot), and given added vigour by Franco’s death in November 1975, that
the protests really got going.28
The city from the grassroots
The social mobilization around urban issues that occurred in the

neighbourhoods of most Spanish cities throughout the 1970s was, to
our knowledge, the largest and most significant urban movement in
Europe since 1945.
(Manuel Castells, 1983)29
In Castells’ account of the emergence of the Madrid movement, he provides a

categorisation of their demands: more and better public housing and repairs to
existing stock; better schooling; improvement in public health services and
sanitation; increased and improved public transport and traffic safety; more open
space; the preservation of the historic city; improvement of neighbourhood social
life, including the provision of festivals and the promotion of local associations;
political demands, primarily concerned with freedom to meet and organise, and
amnesty for political prisoners. Once democracy was established there were also
demands that the associations participate directly in the new councils, and even that
they be given recognition in the new Spanish constitution of 1978. Both requests
were refused.30
If the Madrid experience formed the archetype of an urban social movement for
Castells, in Barcelona the levels of mobilisation were perhaps even more
astonishing. A broad alliance of working and middle class neighbourhood activists,
urban professionals and party functionaries ensured that the movement had a high
profile, a strategy of short and long-term goals, and a powerful presence on the
street. This funnelling of protest was due, according to Vázquez Montalbán, to the
fact that municipal politics, along with football, were the safety valves of later stages
of Francoism. He suggests that the tolerance allowed in the field of urbanism was
far greater by a regime which allowed very little dissent, thus pushing many in the
opposition towards urban critique.31
In Barcelona a similar width of problems were addressed, and the movement grew
organically out of sporadic and initially fragmented protests, arising in response to
specific local issues. Thus in the hilltop neighbourhood of Carmel, locals were
radicalised by the cracks appearing in their houses as a result of the building of the
Rovira tunnel. In some of the poorest districts of the city, next to the Besòs river,
parents were outraged that their demands for school places for their children were met
by the provision of disused tram carriages as classrooms, these, in turn, being placed
under high-voltage electricity pylons. In Sants, protestors scored an early victory in

turning the shambolic car park of Plaça de Sants into play areas and public space.
But the most radical noises were coming from the cluster of hastily, cheaply built
housing estates in Nou Barris in the northeastern reaches of the city, the destination
for many of the Castilian-speaking immigrants who arrived in Barcelona from
throughout Spain in the 1950s and 1960s. Here, in the likes of Vallbona, Canyelles,
Vilapiscina and Prosperitat, were the hurriedly constructed estates of desarrollismo,
the boom years, serried slabs of high-rise system-builds with minimal servicing and
landscaping. The council’s attempt to slash and build in the area was most
monstrously apparent in the 1972 Torre Baró-Vallbona-Trinitat plan to demolish
4370 existing houses and replaced them with an ever-denser high-rise estate. Locals
were quickly radicalised: when the council ignored their petition of opposition,
activists teamed up with the anti-tunnellers of Carmel and occupied the council
chamber, municipal functionaries avoiding their protests by clambering up into the
tiny public gallery. The impact was far-reaching: the following day the plan was
withdrawn and Porcioles dismissed from his post.32
But one of the most celebrated struggles would take place in Poble Nou,
beginning in 1965 when the idea was first mooted to build a huge (225 hectare)
residential development which took in much of the area’s sea-front. The proximity
to the sea endowed the area with a great deal of potential profit: its principal
promoters were the proprietors of resident industries such as Catalana de Gas and
Renfe who saw a means of profiting from selling their land for housing, and the
whole thing—known as the Pla de la Ribera—was promoted as ‘una ciutat que no
pot seguir vivint de l’esquena al mar’, ‘a city which can’t keep living with its back to
the sea’.33 The response was substantial: the proposals threatened up to 30,000 people,
taking account of local businesses, small industries and some 15,000 residents. The
opposition to the plan, rapidly modified and redrawn as the Pla del Sector Marítimo
Oriental (1972), grew into one of the most celebrated of the city’s many protest
campaigns, activists collecting up to 9000 signatures of opposition. Ultimately, the
plan was rejected by the statutory inspectorate, the Commissió d’Urbanisme,
primarily because of doubts that there would be sufficient financial backing to
ensure the scheme’s completion. It would remain dead until the 1980s, as we shall
see.34
Other protests were based on the impact of Spain’s arrival in the automobile age,
with the city’s planners—in line with their colleagues in the liberal democracies —
attempting to slice urban beltways through long-established communities. The
biggest casualties were in Sants, where the plans for the Primer Cinturó (1st beltway
—today the Ronda del Mig), which linked the airport to Sant Gervasi and the Nou
Barris, led to expropriations and a controversial increment in development values
for the owners of the land through which it passed. The interchange with the
Travessera de Dalt at Plaça Lesseps ruined one of the most rustic corners of the city:
the pedestrian walking up Gran de Gràcia to reach Parc Güell will be confronted by
the fruits of Enric Masó’s wisdom: ‘a type of scalextric’ where the city roars past half
underground, half overground.35 The works of the Segon Cinturó (2nd beltway,
today the Ronda de Dalt) were no less destructive, and attempts to expropriate 32
families from their homes in return for meagre compensation led to delays. But
elsewhere the protestors were successful. In Gràcia, which today retains arguably the
most peaceful ambience of any of the city’s barris, the planned ‘Via O’ link from the
city centre to the valleys—by way of a tunnel through Tibidabo—was scheduled to
carve its way straight through the heart of the area. In April and May 1976 the
district’s balconies were draped with banners—‘!Noi a la Via O’—and a
demonstration of 2000 people persuaded the council to drop the scheme.36
Whatever the reasons, the protestors developed a wide range of tactics ranging
from the mundane to the spectacular to the witty. The most common were the
collecting of signatures, exhibitions to highlight specific problems, and
demonstrations in front of the city council building in Plaça Sant Jaume. But
occasionally more unexpected or unusual action was taken. On several occasions,
the long-ignored demands for the extension of bus routes to the peripheral housing
estates such as Canyelles in Nou Barris were given a higher profile when groups of
residents high-jacked the relevant bus, and diverted it onto its rightful route. On the
polluted beach of Mar Bella, near the current site of the Olympic Village, a
competition was held to see who could find the most bizarre object among the
rubbish-strewn sands. They even used football: to protest against the polluting
Fertrat company in Poble Nou the 11 players of a local team each wore strips with a
letter of ‘FORA FERTRAT’ (Fertrat Out) emblazoned on the front. In Prosperitat
in Nou Barris, while the city was playing host to Socrates, Paolo Rossi et al. in the
1982 World Cup, locals threw down their coats in the middle of a major
thoroughfare, dug out a football, and went on to defeat a non-existent council team
25–0 to highlight their opposition to controversial roads proposals.37
Communication of these events was made possible through trusty hand-cranked
duplicators, churning out leaflets of a quality ranging from the purely functional to
amusing and ingenious cartoon agit-prop. There was also an extremely dynamic
neighbourhood press, providing up-to-date bulletins on the latest urban issues, and
comics such as Butifarra!, which attempted to use humour as a political weapon, and
publicised some of the struggles over land taking place in the city.38
The localised protests of the early 1970s became co-ordinated with the formation
of the FAVB, the Federació d’Associacions de Veins de Barcelona, which evolved
into the vanguard of the citizens’ movements. FAVB had initially been formed by
the apolitical street associations, the so-called bombillaires (light-bulbers), who were
responsible for decorating the streets at Christmas and for festivals. Yet amidst the
reinforced repression of the latter days of Francoism, and incited by the tragic
explosion at Carrer Ladrilleros in Sants in 1972 which killed 14 people, the nascent
neighbourhood associations decided that unity was an essential prerequisite for
strength, and after the first few meetings of the semi-clandestine Coordinadora de
Sant Antoni the decision was taken in 1975 to enter the FAVB. (The Sants
explosion was one of many as the city became acquainted with the dangers of natural
gas: the black humour of the time—‘Don’t fly with Iberia, natural gas is quicker’—
expressed the grim realities of life in 1970s Barcelona).39
The FAVB went on to play a crucial role in the clandestine Assemblea de

Catalunya, their most notable single success comingon the 1st of February, 1976.
Only 70 days after the death of Franco and with Spain gripped by tension, the
federation used their privileged position as one of the few organisations who could
protest without fear of serious repression and initiated what—in retrospect —can be
seen as one of the most important post-war public protests against European
totalitarianism until the events in Prague and Leipzig in 1989, drawing onto the
streets many of the activists of the Assemblea. The demands for
Figure 4 Butifarra!: One of the most prominent of the comics that circulated during the
transition, this strip from 1976 satirises with some vigour the urban policies of the city
council
would be heard chanted in the streets. Despite a fierce police response of baton
charges and tear gas, the demonstration was a symbolic resistance to state
power, and was repeated to great effect a week later.40 The FAVB had successfully
shown that the street could be reclaimed for democratic protest.
This period from the replacement of Viola by Socías Humbert in December 1976
represented the zenith of the movement’s powers. The political uncertainty created
by the death of Franco left many owners of unused industrial land anxious about
the future. Socías Humbert, emptying the council coffers, took advantage to endow
the city with 93 hectares of land which would be transformed into parks and
squares from 1979. The economic crisis of 1973, and the general decline in the
textile sector, had left many of Barcelona’s major factories empty. At the likes of La
Sedeta, on the edge of Gràcia, and La España Industrial in Sants, attempts by the
proprietors to build flats on the derelict sites were opposed after long campaigns by
local groups backed up by sympathetic journalists. The sites would be bought up by
the city council from employers keener to take the money and run than await the
potentially radical outcome of the transition. The old railway sites of Renfe-
Meridiana, Clot and the Estació del Nord had also arrived in public hands, and the
latter two would become public parks.41
One of the most significant successes came in Sants. The closure of the textile
factory of La España Industrial42 had left its owners with a prime development site,
adjacent to the city’s principal railway station. However, the nearby districts —
Sants itself, Hostafrancs, La Bordeta, all classic proletarian barris—had been built to
a very high density with negligible provision of green space. When dubiously zoned
for residential development in the controversial plan of 1976— the owner was a
prominent municipal politician—the Sants neighbourhood associations campaigned
vigorously for the redesignation of the land as public space. In an attempt to force
the issue, meanwhile, the proprietors built two blocks of flats on one corner of the
site. However, there was a huge level of mobilisation—demonstrations, exhibitions,
public meetings and a petition with 12,000 signatures. The protestors operated in a
climate of police watchfulness: while a lot of their claims were tolerated, they were
by no means free to demonstrate openly. Forbidden from marching, they were
forced to design ingenious ways around police restrictions. On one notable
occasion, they organised two children’s basketball matches, one at a court near the
proposed starting point of the march, in La Bordeta, the other adjacent to the old
factory next to Sants station. The second game was scheduled to begin a short while
after the condusion of the first. This gave the protestors, many of whom were
parents of the players, a legitimate reason for moving en masse down Carrer
Olzinelles, furled banners in hand, to the location of the second game. While this
did not dissuade the police from lining up around the site, the protestors were able
to stake their claim to the site and make a very visible statement of their
determination. Finally, their actions persuaded the owners to abandon their plans for
developing the site, and the authorities to re-zone it as parkland. The city council
would buy the site and dedicate it to a range of public activities.43
Plate 6 Parc de l’Espanya Industrial. Adjacent to Sants station, the park on the site of old
textile factory is one of the most tangible reminders of the srrength and cunning of the city’s
neighbourhood movements. Source: Vicky Webb)
However, while mass mobilisation would be an important feature of the

movement, it should be emphasised that the cutting edge was provided by highly
motivated professionals. Radical planners, architects and lawyers contributed
their expertise in analysing land and planning law. The magazine CAU issued by
one of the city’s architecture colleges, became renowned for its trenchant critiques
of the city’s urban policies, most notably in three special issues. In 1971 it published
La Gran Barcelona, an account of the assault on the equilibrium of the metropolitan
region by unplanned development, in 1973 La Barcelona de Porcioles, an extremely
detailed A–Z of the city’s urban politics44, and in 1975 La Lucha en los Barrios (The
Struggle the the Neighbourhoods), which catalogued the successes and failures of the
protest movement in specific planning conflicts. It is La Barcelona de Porcioles which
is far far the most detailed, a 300-page encyclopaedia of the city’s property
developers, districts, plans, key sites, infrastructures and buildings, an intensively
researched some of urban minutiae, at once quirky and technically detailed.
Concurrently there appeared informed journalism about the city, the newspapers
such as Correo El Correo Catalán and El Noticiero Universal.45 But perhaps the most
enduring artefact was Martí and Moreno’s ¿Barcelona, A Dónde Vas? (Barcelona,
where are you going?). Its ominous jet-black cover and white typewriter titling still
conveys a sense of journalistic urgency and conviction, an impassioned critique of
Porciolismo and dedicated particularly to ‘those Barceloneses who live, generally, in
the peripheral districts of the city… They have been accused of being apathetic,
disinterested and lacking enthusiasm for the idea of the public good. They have
often and tendentiously been described as sedentary beings of football, television
and consumption… believe firmly that this is not the case…’.46 Its 190 pages
document in depth the efforts made by speculators and the council to redevelop
land for quick profits, without any concern for the negative environmental effects or
quality of life issues, or of the cumulative effect of so much sprawl. It is above all a
socialist document in the noblest sense: dedicated to the conservation of public space
and calling into question the whole notion that development is benign.
The activities of this intelligentsia crossed over into the clandestine party politics
of the 1970s. And this primarily meant the PSUC. The best organised of the
opposition parties, the Catalan communists—along with their sister party the PCE
—had significant power in the workplace through control of the trade union
Comissions Obreres. It is here that Castells’ influence swings into the tale once
again, with his emphasis on the importance of collective consumption, of struggle
over the social wage of housing, education and health services. Acquaintances of
Castells, such as Jordi Borja, would communicate this strategy to PSUC militants
who, along with other parties such as the soon to be subsumed Bandera Roja (Red
Flag), had strong representation in the neighbourhood committees. One survey of
the movement in Barcelona—made towards the late 1970s—recorded that the
PSUC had a presence in 70% of the associations, the PSC in 35%, with other
small, now defunct, parties also represented.47
In the case of Sants, one of the strongest of the neighbourhood movements, both
the PSUC and Bandera Roja had considerable influence. A possible social profile of
those active at the beginning of the 1970s would be as follows:
They were aged between 25 and 35, most had been to university and had stable
jobs. Practically all of them came from Sants, lived in the district, were
Catalan speakers, had a stable relationship, in some cases had children…they
had a Christian background, although they weren’t practising, and they had
all been affected, in many cases subconsciously, by May ‘68 and almost all by
the modernising ideas of the Second Vatican Council.48
It would be these activists who would attempt to take the movement beyond its
initial preoccupation with concrete issues such as the lack of public space or the
threat posed by road-building, to the more pressing demands for freedom and
resistance to the dictatorship of the middle of the decade, evidenced in their
protagonism in the Assemblea de Catalunya.
On the eve of the 1979 municipal elections, the FAVB were poised as one of the
city’s key political groups, able to mobilise activists from across the neighbourhoods.
The nascent political parties regarded them jealously, and the PSC and PSUC
jostled for control. Initially, the PSUC representative Jordi Borja would assert the
need for the grassroots to retain its autonomy from political parties.
For example, something which I find detestable which was introduced by

certain organisations of the PSOE in one Spanish city, is their announcing,
‘Citizen, if you have a problem, come along to our offices and we’ll solve it
for you!’49
At this point, Borja and the PSUC were fully committed to involving
the neighbourhood groups in municipal democracy. Pasqual Maragall, speaking for
the PSC, was more cagey: the neighbourhood movements had a crucial role to play,
he conceded, but argued that ‘the urban movements have incorporated a lot of
political demands which now the parties are in a position not only of taking on, but
of developing and carrying much further’.50 ‘The Prince’ was prescient: within a few
years the movement would be in crisis, as we shall now see.
‘Porciolismo with an Olympic shirt on’

The municipal elections of the 3rd April, 1979, were of huge symbolic importance.
Coming a month after a general election in which the Francoist reformists of the
UCD retained control of the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, the Left swept to
municipal power across Spain (albeit on a vastly reduced turn-out, abstention
reaching 46% in Barcelona). The result was of resounding importance: the first
local elections staged since those of April 1931 which heralded the overthrow of the
monarch and the establishment of the Second Republic; the first defeat of the
Francoist reformers and a sign that the transition was nearing its climax; and the
substantial victory of the Left, a mere three years after their legalisation. The
Barcelona poll results gave the PSC 33.9% of the vote, with the PSUC polling 18.
8% in second place, the CiU just behind with 18.5%. The outcome was similar
throughout Catalonia, with victory going to the PSC in the vast majority of large
towns and cities.51
The result augured well for the FAVB. Throughout the Socías Humbert
transition period they had enjoyed an enormous degree of influence in running the
politically marooned councils, even travelling to Madrid with the mayor to lobby
directly the Ministries responsible for housing and roads. The protests of the 1970s
had sharpened the terms of debate to such an extent that the FAVB were able to
issue a manifesto on the eve of the elections setting out their demands. They
highlighted the lack of school and health facilities within many of the city
neighbourhoods, the lack of public space, the lack of social facilities, and the need
for greater consultation with the citizenry.52
Yet as the 1980s wore on, this optimism declined. Much of the blame was
directed towards the first elected mayor of the new democracy, Narcís Serra. As
lawyer Eduard Moreno—one of a small group of urban professionals still
committed to the defence of democratic planning—recalled, ‘[a]lmost everyone
expected a new form and a new style of governance…but what happens in 1979? What
happens is that a mayor is chosen—by the councillors—who by one of those ironies
of history had been one of the promoters of the Pla de la Ribera…’.53 Instead of
going down the expected route pioneered by the Eurocommunist-run cities of Italy
such as Bologna, the PSC veered down the middle. Narcís Serra, who had become
the city’s first socialist mayor, set the pattern of moderation and public-private
partnership between the Ajuntament and private capital that would lead Barcelona
into a new round of property development and civic boosterism.
As Carles Prieto, the president of the FAVB at the time, recalls, Serra was in no
mood to incorporate the grassroots in council decision-making: ‘It’s us
socialists who have won the elections’, he boomed. The weakening of the movement
was compounded by the PSUC’s decision to distance itself from the neighbourhood
groups as the elections approached. By 1982, Prieto—who had refused a prominent
placing on the PSUC’s municipal election slate because of the party’s dismissal of
urban protest55—was complaining that ‘the major political parties have abandoned
the neighbourhood associations’.56 By the end of the 1980s, most commentators
within the movement would admit a crisis point had been reached: a lack of ‘new
blood’, and a city council little concerned with the demands of the neighbourhoods.
And while there has been a stabilisation of the decline, the neighbourhood
associations remain far from the potential foreseen in the height of the transition.
How did this happen? As Vázquez Montalbán put it:
Could it not be that, under the pretext of the Olympics, a city council with
minimal economic resources, controlled by a left that was paralysed by the
challenge, has handed over management of this immense surge of urban
growth to private initiative? Has it not turned what might have been a model
of democratic urban expansion into a speculative frenzy…?57
The decision to stage the 1992 Olympics set alarm bells ringing throughout the
neighbourhood associations and critical intellectuals who felt they had defeated the
speculator when the Left won the 1979 local elections. The significance of the
Olympics—the golden apple of civic boosterism—being pursued by a socialist
council had uneasy echoes of Porciolismo. In fact, it was under Porcioles that the
idea of staging the Olympics was first mooted, and it was also the Francoist mayor’s
dream of holding an Expo in Montjuïc and Tibidabo in 1982, a means of
continuing the steamroller of urbanisation which would keep the developers’ coffers
replenished. While this never materialised, the lure of the major exposition or event
as a means of levering in revenues was too much for the council to resist.
So it was that by 1992, grassroots critics were aware of the improvements in
public spaces and transport, but they were also conscious of the irony that their
influence was greater during the transition than after 13 years of socialist municipal
control. Maragall was increasingly portrayed as being the heir to, rather than
avenger of, Porcioles, continuing his projects under the mandate of democratic
accountability. On the latter’s death in 1993, the rehabilitation of one of the local
Left’s erstwhile hate figures began, his obituaries carrying more than the respectful
faint praise accorded to the dead. Narcís Serra said of Porcioles that he was ‘a great
person…a man who felt a great passion for Barcelona and a great imagination to
look for and find solutions for the city’; Maragall was slightly less sanguine, yet
acknowledged the continuity of his project with that of Porcioles.58 The critics were
less than impressed: ‘the Barcelona of 1992’ wrote one ‘is the Barcelona of Porcioles
with an Olympic shirt on’.59
So rather than a rupture with Francoist town planning, as had been hoped in the
late 1970s, it made sense to talk of the continuities encapsulated in the Olympic
project. The characteristics of Francoist urban development—the social dominance
of finance capital, the resuscitation of celebrated land use cases defeated in
the 1970s, the prevalence of zoning changes of dubious legality, and the continued
dominance of road-building schemes—still pertained to a certain degree throughout
the 1980s and 1990s.
Most notable was the case of the Olympic Village. Critics pointed to the degree
to which the massive infrastructural projects undertaken by HOLSA (Barcelona
Holding Olímpic S.A.), a public body constituted by central and municipal
government, served to valorise the investments of the private speculator. Without the
involvement of the state—which was responsible for financing the bulk of the
development of the Olympic Village, the rondes (expressways), and the Olympic ring
—there would have been little possibility of attracting private sector developers to
build the Village:
The challenge, in theory, consisted of constructing enough accomodation to

house 15,000 athletes for 3 weeks between July and August 1992. In practice,
it was about replacing an obsolete industrial district with a residential one and,
at the same time, regenerating the city’s waterfront; that is to say, expropriate
more than 5000,000 square metres, dismantle a historic railway line and sink
a new one (to Glories), construct expressways, renovate the main sewer
collector network, protect the coastline, rehabilitate 4 kilometres of beaches,
construct a hew harbour and, finally, build and lay out the aforementioned
residential district for the Olympic athletes. All this while convincing the
unions to postpone pay claims; establishing a rigorous security system in an
area where, some days, up to four thousand people were working; and putting
up with a bomb scare which, fortunately, came to nothing.60
Unsurprisingly, this was the city’s biggest project of the 20th century, and used up a
quarter of the total direct and indirect investment in Catalonia for the Games. The
FAVB were incensed, however, when it emerged that plans to include affordable
housing in the scheme had been dropped. Private sector reticence (or cunning?) in
questioning the viability of the project coaxed the public sector into underwriting a
considerable amount of the land preparation and, into the bargain, selling the land
at rock-bottom prices.61
The private developers who had been the target of such vehement opposition in
the 1970s would still be found at the forefront of many of the city’s major
developments in the 1980s and 1990s. Josep Maria Figueras, who built 10,000
units in the peripheral district of Sant Ildefons, and was involved in the dubious
changes of use of Barça’s former home in Les Corts, had a 10% share in the
company which promoted the Olympic Village, NISA. Josep Lluís Núñez remains
president of Barça, and his company Núñez y Navarro continues to exert its grip on
redevelopment in the Eixample. Roman Sanahuja, whose companies built a
significant proportion of the flats in the Nou Barris districts, has a sizeable interest
in l’Illa de Winthertur site on the Diagonal, the so-called ‘golden island’. Add to
this the profile of Juan Antonio Samaranch, the builder of Ciutat Meridiana, during
the Olympics and it is clear that the core of the Francoist property elite remains very
much a part of the city’s power structure. As Vázquez Montalbán put it, ‘the
speculators worried whether democracy would make them pay for their past sins…
They soon realised that the primary concern of most socialist mayors was not to appear
so radical as to inhibit capitalist development, however speculative’.62
But the concerns of the critics may be misplaced, because a substantial part of the
new building boom has been followed by foreign property capital. Against the
backdrop of the council’s enthusiasm for Europeanisation, and central government’s
sponsoring of a hot money policy, overseas investors were quick to realise the
profitability of the Spanish market, with Barcelona a primary target. This led to
considerable instability. Ware Travelstead, of London Docklands infamy, breezed in
saying Barcelona was going to be the key to his company’s activity in Europe,
undertaking the construction of the Hotel Arts at the Olympic Port. But by
October 1992—only three months after the closure of the Olympics—he had
breezed out rather more quietly, as the project went bankrupt. In October 1995, the
much-vaunted anchor of the Diagonal-Mar project sunk into the Med as the
American-headed Kepro pulled out of its commitment to a massive new office
complex.
The most striking example of a Porcioles-Maragall continuum was demonstrated
by the similarity between the infrastructural projects pursued by the two men. Most
of the major development projects carried out under the auspices of the Olympics
had already been floated at some point in the 1970s. The most striking case was, of
course, the resuscitation of the Pla de la Ribera in the guise of the Olympic
Village.63 While the latter covered only the western part of the original plan, the
fact that it was a socialist council that was promoting a project of high-cost housing
sold at market rents was not lost 011 the neighbourhood associations. The Expo ’82
plans envisaged boring tunnels under the hill of Tibidabo (which forms part of the
boundary of the northern side of the city): the inauguration of the Vallvidrera
tunnel on the 16th of April, 1990, marked a major step forward for the property
developers seeking to open up the Vallés for residential development. The Expo
plans also involved turning Carrer Tarragona into a link road between Montjuïc and
Tibidabo; under the democratic council Tarragona has been transformed into
‘Barcelona’s Wall Street’, a high-rise strip of new office blocks.64 Similarly, the
completion of the city’s three expressways—the rondes—were the pride and joy of
the council, but had been a major focus of neighbourhood protest in the 1970s. The
extension of the project was fiercely disputed by those—usually poor—
neighbourhoods most affected by the negative environmental impact of the
roadways. Finally, the desire of both mayors to make the city an international
business centre has seen modifications to the land use plan to allow the building of
hotels on public land.
While there are few who would equate the corruption of Porciolismo with the
current municipal regime, there have been accusations of serious breaches of
planning guidelines by the council. Ironically, the council’s democratic mandate has
allowed it to get away with urban policies which would have been unthinkable under
the dictatorship, given the degree of citizen mobilisation at that time. In the Vall
d’Hebron the council mishandled the purchase of land which then fell into private
hands. On the site of the electrical company FECSA on the Paral·lel, the council
allowed an illegal re-zoning which involved the building of an office block in return
for the provision of a public park.65 The main issue concerns changes of use, a fear
that the cherished green space requirements in a densely occupied city will be
violated by lupine developers. On the edges of Sarrià and Les Corts, there lies the
concrete bowl of the city’s indebted second football club, RCD Espanyol. The
owners, the Lara family, had been attempting to sell off their prime location ground
for apartments to bail out the club’s ailing finances. At the end of 1995 they
presented a plan to build 700 flats in an already densely populated area. Even
though the site is zoned for sports, the council allowed a change of use to go ahead
after the plan was revised. With Espanyol moving to the white elephant of the
Olympic stadium, a neat solution to the problem was found. Yet the FAVB was
outraged that the initial reason for the redevelopment proposals—the indebtedness
of a private company—should be taken as a consideration for rezoning. A precedent
had been set in the late 1980s with the decision to allow a public sports complex,
Piscines i Esports, to fall into private hands. And some of the major figures in the
critical movement of the 1970s—such as Josep M.Alibés —were among the council
apparatchiks working on the plan.66
Furthermore, a kind of cult of modernity can be detected in the council’s
publicity operations. At the time of the Olympics, HOLSA produced a promotional
video which contained time-delay images to show the changing Barcelona cityscape.
But what images! Seemingly oblivious to the impact of the green movement in
northern Europe, the video was like early Bolshevik documentary newsreel. Cranes
swing, tower-blocks soar into the sky, roads are tarmacked, bridges built. In the
most memorable scene of grotesque humour, the camera pans in on a farmer
surrounded by his green fields on the city suburbs, before he is cinematically
engulfed by a sea of concrete, congealing to form one of the city’s beltways. Further
evidence of crazed technocrats at play could be found in 1996, when the city hosted
the International Architects’ Congress. In an exhibition designed to coincide with
the event, Barcelona Contemporània 1856– 1999, the city planning department told
it as it was. With a token piece of social commentary, showing photographs and
footage of the immigration to the city of the 1940s and 1950s, and the street battles
of the 1960s and 1970s, Barcelona of the 1980s and 1990s was dealt with in an
execrable display of urban bravado. The city’s history was presented as a linear, if
bumpy, ride through successive waves of modernisation and expansion. The
planners, one suspects, see themselves as the heroes of the piece. In a masterpiece of
technical hocus-pocus, maximum space was given to the bizarre pseudo-scientific
charts of growth and sprawl, orange snaking lines indicating major cross-town
highways. The top piece of juxtaposition: a display relating to the citizen struggle
against—among other things—the first wave of road proposals. A battered
duplicator rests next to some of the crude leaflets of the time, exhorting citizens to
protest against the developments. Next room. Monitors flash out speeded-up trips
through the urban beltways of the Olympic city, seemingly oblivious to any sense of
irony. Perhaps they should be commended for their honesty.
Contesting the Eurocity

Two events of catastrophic dimensions marked the city in the first half of the
1990s. On 11th November, 1990, a system-built apartment block in the peripheral
estate of Turó de la Peira in Nou Barris collapsed, killing one resident. The cause, it
would become clear, was aluminosis, a weakness in concrete caused by cost-cutting
in the proportions of sand mixed with the concrete and the humidity of Barcelona’s
climate. The tragedy provoked outrage throughout the city’s working class barris, as
subsequent research revealed that 87,000 flats in Catalunya (most built in the
desarrollismo years) were affected. The 1st of February, 1994, La Rambla, slap bang
in the centre of the old city. Another disaster. A spark from a workman’s welding
iron ignites the curtain of the city’s opera house, the Liceu. Within minutes the
building is engulfed in flames, and all but the facade of the 150-year-old building is
lost. By the next day, campaigns had been launched and Maragall and Pujol were
promising an imminent reconstruction and re-opening.
The neighbourhood movement used the two events to contrast the priorities of
urban politics in democratic Barcelona. The court case over the collapse in Turó de
la Peira ended with the exoneration of all the accused parties: the cement company,
Molins, somehow escaped prosecution on the grounds that they had placed the
correct directions on the outside of the packet, the constructors, Roman Sanahuja,
because they were unaware of the effect of heat and humidity on the cement, the
council because there was no precedent and hence no grounds for negligence.67
Supporters of the neighbourhood movements were stunned: ‘Sanahuja has been
lucky. If his diseased cement beams had broken a few years before, when the
political transition was still under negotiation, he would have taken on the unenviable
role of scapegoat’.68 Sanahuja escaped, however, as noted above, going on to
participate in the development of one of the prime real estate sites in the city, l’Illa
on the Diagonal. And while the rebuilding of the opera house was treated as a top
priority by both the council and the Generalitat, the plan of reform for Turó de la Peira
was not approved by the council until March 1996.
This was only the most obvious example of the FAVB’s dissatisfaction with the
post-Olympic city. They continue to put pressure on all parties to attend to the
urban problems throughout the city’s neighbourhoods. In their Metro als barris
(Metro to the neighbourhoods) campaign launched in December 1996 they set out
a formidable list of broken promises from the previous year’s local election
manifestos. Their primary target is the Generalitat—sharing responsibility for the
metro with central government—and they reproduce a CiU leaflet from 1995
promising the ‘metro to Nou Barris, Zona Franca, and Bon Pastor’. The excuse that
the money from central government is not forthcoming goes down badly coming
from a party which has held both the PSOE and the PP to electoral ransom for four
years. Along with demands for increased provision of social housing (asking that 10,
000 subsidised flats be made available in the short term), environmental protest
against a proposed incinerator in the Zona Franca, and a vigilance against school
closures, the FAVB continues to remind a complacent city that urban problems
remain beneath the bright Mediterranean hues of the Eurocity.69
Barcelona retains an informed critical consciousness and overview of urban issues
which many other European cities lack. The FAVB produces a free bimonthly
newspaper, La, Veu del Carrer (Word from the Street), which provides an admirable
alternative commentary on urban planning, politics and culture. Their 1991
gazetteer/manifesto La Barcelona dels Barris (The Barcelona of the Neighbourhoods)
gives a statistical breakdown of the city by neighbourhood association, highlighting
concentrations of unemployment or the specific needs of areas with above-average
clusters of old people, and cataloguing the outstanding demands of the
neighbourhood groups. In a special issue of La Veu del Carrer a few months after the
Olympics, La Barcelona de Maragall, they provide an A-Z of the contemporary
city’s semi-submerged landscapes of power, a conscious throwback to the 1970s
critique of Porciolismo.70 While I have addressed the writing of Vázquez Montalbán
in some detail in chapter 2, there should be no disguising his direct engagement
with the property development industry. In a dialogue with the lawyer Eduardo
Moreno, published shortly after the 1991 municipal elections, the two men
returned to the themes of the 1970s, questioning whether Maragall’s urban policy is
so different in property development terms from the period in office of Porcioles.71
The most violent challenge to the gloss of the Eurocity came in the form of the
squatters’ movement, the okupes, who had a small but visible presence in the city, in
1996 occupying around 50 empty houses. Sporting the usual accoutrements of drop-
out punkdom—dogs on bits of string, studied shabbiness—they have drawn
attention to the huge demand for housing from young people, the lack of sufficient
subsidies available for those wishing to leave the family home, and a massive
shortage of affordable housing in the city. By squatting, they were able to both fulfil
a desire for a lifestyle independent from their families, and convey a very visible
message of political non-conformity. In 1996 they established themselves in a long-
abandoned cinema at the foot of the Via Laietana, a short distance from the bars
and restaurants of the Moll de la Fusta and Maremagnum. Identifiable by the
graffitied messages on the facades, the cinema—the Princesa— was now home to an
‘alternative centre’ of meetings and film shows on Chiapas and animal rights. While
local residents in the surrounding apartments were split in attitudes over the centre,
the president of the local neighbourhood association pointed out that it was ‘the
first time in twenty years that some use [had been] found for the derelict space’. The
Princesa came to national attention in the early hours of Monday, 28th October,
1996. Having received a court order to vacate the premises, the okupes had begun
preparing themselves for the expected police eviction. Television pictures would
later show how in the murk of the Laietana night the police threw ladders against the
bricked-up front and sides of the building, illuminated by the searchlights of a
circling helicopter. While the squatters attempted to resist with a variety of
improvised street-fighting tactics, including rockets, Molotov cocktails, and a
burning sofa, the police used rubber bullets and forcibly evacuated the building,
precariously shouldering dazed bodies down the narrow ladders, both sides covered
in fine layers of dust as if all that had taken place had been an exchange of flour
bombs. Forty-eight squatters were detained. Dawn would bring the complaints of
local residents, ordered to remain in their houses by police regardless of work or
school. The following evening saw the Laietana again closed off as a pitched battle
between police and demonstrators ended in ragged chases down the surrounding
warren of medieval streets. There were 14 injuries, shared between the two sides.72
While much of the immediate criticism was directed at the police, who acted ‘as
if faced by a fully-armed ETA comando’, according to one local politician, the
following days saw debate over the lack of political will in addressing the shortages of
affordable housing for young people. A high-ranking official of the Generalitat
admitted that the city had 40,000 empty houses. While the regional government
had given subsidies to purchasers of 14,000 flats in Catalonia (1300 in Barcelona)
these remain outwith the reach of young people suffering from unemployment or
low wages, leaving them unable to get any foothold on the housing ladder.73
Barcelona heads towards the year 2000 with its modern financial services
districts, its gleaming high-culture set-pieces in place and its position in a New
Europe seemingly secure. Yet beneath these glinting symbols of a long-awaited
modernity remains a sense of unease. The council seems unable to stop, however,
unable to call a halt to controversial developments in a competitive Europe where
the stakes keep changing. The property-led drive for the ever-new Barcelona will
continue, despite what the neighbours say.
✤✤✤
The story of the second coming of desarrollismo in Barcelona is one which has
parallels in cities throughout the rest of Europe. Whether it be the dramatic and
extensive redevelopment that global cities such as London and Paris have
experienced, or the less ambitious restructuring of smaller regional or national
capitals such as Lille and Stockholm, the revalorisation of the city as a site of
exchange value is one of the characteristics of a New Europe. As my brief political
biography of Manuel Castells has sought to show, there are important reasons why
the Left has gone down the path of encouraging property development. But what is
fascinating is the starkness of the city’s transformation from possessing a Marxist-
oriented, explicitly anti-rentier intelligentsia to being a leading player in or
inspiration behind the model of the Eurocity which other (often Left-controlled)
urban regimes have followed. This is thrown into relief when one sees how the sites
of planning conflict and popular protest in the 1970s have often re-emerged in the
1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, it is worth remembering that some of the jewels of
the city’s public space programme—such as l’Espanya Industrial—would have been
irretrievably lost to residential development had illegal action not been taken by
grassroots groups. The city council has been less than active in sustaining a culture of
urban protest, surely an essential part of any vision of the democratic city.
What lessons does this hold for the Left? It is notable that Castells still retains in
his work the now-unfashionable dichotomy of use value vs. exchange value. This
has often appeared in other guises in the vocabulary of the green movement, whether
in the peaceful anti-airport protests in Manchester, or the quasi-violent squatters’
movement in Berlin (and now Barcelona). This seems to confirm that the dominant
political identity of the Left in the first half of the 20th century— anti-capitalism—
now resides with groups far less willing to carry the baggage of Marxism. Such
groups are now rarely organised along class or occupation lines, and are far less
willing to accept the teleology of much of what has passed for socialist political
strategy. The implicit message of today’s social democrats still retains this teleology
—put up with the negative effects of growth today, and it will trickle down to you
tomorrow. It is the continued existence and strengthening of these opposition
groups—be they based around neighbourhood associations or lifestyle groups—
which holds the greatest promise of the defence of the ‘humane city’ once so beloved
of socialists across Europe.
Notes
1 Castells (1994), pp. 23–5.

2 Castells (1989).
3 Castells and Hall (1994).
4 See his recent work on the ‘network society’, in Castells (1996, 1997).
5 Catterall (1997).
6 Borja and Castells (1997).
7 This is to simplify what has been a complex process of individual intellectual
development. See Lowe (1986) for a detailed account of early shifts in Castells’ thought,
and Catterall (1997) for a more recent statement from the horse’s mouth.
8 Castells (1973, 1977).
9 Lowe (1986), p. 18.
10 Castells (1983), p. 275.
11 Catterall (1997), p. 149.
12 The results of this experience can be found in Castells and Hall (1994).
13 Borja and Castells (1997), p. 14.
14 Catterall (1997), p. 143.
16 Borja (1977).
18 Fabre and Huertas (1989).
19 Alibés et al. (1975); Huertas and Andreu (1996).
20 Quotation from Alibés et al. (1975), p. 201.
21 Castells (1983), p. 220.

22 Cited in Fabre and Huertas (1989), p. 253.
23 Alibés et al. (1975); Fabre and Huertas (1989), pp. 253–7.
24 Castells (1983), p. 219.
25 Alibés et al. (1975), pp. 53–6.
26 Fabre and Huertas (1989, pp. 258–9).
27 Martí’ and Moreno (1974).
28 Huertas and Andreu (1996).
29 Castells (1983), p. 215.
30 Castells (1983, pp. 224–5).
31 Moreno and Vázquez Montalbán (1991), p. 41.
33 Martí and Moreno (1974), p. 58.
34 Alibés et al. (1975), pp. 217–19; Martí and Moreno (1974), pp. 55–68; Huertas and
Andreu (1996), p. 58.
35 Huertas and Andreu (1996), p. 76.
38 Huertas and Andreu (1996) list 18 different tactical approaches used; on the comics,
see Alfons López, ‘Butifarra!: la lluita com a diversió’, La Veu del Carrer September
1994, p. 13.
39 Francese Candel, ‘Gas Natural. Un matí de diumenge a Sants’, Oriflama January 1973,
p. 46, cited in Fabre and Huertas (1989), p. 306.
40 Huertas and Andreu (1996, p. 24).
41 Fabre and Huertas (1989), pp. 321–24.
42 This would subsequently be Catalanised to ‘l’Espanya Industrial’.
43 Gómez and Marcè i Fort (1996).
44 Later published in paperback as Alibés et al. (1975).
45 Alibés et al. (1975), p. 45.
46 Martí and Moreno (1974), quotation from p. 6.
47 Cited in Huertas and Andreu (1996), p. 22, from Anna Alabart (no bibliographic details
cited).
48 Gómez and Marcè i Fort (1996) , p. 15.
49 Borja (1978), interviewed in February 1978, p. 76.
50 Maragall (1978), interviewed in November 1977, p. 91.
51 Lluís Unía (1997), ‘La conquista de los ayuntamientos’, Memoria de Catalunya,
supplement to El País, pp. 113–21.
52 Subirós (c. 1993).
53 Moreno and Vázquez Montalbán (1991), p. 61. It should be noted that mayors are
chosen by the councillors, usually taken from the head of the list of the party with the
largest number of seats.
54 Gómez and Marcè i Fort (1996), p. 30.
56 Cited in Huertas and Andreu (1996), p. 31.
58 ‘Epitafios para el alcalde Porcioles’, La Veu del Carrer November 1993, p. 4.
59 Andrés Naya, ‘Porciolitis’, La Veu del Carrer November 1993, p. 4.
60 Moix (1994), p. 119.
61 FAVB (1991), pp. 146–8.

63 ‘Urbanisme: cine paral·lelismes’, La Veu del Carrer September 1994, p. 18.
64 La Veu del Carrer November-December 1992, p. 29.
65 Moreno and Vázquez Montalbán (1991), p. 115.
66 Manel Calpe, ‘Salvem l’Espanyol o salvem els Lara?’, p. 3 and ‘Qui és qui?’ pp. 4–5, La
Veu del Carrer January-February 1996.
67 ‘Carpetazo judicial a la aluminosis del Turó de la Peira’, El País 8 October 1993, p. 24.
68 Arcadi Espada, Años de cemento’, El País 8 October 1993, p. 25.
69 ‘Les primeres mesures que els barri exigin’, La Veu del Carrer April-May 1995, pp. 16–
17.
70 La Veu del Carrer November-December 1992, pp. 10–11.
72 Accounts drawn from ‘Asalto a la fortaleza okupa’, La Vanguardia 29 October 1996,
Revista, pp. 1–3; ‘La policía “desokupa” el Princessa’, and ‘La violenta manifestación
de la noche supera la batalla campal de la mañana’, La Vanguardia 29 October 1996,
pp. 23–4.
73 Marc Andreu, ‘Els “okupes” reclamen el dret a l’habitatge’, La Veu del Carrer
November-December 1996, p. 4.
6
Designer socialism: the politics of architecture
and public space
‘A good morning in Barcelona in 1966,’ writes Robert Hughes, ‘was a joint 011 the
serpentine encrusted bench of the Güell Park, and then a descent to the city to
groove on the facade of the Sagrada Familia’.1 Latter-day groovers have flocked to
the city since the 1980s to examine the city’s extraordinary range of new buildings,
public spaces and artworks. Already enjoying an enviable reputation through its
well-preserved medieval core and the surviving buildings of the modernista architects
—headed, of course, by the redoubtable Gaudí—the city has become established in
the international architectural press as a capital of contemporary architecture. Since
the first post-dictatorship municipal elections in 1979, the city council has pursued
a high-profile policy of architecture and urban design-led urban renewal: in the
words of Robert Hughes, ‘the most ambitious project of its kind that any
government of a 20th century city has tried’.2 The commissioning of new public
artworks which would take their place among the city’s existing statues and
monuments had endowed its streets, squares and parks with over 500 sculptures by
the mid-1990s. Through renovation and selective demolition the council
comprehensively upgraded the quality of its urban environment. And the public
sector building boom which accompanied the staging of the Olympics brought a
string of commissions for both local and foreign architects, giving the city a broad
portfolio of new landmark buildings.
That this all took place under the tutelage of a social democratic council raises
some interesting issues. Can architecture be harnessed, can space be designed, in a way
that is specifically left wing? There is always a danger in such suggestions that
ideology is unproblematically ‘read off’ from the built environment. Paul Knox has
noted that the idea of architecture as zeitgeist has appeared in the works of
prominent urban sociologists such as Lewis Mumford, Ray Pahl and Ruth Glass,
each seeing in the built environment all sorts of manifestations of power relations.3
However, as David Ley has pointed out, direct relationships are difficult to sustain:
‘landscape style is intimately related to the historic swirl of culture, politics,
economics and personality in a particular place at a particular time’. Politics cannot
be simply read off from landscape.4 So here, I want to provide a contextualised
reading of how Serra, Maragall and a team of municipal architects and planners
have conceived of Barcelona in aesthetic and design terms. My intention is not to
provide a definitive statement of the city council’s architectural and design policy,
DESIGNER SOCIALISM 141
but rather to explore how the local state’s intervention in the built environment fits
with some of the themes and local discourses already discussed. I begin by
introducing how the key figures in Barcelona’s aesthetic renaissance—primarily
Maragall, Serra and Oriol Bohigas—have envisioned its remaking. This is often
couched in terms of the city being a kind of meeting point of civil society and the
state. I then explore some of the implications of this in practice: the idea of an
inclusive city based around a politics of public space; the council’s utilisation of
public art and the architectural monument as a means of re-establishing place-
identity in the post-Francoist city; and a willingness to use both the internationally
renowned ‘trophy’ architect and controversial urban design strategies in projecting
an image of the city beyond its immediate boundaries, leading some to criticise the
‘enlightened despotism’ of the socialists in power.
The city of architects
Some cities are capitals of power. An obvious example is Paris; we never

speak of the Paris of this or that architect, but of Mitterrand or the
revolutionaries. Other cities, with more civil society and less state, are in
certain cases defined by their architects, their planners. Such is the case
of the Vicenza of Palladio, and that of the Barcelona of Gaudí; and,
why not?, that of the Barcelona that we architects have been
constructing over the last few years.
(Ricard Bofill)5
Does Barcelona have more civil society and less state? As we saw in chapter 3
Maragall has argued the need for a plural, democratic city. Architecture and design
is seen less as an instrument of power, and more as a means of endowing the city
with collective, civic identity. Bofill’s comparison of Barcelona with Paris is
insightful: both are cities which have headlined in architectural journals since the
1980s, yet the prominence of the latter has been characterised by Mitterrand’s
dominance in the design and commissioning of what have been very presidential
grands projets. By contrast, Barcelona has been commended for its smaller-scale
projects, which seek to provide its neighbourhoods with distinct identity.
In his book Civic Realism, Peter Rowe describes a number of cities—Siena,
Llubljana, Barcelona itself—whose built environments embody the following
creative tension:
…it is along the politico-cultural divide between civil society and the state
that the urban architecture of the public realm is made best, especially when
the reach of both spheres extends simultaneously up to a civilization’s loftier
aims and down to the needs and aspirations of its marginalized populations.6
142 DESIGNER SOCIALISM
Such a conjuncture does not occur very often. One is reminded of David
Ley’s account of late 1960s redevelopment in Montreal under the TEAM
movement, a middle class strategy of ‘careful place-making’ counterposed to
massified modernism.7 It is apparent that, on occasion, a popular Left in alliance
with powerful neighbourhood groups and sympathetic architects, can seek to
achieve what Rowe labels ‘civic realism’. So what was the context for Barcelona’s
aesthetic renaissance, who were the main agents?
As I mentioned in the last chapter, architects were in the vanguard of the local
Left’s opposition to Francoism, though their collars were more likely to be wide and
silk than blue and denim. These soixante-huitards had their own meeting places,
such as the infamous Bocaccio dance-hall, which attracted
…progressive celebrities who included models, singers, film directors,

architects and designers. Its owner even sent a lorryload of smoked salmon
sandwiches to sustain those democrats who occupied Montserrat monastery in
protest at the Burgos ETA trials. This was Barcelona’s gauche divine, the
fashionable left which in some way softened the impact of the gauche
satanique’s, bombs and strikes, helping the bourgeoisie to understand that
democracy was inevitable.8
As we have seen in the preceding pages, the opposition to Franco in Barcelona was
diverse, a broad coalition drawn from most strands of society. Come the transition
and the jockeying for position and influence in the democratic society, this social
bloc began to dissolve and reform. And so—as Vázquez Montalbán reminds us—this
‘fashionable Left’ was well placed to ease its way into power at the head of the PSC
and PSUC party lists, with a very clear idea of how culture had to be utilised and
redefined as a means of building the democracy. As in the rest of metropolitan Spain
where the PSOE would—after 1982—embark upon an ambitious programme of
spending in the arts and cultural infrastructure9, so in Barcelona issues of culture
and aesthetics, and their relationship to the new democratic society, were at the
forefront of the new council’s concerns.
With Narcís Serra and Pasqual Maragall holding the mayor’s office between 1979
and 1997, for almost two decades the city council was led by highly educated,
cosmopolitan members of the local ‘enlightened’ bourgeoisie. Serra had all the
hallmarks of the renaissance man, an architecturally literate, piano-playing
economist, a devotee of Mozart and Viennese modernism (Hoffman, Loos) who
went off to paint the Mallorcan landscape in the summer.10 Educated at the London
School of Economics, Serra had set up a legal practice with the lawyer and Catalan
social democrat Miquel Roca in the 1970s, and was well respected within the
Catalan bourgeoisie. One of his first tasks as mayor, however, was to satisfy the
demands of the city’s neighbourhood movements, to undertake a generalised
mending of a city which had been torn apart by the speculation of the Porcioles
years. When looking for a figure who could carry through such a vast operation, he
knew where to turn: Oriol Bohigas.
Plate 7 Calatrava’s tower from Sants. One of two communications towers built at the time of
the Olympics, the tower is another example of the city’s bold architectural approach. (Source:
Vicky Webb)
Bohigas had a long history within the gauche divine. As Llàtzer Moix, who has
chronicled the development of the ‘city of architects’, has noted, Bohigas’s influence
on the Barcelona architectural ‘family’ has been enormous. He had been influential
in pursuing a theoretical agenda formulated by the Grup R, the Catalan modernist
architectural movement which sought to contextualise and regionalise the modern
movement with a closer attention to vernacular traditions. This would provide a basis
which would influence many of the young architects of the ‘Barcelona School’
clustered in the city’s principal architectural college (which Bohigas directed
between 1977 and 1980). He headed protests against the wilful destruction of
notable historic buildings under the Francoist council, and his political leanings led
to his expulsion from the college for several years in the late 1960s. Prone to making
outrageous statements on cultural policy, renowned for his bullish temperament and
self-assurance, he was the obvious choice to head the regeneration effort.11
Encouraged that the council’s planning policy was open and undefined, and with
Serra’s counsel that Samaranch seemed confident that the city could win the
Games, Bohigas realised that he was being offered an unprecedented opportunity to
undo the philistinism of Francoist urban policy, and to put his own distinctive
philosophy into practice. He accepted the post of head of Urban Services, making
him, in effect, the city’s chief planner. His distinctive approach he explains as follows:
My idea was that there was a chance in Barcelona of developing a realist vision
of planning; a vision more interested in the volumetric construction of the
city than its street lay-out. That is, an architect’s vision rather than that of a
planner… What we wanted was to transform Barcelona intervening through
small concrete projects. We didn’t want to demoralise ourselves, like other
inexperienced democratic councils, in revisions of general plans.12
As I describe below, Bohigas initiated a number of remarkable schemes, frequently

clashing with road engineers over his unorthodox plans, opening up gems of urban
parks, and civilising the city’s expressways.
Maragall’s arrival in office in 1982 extended this phase of small, architect-led
projects, but brought the hard-headed reckoning of the urban economist into the
fray. He was less sanguine than most about the role of architects in the urban
renewal process:
Barcelona has been transformed thanks, in part, to the architects. But they are
not the only ones responsible for the change. The change has been possible
thanks to the collaboration between architects, engineers, and economists. It’s
a mistake to define it as a city of architects….13
With an inclination to pursue a ‘greater Barcelona’ which extended beyond the

administrative boundaries of the city, Maragall saw a need to move beyond the
architect-defined small project, with a more global vision encompassing transport
and strategic planning. Without great support in the PSC, and with the reputed
pressure of his colleagues in his own architectural practice, Bohigas left the post in
1984 to be replaced by Josep Acebillo.
Acebillo had been in the planning team from the outset, but had largely been in
the shadow of Bohigas. He began to realise the importance of negotiation and pacts
with other key departments in the council, along with the well-organised
neighbourhood groups. And this was timely: Maragall came to the post with a
distrust of one professional group dominating things, and found Acebillo ‘a
bulldozer’ defined by his ‘drive, his hardness as a negotiator and his capacity to
dialogue and defend his position against engineers, the roads department or the
neighbourhood associations’. Along with Joan Busquets, who concentrated on
planning policy, Acebillo was responsible for co-ordinating most of the major
infrastructural works which characterised the city’s Olympic drive: major road
projects such as the building of the Ronda de Dalt and Ronda Litoral, which
involved sensitive negotiation between the mayor, the neighbourhood groups, the
engineers and the planning department. As technical director of IMPUSA, the
limited company set up to channel resources into the building of Olympic-related
projects, he would be behind the planning of various major projects such as the
Olympic sites at Vall d’Hebron and the Diagonal, and the complex motorway
interchange at Glories. He was also singularly responsible for choosing many of the
artists who would contribute sculptures to the city’s public spaces. Meanwhile,
Bohigas would remain close to the decision-making process, his own practice
protagonising in the planning of the Olympic Village. So, we can see Acebillo as
Maragall’s chief operative in the complex process of readying the city for the
Olympics, carrying through a strategic overview in contrast to Bohigas’s earlier
bottom-up approach.14
It is Maragall who has become identified in the international press as having an
ambitious and practical vision of the contemporary European city, with a rare
combination of political cunning, a deep understanding of urban economics, an
appreciation of the sometimes arcane language of architecture and urban design, and
above all the political support and popularity to carry off some of the council’s more
audacious projects. And he would soon become a favourite in international
architectural circles, commissioning Pritzker Prize-winner Richard Meier to design
the city’s new modern art gallery, on good terms with the likes of Norman Foster
and Richard Rogers, and with the added advantage of the powers of patronage
offered by the Olympics. Invited to tour London in 1993 by the Financial Times, he
would reveal some of his personal preferences:
11.30am There are no traffic jams on the M4 as we drive into London from
Heathrow… The western outskirts of London unfold. No Mediterranean sun
or coastline here, no Olympian village. Just a landscape of cricket fields,
warehouses, office blocks, and terraced houses. Maragall looks bored. ‘I have
to agree with the Prince of Wales, there is a sound basis to dislike much of
what has been built in London. Look at all this. I am unable to understand
what is going on about me. For a citizen of a city, that is the most damaging
of sensations. Being lost in a landscape you cannot understand. There doesn’t
seem to be a cohesive urban development plan’.
1.00pm To the FT for lunch [with various London politicians and
boosterists] …The dialogue shifts to culture and design. Maragall says: ‘If
Barcelona has one asset it is the gift of design. You cannot show a design
which is not the best otherwise you lose your trademark. Barcelona wanted to
be capital and never was…it is always trying to go beyond itself and we had a
lot to catch up after 40 years of dictatorship…’ The gathered Anglo-Saxons
look bemused.15
Two points emerge from this. First, as we have seen, for Maragall the city is central
to political and cultural identity. As such, the local state (city-state) should design the
city with the citizen, not the subject, in mind. The citizen—as part of his or her
social contract with the state—is entitled to be able to ‘read’ the city, rather than
being ‘lost in a landscape you cannot understand’. In other words, a responsibility
of the state is to provide legibility: an implicit critique of the lack of context of
modernist urban planning. For Maragall, ‘the city is the place of experimentation.
The meeting place between creators and consumers of that creation. I feel
responsible for this creation being expressed…therefore we put the walls on the
libraries, the museums, the theatres. This is what the local state should do’.16 The idea
of the state as an animateur of creativity is a motif of recent urban commentary, but

such rhetoric may overlap with very determined aesthetic choices made by
government.17
Second, more specifically, ‘we had a lot to catch up after 40 years of dictatorship’.
For Maragall (and the whole architectural establishment), Francoism was not only
about loss of democratic freedom, but also an assault on Barcelona’s prominence as
an international cultural citadel. The death of the Republic also hampered the work
of the GATCPAC group of Catalan rationalist architects— influenced by Frank
Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus—who had ‘travelled abroad arguing
for the young Republic’s new urban philosophy at architecture conferences, whether
in Athens or in Paris, and won the respect of those who were in flight from Nazism
and Fascism and saw Barcelona as the democratic capital of southern Europe’.18
What had to be re-asserted after the hiatus of the dictatorship was this role as a
citadel and promoter of democratic values, so important to Maragall’s vision of how
the city fitted into Catalonia, Spain and Europe. Part and parcel of the re-
establishment of the democratic state was a return to quality in architecture and
design. Hence the symbolic importance of the decision to reconstruct Mies van der
Rohe’s German Pavilion from the 1929 Expo, and the search for high-profile
architects to undertake the major commissions of the 1990s.
The Left has long held a cultural baggage associated with the embrace of
modernity. Part of the Republican dream which died—thankfully—with the defeat
in the Civil War was the plan to reconstruct Barcelona through a ‘rational’ plan
part-produced by Le Corbusier, which would have involved the levelling of much of
the old city. The International Style remained dear to the hearts of many of the
city’s architecture professionals, evidenced in the municipal project—driven by
Bohigas—to reconstruct the Mies Pavilion. Re-opened in 1986, it served notice of
the council’s intentions to rediscover this modernity and to celebrate its heritage.
Few of the structures built in the city since the 1980s were influenced by the
postmodern craze sweeping much of the West, save Frank Gehry’s playful—and
gigantic—Fish sculpture, which sits beneath the corporate towers of the Olympic
Village.19
Maragall’s speech at the opening ceremony of the Mies Pavilion serves as a
crystallisation of these philosophies:
Today…we are…settling a debt. A debt Barcelona owed to Ludwig Mies van

der Rohe. Photographs, drawings, and references to the Pavilion have been a
constant in books and journals on architecture, art, and in all manner of
encyclopaedias, Barcelona’s name has been known round the world since
1929 thanks to Mies van der Rohe. Also, Barcelona has received an enormous
amount of publicity in the best of the world’s press since work began on the
reconstruction of the Pavilion… For the people of Barcelona it also represents
the recovery of a part of our history. The 1929 Exhibition signalled the most
important renovating impulse that Barcelona has experienced in this century.
The subway, the development of Montjuïc, Plaça d’Espanya, were all made
possible thanks to the exhibition. The Pavilion reminds us of all that. But the
reconstruction of the Pavilion is also a symbol of what Barcelona City Hall
does…In the past six years, Barcelona city planning has had as its theme the
reconstruction of a deteriorated city, the recovery of the marks of its identity,
and the use of monuments as an instrument for giving dignity to the
urban environment… Tours of the new public areas have already become a
regular part of the itinerary of visitors to Barcelona. And this ties in with
Barcelona’s renewed desire to be a part of the international scene. The
Pavilion brings all this together: an architectural milestone, Barcelona’s
history, an international presence… It will be an emblem of the cultured,
cosmopolitan, open Barcelona that all of us are reconstructing.20
Maragall’s address contains a number of themes and motifs which indicate the
importance of the built environment to his political project, and I want to pick out
three of these for closer examination. First, there is the reference to the role of the ‘City
Hall’ (the state) as mediator in the production of the built environment, and the
Left’s approach to reconstructing Barcelona’s through an extensive programme of
public spaces. Second, the pavilion functioned as an architectural monument
employed to add dignity to the urban arena, also pursued through an extensive
public art programme. Third, the specific mention of the pavilion as symbol of the
1929 Expo echoes the aim of using the 1992 Games as catalyst for both
modernisation and ‘cosmopolitanism’, the ‘desire to be a part of the international
scene’. Here, an internationally recognised architectural aesthetic was utilised to boost
the city’s image around the world.
The Left, space and its public

Barcelona is, as many people see it, a patchwork of districts each with their own
identities and histories. When the democratic council first sat down to look at its
urban policy, the in-tray was overflowing with a list of demands for new parks,
squares and services neglected under the dictatorship and the transition council. The
FAVB’s manifesto—published on the eve of the 1979 elections—had made clear
just what the demands of each barri were, and just what was to be prioritised.
Gradually, over the years, these projects would be addressed.
The set of projects to be tackled were listed in the council’s catalogue Plans i
Projectes per a Barcelona, 1981–1982, in which is included Bohigas’s keynote essay,
Una Altra Urbanitat (which translates a bit awkwardly as A Different Urbanism).
The essence of Bohigas’s theory was that the city had to be seen from the viewpoint
of the individual district, with the smaller project taking precedence over the rational,
abstract plan (which the city had been pursuing up to that point). His philosophy
could be summarised under three main criteria. First, although strategic planning
was important, it was necessary to make regeneration a positive experience through
tangible and numerous projects that restored quality of life to the barri; second, the
all-important issue of the road network was to be addressed by integrating the city
expressways into the existing physical environment, rather than imposing them
destructively upon it; third, on a city-wide level the intention was to regenerate the
urban core through esponjament, the opening up of areas of the densely built old city
through selective (rather than wholesale) demolition (hence the metaphor of the
sponge, with small air-holes providing ventilation), combined with a
‘monumentalisation of the periphery’, the decentralisation of economic activity
throughout the city and the creation of a sense of place in the chaotic districts of the
post-war period. The emphasis was on stitching rather than bulldozing, the small
architect-designed project rather than the global overview of the planner.21
Accompanied by a small and dedicated team, Bohigas started work on the 1st of
November, 1980, appointing Acebillo to control the projects. Owing to the parlous
state of the council’s finances, and the huge volume of demands from the
neighbourhoods, the team was augmented by 13 of the most promising
architectural students from the city’s main architectural school, ‘golden pencils’
prepared to work for a minimum of money. Every Friday, the planning heads would
sit down and look at the reams of outstanding demands, and would ask themselves
if they had the money, the land, and the planning tools to proceed with the project
in question.22 In many cases, the answer was affirmative. As we saw in the previous
chapter, the transition mayor Socías Humbert had brought a number of old
industrial sites and railway properties into public ownership. The result was a spate
of fascinating public spaces scattered throughout the city with a remarkable degree of
diversity in aesthetic styles. Some, such as the Plaça dels Països Catalans, were
architectural set-pieces, combining monumentality with functionality. Others, such
as the parks at Clot in Sant Andreu, l’Espanya Industrial in Sants or l’Escorxador in
the left Eixample, were designed as a direct response to the wishes of the
neighbourhood associations. Many were ‘hard spaces’, squares or parks with little
planting and, hence, with low maintenance costs.
I think we can meaningfully identify three aspects of the city’s regeneration
policy: the ‘airing’ of the old town through the process of esponjament, the
redefinition and revival of the city’s traditional districts; and the ‘monumentalisation
of the periphery’, the process by which many of the cheaply built mass-produced
housing on the outskirts of the city were given definition through design and the
provision of new public spaces.
‘Esponjament’ in the old city

The Ciutat Vella is—as we know from the works of Vázquez Montalbán—one of
the most atmospheric parts of Barcelona. Stretching over 431 hectares, and with a
population of around 100,000, the district runs alongside the sea as far as the
Ciutadella on one side and Montjuïc on the other, hemmed in on two sides by the
location of the (now almost disappeared) medieval walls, and swamped by the
Eixample’s grid pattern on all sides.23 The old city is divided into four major blocks.
To the east lies the Case Antic, comprising the districts of Sant Pere and Santa
Caterina, a warren of decrepit housing, today sealed in by the roaring Via Laietana
which, at the start of the century, was carved, Haussman-like, through the old
district. On the other side of the Laietana is the Barri Gòtic, centred around the
government buildings of Plaça Sant Jaume, upmarket shopping streets such as
Portaferrissa and Portal de l’Angel towards Plaça de Catalunya, but containing the
lumpen seaward barri of La Mercè around the colonnaded Plaça Reial and Carrer
Escudellers. Across the Rambla is the Raval, the setting for the Carvalho novels, the
home of the Liceu opera house, containing the sub-district of the once-notorious
Barrio Chino. Finally, jutting out into the sea is Barceloneta, the traditional maritime
heart of the city, home to much of its fishing and maritime industries (and
employees), its gridded streets today concealed behind the generous frontage of
Passeig Joan de Borbó, with its strip of fish restaurants.
The problems facing the council in the old city were clear. In the mid-1980s,
unemployment was running at 30% (twice that of areas such as Les Corts or Sant
Gervasi, and higher even than the peripheral estates of Non Barris).
Demographically, almost a quarter (23.6%) of its population were over 65,
compared with 6% in Nou Barris (and this is even more pronounced in the Barri
Gòtic). The narrow streets, poor access, dilapidated housing, lack of social facilities,
and problems of drug addiction and crime all exacerbated the problems faced by its
residents.24 The situation demanded urgent attention. Within the decaying streets
lay much of the city’s administration (the Ajuntament and Generalitat), many of its
cultural institutions (museums, archives, theatres and concert halls), and a hefty
proportion of its nightlife, the narrow streets dotted with bars, clubs and
restaurants. Thus, the reform of the Ciutat Vella was given a high priority, with the
establishment of specific funding regimes (including support from the EU’s
Cohesion Fund) and social housing programmes (funded primarily by the
Generalitat), along with strategies for encouraging mixed uses into the area to
valorise the redevelopment.
The city council began with its programme of esponjament, opening little air-
holes across the area, rather than pursuing comprehensive slum clearance. In the
early 1980s, small projects were chosen, little squares such as Emili Vendrell in the
heart of the Raval, or that facing the church of La Mercè tucked in between the
waterfront and Plaça Reial. Projects such as these would involve the demolition of
certain blocks—that of La Mercè would require the removal of a housing block
including a flat once occupied by Picasso during his stay in Barcelona, a decision
angering certain local heritage groups. Nonetheless, the council pressed on, and
soon identified several key areas for rehabilitation. In the north of the Raval, the
refurbishment of the early 19th century Casa de la Caritat and the demolition of
adjacent apartment blocks allowed the construction of a new university and cultural
centre, housing Richard Meier’s MACBA modern art gallery, the city’s
contemporary culture centre, and university faculty buildings. The new Pompeu
Fabra university opened a large complex in La Mercè, and undertook a striking
refurbishment of an old red brick pumping-station in Carrer Wellington (adjacent
to the Ciutadella) as a location for its library.
More striking still has been the regeneration of the most central piece of
waterfront, the Moll de la Fusta, which runs from the foot of the Rambla to the
foot of the Via Laietana. It is difficult today to imagine what this looked like at the
beginning of the 1980s, the calm, paved streetscape of the Passeig de Colom,
dedicated only to buses and pedestrians; the scrubbed 19th century facades; and the
Moll de la Fusta itself, a strip of alfresco clubs and restaurants sheltered by palm
trees, which gives onto a cobbled quayside and marina. Here is Mariscal’s prawn
sculpture, sitting atop one of the restaurants. There are generous cycle lanes, blue-
tiled benches, footbridges and, on summer nights, alfresco dining and clubbing
options. The whole boulevard is marked by statuary: at one end is a towering
Lichtenstein, a symbol of 1992, at the other the towering monument of Columbus,
symbol of 1888. It is, in many ways, one of the key projects in the renovation of the
old town. Beneath the palms, however, there is a hum of noise, and if you turn your
head from the sea you can just witness the semi-submerged Ronda Litoral
expressway roar past. Mediterranean settlements are cursed with this problem: the
coast road that has become, through the age of the automobile, a motorway. This is
one of the most impressive outcomes of the marriage of architecture and
engineering, the stitching of major infrastructural projects into the urban fabric.
Before, an 11-lane motorway and port warehouses made this one of the least
pedestrian-friendly sections of the city. This key demand of the neighbourhood
federation—for the city to recover the sea—is deservedly seen as one of the council’s
many success stories.
However, while the regeneration of the district was aimed at allowing existing
residents to be rehoused in the area, there is no doubt that the council relied on
gentrification to valorise its initiatives. Along with the selective demolitions, the
overall strategy included quite dramatic clearance programmes. The reform of the
Raval will culminate at the turn of the century with the completion of a huge central
‘square’ (in reality a thin oblong based on Rome’s Piazza Navona), running between
Hospital and Sant Pau. This was one of the heftiest sections of the reform, involving
the demolition of five whole blocks of housing, bringing down 1384 flats and 293
commercial premises.25 Elsewhere, new housing has been built in the heart of the
Chino, completely transforming its ambience, although the provision of sports and
community centres fulfils the council’s promise of finding a stable mix of uses, for a
variety of social classes.26
Reviving the traditional barris

While the Ciutat Vella was an obvious priority for the council, one of the most
interesting aspects of the overall urban policy was the attention paid to the other
districts in the city. With the expansion of the city through Cerdà’s Eixample grid
from 1860, the villages which surrounded the medieval city and which were already
foci for the Spanish industrial revolution were engulfed. Sants, Sant Andreu, Sant
Martí and Gràcia (1897), Horta (1903) and Sarrià (1921) were annexed to form the
dense urban core that is present-day Barcelona. The early industrial or semi-rural
heritage of these barris is still very apparent today. In Gràcia, you find yourself
suddenly leaving the Eixample’s wide boulevards and being funnelled into a village
of narrow streets, squares, church towers and small shops. In Horta, you surface
from the end of Line 5 of the metro into the quaint Plaça d’Eivissa, with its masies
and cobbles.27 Even in Les Corts, ripped apart by the construction of the Camp
Nou and the speculative upmarket flats of the 1950s and 1960s, there remain a few
of the 19th century streets and buildings. These traces, along with the annual street
festas and community events which were quickly re established after the fall of the
dictatorship, help to cement the sense of a distinct identity. Three tenor Josep
Carreras, for example, is proclaimed as a child of Sants, as much as of Barcelona.
And some of the city’s best-loved novels—Mercè Rodoreda’s Plaça del Diamant, for
example—are set around some of the focal points of these districts, rather than in the
heart of the medieval city.
During the years of desarrollismo, however, the quality of life and the
distinctiveness of these districts were eroded by demolition, swamped by randomly
parked cars, or pocked with electricity pylons. It was this which inspired many of
the neighbourhood movements discussed in the previous chapter, bolstered by an
intense sensitivity to local identity: along with the demands for increased school
places and local health centres, the manifesto published by the FAVB on the eve of
the 1979 elections demanded the ‘recovery of green spaces, urban parks and wooded
areas…the prioritisation of public over private transport and recovery of pedestrian
areas; struggle against smoke, noise and pollution’.28 The power of the FAVB put
pressure on the new council to make a comprehensive provision of public spaces, to
help restore a focus to the likes of Sants, Clot or Sant Andreu. Sants and Clot would
attain new urban parks, Sant Andreu the restoration of its beloved rambla, one of the
most lamented victims of Porciolista traffic management.
While much of the best work done by the council is in the quality of its public
spaces—finish, surface, level, texture, street furniture, use of water, the highly
selective planting—there are several keynote developments of the period which are
of enormous importance and act as flagships for the city’s urban policy in the
international architectural press. The Parc de l’Espanya Industrial in Sants is
perhaps the most recognisable, idyllic on days of hazy sunshine with its fountains,
its curious fortress-like lighting towers, its precious green sward, table-tennis tables
and basketball courts and dappled lake. Dotted with white neo-classical figures in
various states of repose, along with rusty Anthony Caro sculptures, it sits as a
monument to the imperfect utopia of Barcelona public space: broken glass and dog-
walkers, solitary figures reading newspapers in the shade, swans and almost-
copulating teenagers, high-rise housing and aspiring Ronaldos. Nearby, leapfrogging
the Plaça del Països Catalans, is the Parc de l’Escorxador, the site of the city’s old
slaughterhouse. On closure in 1979 it was quickly claimed by the left Eixample’s
neighbourhood groups, and is an important focus of community identity,
comprising a library, open spaces and green walkways (and is occasionally used for
mass prayer meetings by the city’s Muslims); it has been given added fame by
Miró’s enormous concrete sculpture Dona i Ocell (see below). In Clot, the remains
of old railway sheds were incorporated into a multi-level design, with an array of
peaceful, noisy, shaded, secluded and wide open spaces for the park’s multiple uses
and users. One could go on, taking in the parks of Pegaso, of Guinardó, or the massive
reform of Montjuïc. What is important is this: the parks were claimed by the
neighbourhood groups, often—as we saw in the previous chapter—through illegal
(peaceful) protest. This was no model of community planning, however: as Acebillo
recalls, ‘the truth is that immediately [the neighbourhood groups] understood that
what they were doing was their thing; but how the works were to be carried out was
ours’.29
Monumentalising the periphery

By contrast with the opening of the old town through esponjament, the problem
faced in the new districts on the city’s periphery—particularly in the areas of Nou
Barris and Sant Martí—was their chaotic history of urbanization. Twenty-storey
tower-blocks soared above dusty, unfinished ‘spaces’, with a complete absence of
any form of aesthetic consideration. Here, the aim was to close down space, rather
than open it up, ‘a posteriori urbanisation’, in the words of Acebillo.30 Design was
employed to provide definition, with the use of unusual street furniture, public art
and variable planting and surfacing giving a uniqueness in feel to each of the
districts, with most of the major projects being executed by small teams of
architects, artists and engineers working together. Here, the aim of Bohigas was to
‘monumentalise the periphery’, the flipside to the airing of the old city. The wide
open spaces of the new districts were to be redrawn and redesigned with the
architectural principles of form and aesthetics being prioritised over the functional,
engineering criteria which had prevailed.
As Moix puts it, Bohigas was initially knocked sideways by the peripheral areas,
only a few kilometres from the Rambles and the splendours of the old city by
distance, but a world away in terms of architectural design. ‘Bohigas had for the
previous fifteen years been breathing the atmosphere of the gauche divine and,
suddenly, he was inhaling the air of Via Júlia or Torre Baró. The change required an
acclimatisation’.31 By all accounts, he managed it rapidly. The reform of the Via
Júlia—a formless dual carriageway which roared through the outer estates—
involved Bohigas in a direct confrontation with the roads department, altering the
road layout to preserve architectural harmony. ‘He wanted to impose a new style of
intervention,’ recalls the participating architect, ‘—meticulous, citizen-centred,
minutely calculated—in that corner without any tradition of urbanity; he wanted to
set a precedent. The fury of the engineers was memorable.’32 Being restored to a
rambla from 1986, the Via Júlia was also adorned with a set of sculptures—including
the 28-metre-high lighting tower at the Ronda de Dalt which, on account of its
unfortunate grey cylindrical form, is known locally as ‘la xeringa’ (the syringe) or ‘el
monument al ionqui’ (monument to the junkie).33
So, through the ‘airing’ of the old town, the enclosure and redefinition of the
periphery, and the overall concern of seeing Barcelona ‘from the neighbourhood’ (in
the words of Bohigas), the public space policy which comprehensively reshaped the
city’s texture in the 1980s provided the council with a lot of well-earned prestige. It
is a temptation, particularly in critical geography, to view the actions of the state
pejoratively. Here, I have little to say about the quality of the spaces provided except
that they are, by and large, imaginative and economic uses of space that have, by
and large, reflected the needs of local people. We might, however, be concerned
with the present direction of the council in the light of the previous chapter. The
past few years have seen controversial re-zonings of green space to allow for
development, and the Port Vell has, through Maremagnum and the World Trade
Center, been subject to intense commercial development. Furthermore, it could be
argued that the redevelopment of the Ciutat Vella will— whether intentioned or not
—lead to gentrification and a redefinition of the ‘public’ in that neighbourhood.
The most striking point about Left rhetoric is the desire to represent a public.
How this is defined is critical, however. Certainly, regardless of the shifts towards
new realism in social democratic politics that I discussed in chapter 4, the concept
of the public realm is still something that is pursued as a desirable goal. As Mark
Fisher, British Labour’s spokesman for the arts, has put it:
[Cities] should offer public places, squares and parks and waterfronts, in
which it is a pleasure to be. There should be choices, of theatres and cinemas,
of book and record shops, of bars and restaurants. Most of all there should be
other people to meet, with whom to share these amenities.34
Here we meet the idea of civil society again—the importance of cities to civil society
is expressed in its architecture and spaces. We recall the importance of such a
concept to Maragall’s Catalanism and social democracy, of seeing cities as spaces of
heterogeneity, of social and cultural mixing. However, the concept of public space is
highly problematic. Don Mitchell has summarised the two dominant (and
contradictory) visions of the function of public space as being ‘a space marked by
free interaction and the absence of intervention by powerful institutions’, and its
flipside, the commitment that such space should be ‘planned, orderly and safe’.35
The happy vision of Fisher fails to address the argument that a good many geographers
and urban sociologists have hammered home: space is contested, and is furthermore
undergoing a gradual encroachment by private interests (as in the dystopian visions
of the American city put forward by various authors).36
This has made the council face hard decisions about who their public actually is.
The changing profile of the municipal socialism of the 1980s reveals some of the
pressures faced by the council, and this has had a clear impact on the renovation
programme of the old town, as Maragall notes in a discussion of the reform of the
Ciutat Vella:
Our concrete idea was to rehabilitate but literally leave people where they
were, without forcing them to move, which is a far more humane and left-
wing policy. But the process you have to follow in order to do this is long and
complicated, because you have to temporarily rehouse people, reconstruct

their homes and then let them back in again. The battle was lost from the
start, though, since it’s taken eight years for the ‘wheel to turn full circle’, and
in the meantime some have died and others have left… The problem is that
for all the planning and humane ideas, the cleverest and most courageous of
the young people who have been able to have all left the district, and the void
they’ve left behind has been filled by people who, depending on how you look
at it, create more problems than they solve. So we have to make more realistic
calculations and attempt to keep up with the spontaneous natural forces at
work in a market society such as ours….37
This problem—the conflict between harnessing market forces and following the
‘humane and left-wing policy’—runs to the heart of most Left attempts to
regenerate public spaces. Similar programmes (such as the removal of the ‘black
island’ discussed in chapter 2) were targeted at creating a new mix of classes and
activities in the area, which may ultimately lead to the pricing out of those who
‘create more problems than they solve’ from the heart of the city. This had
important implications for the public space programme: recall the tension facing all
such strategies between allowing ‘free interaction’ and imposing order and safety As
Bohigas has recognised, this tension was very pronounced in some of the reforms of
the old city:
I believe that Barcelona needs harmonious spaces… But I do admit that the
form a space has gives structure to social life. One example is the famed Plaza
Real [Plaça Reial], a neo-classical square that was a considerable problem
neighbourhood in the seventies. When I was director of the City Planning
Department we turned it into a pedestrian precinct. We also thought we were
doing a good thing by making a genuine living room in the city with the use
of concentric benches. The square as a living room has become such an
enormous success that it is mainly used by marginals. Every day they do
things there we’d rather not have to see.38
This encapsulates the problem facing the council: a genuine public space is difficult
to sustain if all groups are not playing by the same rules. Drug addicts and petty
criminals do not, generally, contribute to the successful functioning of gentrification
or tourism.
While I would be wary of using such examples as proof of a hardening attitude
towards public space as sacred, when read in the context of chapter 5 it is clear that
the quasi-utopian days of the early 1980s are now over. Nonetheless, the principle
of public space and a whole and inclusive, rather than dual and exclusive, city still
appears to be contained with the philosophy of Maragall. This stance also applies to
the council’s views on commemoration and monument, as I shall now describe.
Public art in the New Barcelona
Catalans have had enough of ‘monuments’ in the official, pejorative sense

— those crystallisations of power and vanity with which no interaction
is possible, which speak one way to the urban void from their plinths
and carry an air of pharaonic extravagance.
(Robert Hughes)39
When Nationalist troops scaled the hills that ring Barcelona on the 26th of January,
1939, and came down into the last major stronghold of the Republic, it was the
beginning of what Vázquez Montalbán has called ‘not so much a “scorched earth”
as a “scorched culture” tactic’.40 The banning of Catalan, the censorship of
cinema, literature and the press, the removal of freedom of speech, the imposition
of religious values went alongside the poverty, the rationing, and the torture and
executions. While the privations would slowly lift as the dictatorship matured and
autarky was abandoned, the public realm would continue to be unloved. The
ideological sea change was reflected in the street names:
The Republic had named Barcelona’s streets after important representatives of

republicanism and the workers’ movement, as well as Catalanizing almost all
the nomenclature in the city: Marx, Seguí, Durruti, Prats del Molló, Voltaire,
Ferrer i Guàrdia, Zola…a collage of political culture which was surgically
removed by the conqueror. In a statement made on 25 February 1939, the
councillor responsible for culture…authorized ‘the change of street and
square names of this city so that heroes and martyrs can be honoured and that
the mobs of the past which stained the city’s streets with foreign and
undesirable names can be erased from our memories’.41
Along with the street names came the monuments. The Francoist taste-makers were
committed to redefining the artistic canon of the dictatorship:
The return to historical models, and the rejection of foreign avant-garde

influences, was seen as a way of restoring religion, the family, patriotism,
order, and authority through a construction of ‘Spanishness’. Many literary
figures, artists and architects began investigating medieval culture, seen as
compatible with Nationalist values because of its association with
unquestionable religious and hierarchical order. Roman classical themes were
also investigated, and neo-classicism was revived in sculpture, painting and
prose as well as in architecture.42
In other words, there was the familiar turn that fascist artists would make towards
religious essentialism and classical monumentality, contributing to a Barcelona
lacking in public commissions, and with a private sector ‘saturated with the bad
taste of the official aesthetic’.43 Once democracy was re-established, Bohigas
famously—and fatuously—remarked that ‘[t]o set Barcelona back on course,

everything built under Franco would have to be demolished’.44
And so, once elected, it was clear that the democratic council would have an
important role in fomenting a distinct ‘democratic’ zeitgeist. The initial task was to rid
the streets of their Francoist connotations, as the battle of the street names was
rejoined. Serra’s approach was prudent: in a period of high tension and political
uncertainty, there seemed to be an awareness that the triumphalist removal of
monuments could be counter-productive. Monuments were discreetly removed by
municipal workmen, not torn down by angry mobs. A monolith which
commemorated the Condor Legion, the Nazi airborne division which had helped to
bombard Barcelona into submission during the Civil War, was removed at night
and with no publicity.45 Street names were rapidly changed: the Avenida
de Generalísimo Franco reverted to the Diagonal; Marqués del Duero to the
Paral·lel; José Antonio Primo de Rivera to the Gran Via.
When it came to ornamenting these streets, however, there was a wariness of the
monument. But, rather than turning their back on urban statuary, the council went
to enormous lengths to promote a programme of public art, conceived particularly
by Serra. He argued that the city lacked a collection of modern sculpture, and that
through the municipal parks budget a programme of public art could be established
which would complement the new public spaces. From 1980 onwards, through the
mediation of Xavier Corberó, a Catalan sculptor, and the New York art dealer Joe
Helman, a range of leading North American sculptors were persuaded to design
pieces for the city. This brought to Barcelona works by the likes of Richard Serra,
Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Bryan Hunt and Beverly
Pepper for the rock-bottom price of $20,000, the council paying for the expense of
the materials in addition. Major European, Catalan and Spanish artists also
contributed.46 Together with these newly commissioned pieces, the council also
took out, dusted down and refurbished many of the monuments which had been
removed from the streets after Franco came to power. By the mid-1990s, taking
together all the public sculptures and artworks in the city’s streets, the council could
publish a compendium listing 535 pieces along with 28 architectural monuments.47
A multitude of aesthetic tastes make up the municipal collection. The Parc de la
Ciutadella, Plaça de Catalunya, the reposeful gardens at the Palau Reial at
Pedralbes, and the glades of Montjuïc are dotted with the white neo-classical
noucentiste (turn-of-the-century) allegorical nudes which complement the rather
more brutal, hulking, rust-brown abstractions which often sit nearby. Pop gets a
look-in too: Roy Lichtenstein’s Cap de Barcelona on the Moll de la Fusta, a giant
face rendered in his characteristic red cartoon dots; or Claes Oldenburg and Coosje
van Bruggen’s Mistos, a giant red and yellow book of matches at the Vall d’Hebron
Olympic site. And, of course, there is an ample helping of the bizarre: the gold ball
with squiggles which adorns Plaça de George Orwell at the lumpen heart of the
Barri Gòtic; Rebecca Horn’s almost-about-to-topple set of four iron and glass cubes
on the beach at Barceloneta; the Clangers-inspired (surely?) homage to the 1888
Fair located at the northern end of the Ciutadella park, or Fernando Botero’s
bulbous, smirking giant cat which has padded around a variety of sites in the city,
and which is now poised on a back-street at the back of Drassanes, waiting to leap
on you as you stagger back one dark night.
In fact, walking through any square or park in Barcelona, no matter how small,
usually involves a confrontation with some sort of municipal monument. Even the
humble roundabout has been turned into an aesthetic free-for-all as art critic meets
road engineer: the swirling tunnelled exit from the Ronda Litoral onto the Paral·lel
which encircles a huge, formless space has been laid with basalt slabs to (curiously)
imply some sort of volcanic ashscape; the park which cowers within the motorway
junction at Glories contains beneath its scrawny trees a Cor-ten steel model of the
‘geodesic cleft’ that runs from the North Sea to Barcelona and which was used to
define the metre. Indeed, one of the defining features of the approach to ‘stitching’
in the inner-city motorways is the siting of sculptures at tunnel mouths which pop
up periodically around the city, marking out otherwise anonymous roadways.
Such a prolific outpouring of creativity is impossible to survey adequately here.
Indeed, there are methodological problems in focusing on too narrow and selective a
choice of monuments and artworks, selecting a particular piece and then ‘reading
off’ all manner of ideological insights. Certainly, the problem of determining
meaning in a plural society is often difficult, given the complexity of the tensions
between artist, function, and the variety of perspectives held by local residents. The
sheer diversity of Barcelona’s public art programme defies quick and dismissive
charges of elitism, its portfolio so heterogeneous that sweeping statements about
hegemony are difficult to sustain. Furthermore, it is even difficult to point to one
defining artwork which is placed for maximum attention at particularly ‘sacred’ sites
in the city.48 Nonetheless, I want to make five points here about the art programme.
First, there is a definite bias (particularly among the new commissions) towards
abstraction, rather than figurative works. The high-profile use of figurative public
art by city councils has proved controversial. Birmingham’s use of proletarian
imagery (Raymond Mason’s Forward), juxtaposed against its international
convention centre, while apparently lamenting the city’s industrial past, reveals
fundamental contradictions in terms of conceptualising its public.49 Furthermore, it
and projects like it face ‘the same difficulties of reception as the monuments of socialist
realism’, reflecting an idealised, state-promoted version of society.50 In Barcelona,
there is a marked tendency to promote the avant-garde and the abstract, perhaps in
the belief that its neutrality and lack of established meaning is the best way to avoid
the heavy-handedness of the state. As a downside, this has ironically resulted in
accusations of enlightened despotism which I consider below.
Second, a dominant theme of public art has been the assertion that it legitimises
controversial development, through massaging public opinion or softening
corporate gain.51 Certainly, a major beneficiary of the increased funding available to
the art programme was the Olympic Village, which had its identity as l’últim barri
(the last district that can be built in the city’s crowded interior) enhanced by the
existence of a variety of abstract sculptures. Running down the main boulevard
parallel to the sea—Avinguda Icària—twist the tree-like pergolas of Enric Miralles
and Carme Pinós. Nearby lie a whole bag of eye-fillers: the spindly, puzzling group
of spikey, 14-metre-high steel somethings (a gift from Rotterdam city council and
the Dutch government in honour of the Games); the towering, lonely chimney of
the Can Folch flour mill (1887), a last reminder of Poble Nou’s industrial heritage;
the Monumental fountain which dominates the roundabout at the foot of the
Village’s twin towers. Certainly, Frank Gehry’s enormous Fish sculpture is the most
obvious example of the conventional art-as-corporate-toy, a likeable tinted steel
mesh which sits at the foot of the Hotel Arts, 35×54 metres in dimension, which
softens the frontage of the two beach-front skyscrapers. Again, however, the
eclecticism of the portfolio, and the commitment to the council of opening up new,
fairly unregulated public spaces, suggests that the existence of corporate artwork is
not a major theme in the redevelopment of the city.
Third, there is certainly a degree of anti-monumentality at play in some of the
monuments. The most striking example of this must be Homenatge a Picasso
(Homage to Picasso), which reflects the desire to substitute an avant-garde
interpretation of municipal commemoration for the usual figurative statue.
Executed by Antoni Tàpies, the most illustrious living Catalan artist, this sculpture
is unassumingly placed on the pavement running down one side of the Ciutadella
park in Passeig de Picasso. The sculpture takes the form of a glass cube, filled with
furniture and sheets, criss-crossed with beams, the whole thing partially concealed
by a steady stream of water running down the glass. Things haven’t worked out as well
as Tàpies would have intended: ‘the work frequently steams up, and much of the
time there is no water at all, leaving an unseemly film on the glass and, in warm
weather, an unappetizing layer of scum in the pool around the box.’52 However, this
lack of suitability is perhaps due to the anti-monumentalism pursued by Tàpies, the
stated refusal to perform the ritual of much civic statuary of canonising dead locals,
usually in the hard-wearing pomp of bronze or marble.53 Furthermore, the work is
hardly in a prominent position, located outside the park on a relatively quiet street.
This explicit antagonism to the marble or bronze plinths of monumental civic
sculptures is, one presumes, something Picasso would have approved of. (Tàpies
would go further still: when asked to design a sculpture which would grace the huge
domed entrance hall of the Catalan national art museum on Montjuïc, he produced
a model of…a sock, a holey, worn sock of the type familiar to anyone who
remembers the 1980s: white, ribbed, with nasty blue rings around the top. Needless
to say, the sculpture would not be commissioned).
Fourth, attempts to commemorate the Civil War are discreet. Beth Galí’s
monument at Fossar de la Pedrera is tucked away—appropriately enough—at the
quarry beneath Montjuïc castle, where executed political prisoners (including the
president of the Generalitat at the end of the Civil War, Lluís Companys) were
buried. Roy Shifrin’s David and Goliath, an explicit, foreign-funded
commemoration of the role of foreign volunteers in the Civil War, is also obscurely
located, this time at an expressway tunnel mouth in the northern district of Carmel.
In 1988, between two and three hundred veterans of the International Brigades (out
of an estimated 43,000 who had fought in the Civil War) returned to Barcelona, 50
Plate 8 Homenatge a Picasso/Homage to Picasso. This work by Antoni Tàpies epitomises the
anti-monumentality of much of the city’s public art. (Source: Vicky Webb)
years after their departure, and attended the unveiling of the monument. Both the
words of the mayor and the location did little to please the veterans. ‘Thanks to you
Barcelona is a free city, Catalonia is a nation with autonomy, and Spain is a
democracy,’ he began. ‘David, now he has come of age, must help Goliath… Give
your hand to those who were on the other side,’ he then continued. The appeal for
reconciliation did not go down so well, the real tone of the day being represented by
the singing of the Internationale.54 The complaints of the veterans seem justified.
There is more emphasis placed on recuperating the heritage of the Republic (a safe
golden age) than on memorialising the war. The dusting down of Llimona’s 1910
monument to the late 19th century socialist mayor (removed from the streets by the
Francoists) that sits at Plaça Tetuan in the Eixample lends—it is suggested—a
‘certain pedigree to the city’s socialist government’.55 And we must remember the
divisions within the Republican forces: Plaça Reial would never return to its Second
Republic name of Plaça Francese Macià (the Catalan president at the time), too
nationalist by far. So ideological statements are by and large avoided, perhaps the
greatest legacy of Francoism in the contemporary built environment, and a sign of
the collective amnesia discussed in chapter 2.
Fifth, finally, there is a tendency to commission works on a monumental—in the
sense of massive—scale. As with the gangling pop of Lichtenstein and Oldenburg/
Van Bruggen, the artists invited to contribute to the public spaces have clearly not
been exhorted to think small. Perhaps most striking—easily viewed from a speeding
taxi or bus on the way from the city centre to the airport—is Joan Miró’s enormous
Dona i Ocell (Woman and Bird) in the Parc de l’Escorxador, suggestively phallic but
capable of multiple interpretation. Inaugurated in 1983, the 22-metre-high concrete
shaft is pocked with bright trencadís (broken ceramic), with a tip that supports,
presumably, the bird. Similarly, in the hilly park of Creueta del Coll (formed
through the rehabilitation of a disused quarry) Eduardo Chillida has strung an
enormous, 80-ton concrete spider from two sides of the rock faces, hanging
playfully above a circular pool (the spider collapsed in 1998, with near-fatal
consequences for a group of art students standing below). And Richard Serra’s ‘wall’
(discussed below) brought the most infamous practitioner of colossal public art to
the city.
So instead of the public monument’s function as a grandiose language of political
power—the ‘Value-free…architecture of coercion’ of so much
municipal modernism56—the approach of the council has been consonant with its
stress on rebuilding civic culture. As Maragall puts it:
One could say that the new sculptures in Barcelona are but the tip of an
iceberg in the process of planning a city that seeks a more pleasant
environment with new spaces which enhance city life. This is different from
the idea that the city’s sculptures form an open-air museum… Sculptures in a
museum play a specific aesthetic, historic or didactic role; whereas open-air
sculpture becomes part of the urban system, and thus enriches it. Today,
Barcelona is a city that invites one to stroll. The intense period of urban
renewal has given way to the more charming tranquility of the present, a time
when one can more fully enjoy the city’s parks, squares, beaches, boulevards,
gardens… The sculptures, standing proud day and night, defying inclement
weather and merciless graffiti, have earned their respectable place in the city.
They beckon us to start walking.57
From this rhetoric emerges Maragall’s conviction that citizenship is closely related to
a participation in the public space and rhythms of the city. This—a prevalent theme
of Maragallisme—is resonant with ideas of community and the legibility of spaces.
For Robert Hughes, the projects ‘try, in a medley of different voices, to undo the
spurious explicitness of the official public sculpture that goes with such official
projects…admitting, above all, that sculpture is not some kind of visual fluoride
designed to act on the soul instead of the teeth’.58 The idea that public art and
sculpture valorise public space is not a new one: however, rarely has it been
incorporated so comprehensively into a programme of urban renewal. Yet this open,
undefined aesthetic has not escaped without criticism. Maragall’s city of marvels has
been called elitist and pharaonic. Are these charges fair?
More state than civil society? The enlightened despots

If we recall the comment made at the beginning of the chapter by Bofill, the tension
between state and civil society is often entangled in struggles over the production of
space, and comes to light in redevelopment and design controversies.59 Thus far,
I’ve suggested that Barcelona has a genuinely popular set of spaces, which were
created through the historical conjuncture of a powerful neighbourhood movement
and a highly imaginative, politically committed group of municipal architects and
politicians. The council’s attempt to remake the city is also defined by certain
tensions, however, where the balance between civil society and state tips markedly to
the latter. Here, the cityscape of the New Barcelona is seen as the monumental
legacy of a generation of enlightened despots, an educated elite who dispense harsh,
puzzling designs for the benefit of an uncomprehending citizenry.
Of course, such a charge has been levelled at the other major example of
‘architectural socialism’ in contemporary Europe, that of the Parisian grands projets.
Mitterrand stated his desire to pursue ‘a certain idea of the city’,60 a particular vision
of Paris as being both the centre of a redefined French national identity and a
genuinely social metropolis. Through the popularising of high culture (the
modernist pyramid extension to the Louvre, celebrating transparency, the creation of
the new park at La Villette, or the sponsoring of a popular opera house at the
Bastille) he sought to reverse the individualism and anti-urban nervousness of his
predecessor, Giscard d’Estaing. However, this brought its own problems. As David
Looseley has argued:
Mitterrand’s idyll of a living community of the city and his talk in the 1981
[presidential election] campaign of a ‘contre-pouvoir associatif’ that would
guarantee the participation of citizens in the creation of their built
environment contrasted strangely with the centralised, personalised and
statuesque grands projets.
Instead, the substantial disruption caused by projects such as the opera house at the
Bastille has actually broken up established communities, or such projects have been
seen as jarring and provocatively grandiose presidential signatures on the Parisian
urban fabric, heavy-handedly pursuing an idealised civic identity.61 As we shall now
see, ‘Maragall’s city of marvels’, the Olympic variant of Eduardo Mendoza’s city of
the 1888 and 1929 expos, has been similarly accused—of boosterism, the worship
of modernisation, and enlightened despotism.
Boosterism
Eduardo Mendoza’s novel City of Marvels is remarkable for a number of reasons. As
I noted before, it is a chronicle of the rise of one individual to the heights of the
city’s bourgeoisie between the two fairs of 1888 and 1929. And what is central to
this narrative is the attempt by Barcelona’s bourgeoisie and town hall to project the
city into the circling dynamics of European capitalist modernity. These fairs were
modelled on those being held in Paris, London, Antwerp, Glasgow and Liverpool,
and displayed the earliest trappings of modern commodity capitalism. Today, the
city demonstrates the kind of lush beauty that the fallow sites of old exhibitions can
yield. The 1888 Fair is remembered in the Ciutadella park, and the red-brick
remnants of that year remain among the city’s urban jewels: Domènech i
Montaner’s Café-restaurant, now the zoology museum, and l’Arc de Triomf, with
its interpretation of Parisian pomp. The mayor of Barcelona at the time of the 1888
Fair—Rius i Taulet—saw such architecture as one of the principal means of putting
the city on the map of European modernity, despite it being launched in the
aftermath of a disastrous economic collapse. Similarly, Primo de Rivera’s hopes of
sustaining his crumbling dictatorship were pinned on the 1929 Expo, which would
endow the city with a range of miscellaneous buildings, sculptures, fountains and
gardens, grouped around the Plaça d’Espanya and the foot of Montjuïc.
For the long decades of the 20th century when the city was under the thumb,
civic pride was very much curtailed. But in the 1980s, when the Olympics
were mooted, the opportunity arose again to become part of the European spectacle
circuit. And in such affairs, architecture is one of the main ways a distinctive civic
identity can be forged for the outside world. This process has often been described
as an attempt to forge hegemony by local elites, whereby mass culture is
manipulated to legitimise particular growth strategies, and to advertise the city in an
international market of trade and tourism.62 And so, 1992 was framed with a strong
sense of the importance of fine architecture in establishing Barcelona’s civic
identity. The council’s efforts to reposition the city in the new European economy
were combined with the realisation that they could—as with their forebears—use the
money levered from Madrid to endow the city with lasting architectural
monuments. The major sports and infrastructure projects could both ‘market’ the
city internationally, and provide a symbolic demonstration of the city’s belated (or
delayed) modernisation. To achieve this, a galaxy of international architectural stars
were lured to the city. Arata Isozaki, Norman Foster, Santiago Calatrava, Alvaro
Siza, Richard Meier were all found commissions, not all related to the Games,
taking their place among prominent figures from the local architectural community.
The ‘signing’ of Meier was particularly satisfying to Maragall, as the architect was
at the time the holder of the Pritzker Prize, the top award in architecture, and was
on the ascendancy in Europe.
Every now and then a European city or corporation decides it wants a major
symbolic building, something that sets it apart from its competitors, that
speaks of its unique good taste. Then it goes to Richard Meier. It knows what
to expect and gets it: a white, rectangular, gridded building with a drum and
perhaps a piano curve attached. Everyone seems happy.63
The socialists’ symbolic building was the projected contemporary art museum,
opened in November 1995 as the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
(MACBA). The gallery filled a surprising gap in the city’s cultural infrastructure:
despite several institutions devoted to modern art—Miró, Tàpies, Picasso—
Barcelona lacked a single building for the display of the work of contemporary
international artists. It offered a remarkable opportunity for a landmark building,

sited in the middle of the northern Raval.
Meier’s talismanic status among European municipalities and corporations has
been attributed to two factors:
In the first place, his work is always instantly recognisable, an attribute that
clearly appeals to those who are unsure of their own taste. Meier appeals to
the kind of people who would have bought Julian Schnabel in the eighties, on
the grounds that not only was he fashionable, but that smashed crockery
glued to the canvas could not fail to be recognised by even the most casual
observer. Just as Schnabel stuck to plates, so Meier is always designing
essentially the same building, using the same geometries, the same nautical
imagery, and above all the same white stove-enamel steel cladding.64
Second, he avoided the postmodern fripperies that characterised North American

corporate architecture in the 1980s. With municipal commissions to design two
museums in Frankfurt and town halls in The Hague and Ulm, he also found
corporate favour. For Siemens, Swissair, Canal+, Mercedes and Luxembourg’s
Hypolux bank, ‘Meier’s serious-minded aesthetic approach had a strong appeal.
They could be sure that, even if he made them look as dull as graph paper, he would
not make them feel ridiculous’.65
The site chosen for the MACBA was at the northern end of the Raval, close to
the university. In amongst the crowded tenements rises Meier’s creation: it is white,
gleaming white, its frontage is almost entirely glass, and inside it is also white, with
the major access between its three floors achieved by way of a ramp which sits
behind the facade. Opinion is divided as to whether it fits in: many see it as an
elitist slap in the face to one of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods. An Observer
reviewer sneered at the ‘white, white, white and white’ of the museum, containing
the ‘standard four-star International Art starter pack: a Beuys bathtub, a stack of
Christian Boltanski false-memory deposit boxes, a leaden V-2 rocket by Anselm
Kiefer and a number of Spanish makeweights’.66 Others regard it as a beacon of light
in the depths of the old city: Maragall was quick to stress Meier’s lineage with the
modern movement ‘which has had such happy echoes in Barcelona’s architecture’,
and seeks justification in its insertion in the Raval as evidence that the city is ‘once
again making its own that synthesis of old and new’ that, he asserts, has
characterised the city’s history.67 Regardless, what the presence of Meier really
symbolises—as with Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim art gallery in Bilbao—is the
importance of architecture as image and talking point, a kind of free publicity,
indispensable for place marketing. By the late 1990s, when Meier had achieved near
godlike status for his new Getty museum in Los Angeles, Barcelona could say ‘we’ve
got one too’.
Plate 9 MACBA. Richard Meier’s contemporary art gallery lies at the heart of the northern
Raval. (Source: Vicky Webb)
The Olympic skyline: monuments to modernisation

Significantly two of the principal commissions awarded under the auspices of the
Olympics were for communications infrastructure. Seen as an essential part of a
post-Fordist, or informational, or whatever, future, the use of hi-tech architecture
actively advertised the city’s refound modernity. Maragall was a sucker for the
celebration of progress through the grand projet: on his Financial Times tour of
London, he goes to see Nicholas Grimshaw’s new international rail terminal at
Waterloo. He is enthused: ‘It’s airy, it’s wide…it’s beautiful… It’s EUROPE…this
is going to change London’s history’.68 The social democratic embrace of
technology and modernity has many echoes in the recent past—from the white heat
of technology to the González government’s Seville Expo. As well as projecting the
city abroad, the use of international architects was explicitly conceived as justifying
certain projects domestically. As well as the architects’ reputation and experience,
Maragall suggests that there was a need ‘to create a state of legitimacy…by choosing
an important architect it would make it more difficult to prevent a building from
being constructed’.69 In the case of both of the city’s new communications towers
there was some dubiety and political debate over the need for the developments, so
there were practical issues of municipal statecraft behind the employment of
prominent architects.
Along with Meier’s museum the most apparent evidence of the trophy architect is
on the city’s skyline, altered through the hi-tech signatures of leading European
architects. The two communications towers, by Norman Foster and Santiago
Calatrava, demonstrate the council’s desire to be semiotically associated with the

informational economy. Foster’s tower was the first to be commissioned. While
accounts vary, according to one insider it originated during a lunch in 1985 between
Maragall and the head of Telefónica, the state telecommunications company. The
mayor had remarked on how good it would be if Barcelona were to have a tower which
rivalled Madrid’s pirulí (which stands above the state television centre). The man
from Telefónica agreed, arguing for the importance of centralising the various
aerials which stood on the Collserola hills above the city. With this injection of
public funding, the council was determined to profit by using a trophy architect.
Through an invitation-only competition, Foster emerged triumphant with a
typically hi-tech design, beating off—significantly—a proposal by Calatrava.
However, not long after his failure Calatrava was contracted to design another
tower, this time on Montjuïc. The decision to employ Calatrava provoked an
unprecedented controversy. The site awarded to him was, essentially, part of the
Olympic ring—the cluster of sports installations which included the main stadium,
Isozaki’s gymnastics amphitheatre, and the diving pool—which was being master-
planned by local architects Correa, Milà, Margarit and Buxadé. They had foreseen a
simple cylindrical monument, but Acebillo took issue over the cost and, having
negotiated again with Telefónica, persuaded them to fund another communications
tower. The local architectural profession took severe umbrage, and with a long-
running tension between Bohigas and Acebillo as a subtext, the whole affair became
public when 58 architects and intellectuals signed a letter to the Ajuntament
protesting the issue. Calatrava’s tower won out, however, and endowed the Olympic
hill with a distinctive, highly visible and imageable ‘wishbone’, strikingly floodlit
against the night sky.70
Calatrava is showing every sign of joining Meier and Foster as favourite architects
of the European municipality Gaining widespread acclaim for the remodelling of
Zurich railway station, he was one of the first major architects to benefit from the
Ajuntament’s policy of bringing design aesthetics to working class districts. His
bridge linking the Carrer Felip II and Carrer Bac de Roda in Sagrera was one of the
first examples of how the council would use architecture to enliven the landscapes of
the city’s working class suburbs, a generous (white) structure over the main railway
line to the north, with a comfortable segregation of pedestrians and vehicles, its
floodlit structure at night displaying the dinosaur skeleton influences on his work.
Furthermore:
Calatrava…finds himself in good historical company, with Viollet-le-Duc,

Antoni Gaudí, Robert Maillart, Pier Luigi Nervi and Felix Candela. Like
them, Calatrava makes poetry out of the kind of civil engineering usually
treated as just a prosaic business of applied mathematics.71
This is what makes Calatrava so attractive for city governments. He gives added
value to potentially mundane infrastructure projects, and the white, skeletal bridge
and angular communications tower provide the kind of landmark which speaks
sweetly to the modernising urban elite, setting it apart from the conservationism that
provides the aesthetic for the leaders of ‘historic’ cities. Organic curves with a
reassuring air of hi-tech.
The enlightened despotism of the ‘hard squares’

Occasionally, the city’s architects were deemed to have gone too far, to have used
too elevated an architectural language. One of the most striking—but best-hidden
—pieces of municipal avant-gardism was the invitation to Richard Serra to design a
sculpture for the outlying Plaça de la Palmera, a newly created square in the heart of
working class Sant Martí, out towards the northern boundary of the city. The bus-
ride to reach this barri involves a trip through the high (literally) modernism of the
grey years of Porciolismo. And there, a few kilometres from the city centre and a
good few more from Federal Plaza, Manhattan, lies Tilted Arc. Except it isn’t called
that: it’s called El Mur, The Wall. It was actually two walls, slightly curving, slightly
overlapping, off-white, kept ajar by the square’s defining feature, its towering palm.
The square itself is a red asphalt garden for an infinity of high-rise flats. It is a
striking example of bringing art to the masses, a deliciously luxuriant use of an
international art star in an unremarkable peripheral housing estate.
Incredibly, the artistic bloody-mindedness which had seen Tilted Arc enter the
courts—Serra’s Manhattan are had completely cut direct access across its windswept
location, and the artist had resisted the owner’s attempts to dismantle it on the
grounds that it was site-specific art—had been lapped up whole by his namesake’s
public space-obsessed regime in Barcelona. Unlike Manhattan, however, the wall
posed little obstacle to the square’s users: the gap between the walls removed the
problem of obstruction and, indeed, it was seen as a highly functional way of
separating the flat playing area from the lusher, quieter space for those who wished
to sit in the shade. While public art meaning-seekers may welcome the poetic
division between lush fecundity and desert-like aridity,72 what is interesting here is
the literal adoption of the Bohigas credo of ‘monumentalising the periphery’.
While Serra’s Barcelona wall survived its Manhattan fate (despite threats to
bulldoze it in election campaigns) through its successful functionality, the most
outstanding piece of municipal bravado and the most spectacular of the hard
squares was the Plaça dels Països Catalans adjacent to the main railway station in
Sants. Designed by the local team of Piñon and Viaplana, this is also high aesthetics
combined with mundane functionalism. Faced with a huge and ill-defined open
space surrounded by tower blocks and highways, Piñon and Viaplana responded
with an architectural essay of enormous minimalism. The square, paved with grey
stone, is dominated by a 15-metre-high square canopy, measuring 30 metres on
each side, and accompanied by fountains, a clock, and lamp standards. ‘What is
that?’ might be the response. Skateboarders like it, pedestrians and travellers cross it
on the way to the station, or between Sants and the Eixample, and when the sun is
low the poles send long shadows across the square. It has a sex-shop beside it, and a
Plate 10 Plaça dels Països Catalans. But is it art? (Source: Vicky Webb)
hypermarket, and a hotel. You feel you are in the New Barcelona, certainly. But is it
art?
Architecturally, the answer is clearly yes. For Kenneth Frampton, ‘[t]he delicacy of
the metal framework recalls the unrealized constructivist cities of the Soviet avant-
garde; hence the inclined planes, the floating slab-like benches, the diagonal
stanchions and the parabolic trajectories implying non-traditional urban forms of
infinite extendability’.73 I can see that. Those disconcerted by the square who
sought enlightenment from its authors would doubtless be reassured by the rationale
which accompanied Viaplana and Piñon’s design:
At first we felt distressed. Anyone who knows the site on which we were to
work will understand. But we did not complain too much; in fact, we did not
complain: we decided that from that moment on the project itself had to
embody the feeling which arose from the place; cunning is essential in our
field, and silence is one of its forms. With a cunning smile we planned a
horizontal surface to unite all of the parts, even the most intractable, as could
be done with a route as wide as it is long. But even the existing streets
vanished in that desert….74
And so their prose spins off into a frenzy of nonsense, a flurry of the architectural
bizarre. Interviewed later, they’re off again:
To call it a ‘square’ always seemed to me ironic to the point of sarcasm. It was

a desert…an urban wasteland. The responsibility of not knowing how to
begin made us ‘lift our eyes up to heaven’. In this way we realised that we
could only turn towards that great patch of sky that exists in that part of
Barcelona. It was the most living presence, the only presence we could grasp
on to.75
Opinion was split beautifully between the architecture profession and the
uninitiated. On visiting the site, Alfonso Guerra—then the General Secretary of the
PSOE—joked to Maragall that it looked like a petrol station. Other politicians
went further: a representative of the far-right Alianza Popular made an electoral
promise that it would be demolished should they be voted into power. For the
majority, however, the main point of contention was the lack of greenery in the
square. The president of the local neighbourhood association described the work as
being conceived for those using the station, rather than those who lived in the area.
The council responded that this was indeed the case: locals were already provided
for in the adjacent Parc de l’Espanya Industrial.76 Furthermore, supporters of the
hard square pointed out its relevance on two counts. First, grass is expensive to
plant and maintain, a luxury that the financially stretched council was unable to
succumb to. Second, gardens need time to mature. The hard square, however, is
ready immediately. Given the vast range of projects the council was trying to
inaugurate across the city, the hard square was something that had to be
swallowed.77
For the cognoscenti the square was a remarkable success. In 1983, it received the
Premi del Foment de les Arts Decoratives (FAD), the principal award of the Catalan
design profession. International commentators praised it fulsomely. For Kenneth
Frampton, ‘[p]art sculpture, part architecture, the success of this tectonic gamble
makes it one of the most daring and brilliant works of the “plan-project” to date’.78
And in 1991, the Harvard Design School awarded the city the Prince of Wales
award for Design as recognition of its quality, along with the Moll de la Fusta and
the park at Clot (what the Prince of Wales would have said is left to the
imagination).
Such avant-gardism has not gone unchallenged, however. Bohigas reels off a list of
complaints at those in the city who have challenged the council’s projects: those
who criticised the avant-gardism of Tàpies, who saw Dona i Ocell as pornography,
the journalists who criticised the renovation of Plaça Reial, the pedants who
criticised the planting of palm trees for these being non-indigenous to Catalonia,
and the electoral promises to demolish Richard Serra’s wall sculpture in Plaça de la
Palmera.79 We could add the electoral opposition of both the Spanish and the
Catalan right to the Plaça dels Països Catalans, or the Generalitat’s opposition to (or
jealousy of?) Acebillo’s powers of spraying the city with sculpture. Much of this was
political point-scoring, but it could be seen as ideological: as Vázquez Montalbán has
put it, the emblematic Plaça dels Països Catalans was
…a ‘hard’ square in a ‘soft’ and compromised age, scorned by the press and
by Pujol’s conservative nationalists, who are all imbued with the antiquated
concept of bringing nature to the city. The Plaça dels Països Catalans bears
witness and pays homage to the uncompromising realism of the urban
aesthetic and makes no concessions to the ‘little house and garden’
philosophy.80
This is a useful summary of the council’s approach: a celebration of urbanity and

avant-gardism, rather than rurality/romanticism and conservatism. Yet such tastes
are rarely the most popular, and give credence to those who argue that the ‘city of
marvels’ was a city of despots, enlightened or not.
✤✤✤
Throughout its 19 years of continuous government, the PSC-led city council has
intervened comprehensively in Barcelona’s built environment, giving the city
international renown for its design and architecture. And—as with Mitterrand in
Paris—it has sought to make the city a stage, a theatre, a visible display of humanist
socialism. So can we identify a distinctive Left aesthetic and spatial policy for cities?
Reading across the narratives presented above, I think that three basic points can be
made about the Barcelona experience.
First, there is an issue of architectural literacy: it was clear that architects were
close to the decision-making process within the council, and were able to capitalise
on both the initial focus on small projects (rather than major infrastructural works)
and the larger commissions required by the Olympics. The centrality of architects in
the planning process allowed a greater degree of aesthetic control over the major
engineering works often off-bounds to urban designers, such as the landscaping and
‘stitching’ of the new expressways into the urban environment. Furthermore, there
was a peculiarly well-developed notion of aesthetic issues within the mayor’s office,
evidenced in the biographies of both Serra and Maragall. From this, it seems fair to
suggest that the social composition of the state (including the personal preferences
of its leaders) has a lot to do with the intelligence and proactivity with which
aesthetic strategies are pursued: Serra, Maragall, Bohigas et al. were all sensitive to
the Left’s heritage in international modernism, evidenced in the reconstruction of
the Mies Pavilion, and were keen to promote the avant-garde, in the commissioning
of Richard Serra, for example. Most notably, Ricard Bofill’s postmodern classicism
found few supporters in the council establishment, and he was left to pick up the
altogether scarcer commissions from the Generalitat.
Second, there was the council’s firm promotion of public space, and its use of
public art as a complement. This strategy had different phases: the early
involvement of Bohigas in the formulation of policy, with his emphasis on
architectural approaches to solving engineering problems. This would be superseded
by the progressive shift upwards in scale in the later 1980s. Given the anti-
development political climate of the transition and its aftermath, both the council
and the neighbourhood groups were working in the same direction: tensions only
surfaced over the degree to which the latter could dictate the actual designs and
forms of the new spaces, with the planners and architects jealously guarding their
professional standing. While the public spaces are a very definite part of the
council’s philosophy, the shift to a more pro-development agenda (see chapters 4
and 5) has meant that re-zoning is now taking place in certain key sites that would
never have been considered in the early days of democracy. Furthermore, it is clear
that the illegal occupations that yielded rewards such as l’Espanya Industrial would
not be viewed with sympathy under the ‘democratic’ state. Thus while Maragall—in
his opening of the Mies Pavilion—could stress the importance of the monument for
the city, his rhetoric on citizenship is somewhat hollower than it was in the 1980s.
Third, the local state has gone a long way to imposing its aesthetic choices. This
has been described as an enlightened despotism: the careful choice of the right
architect from the international star system, the ‘difficult’ public art pieces, the
controversies over competition decisions. The council’s strong aesthetic tastes have
certainly paid little heed to populism. This is not necessarily a bad thing: the ability
to dictate taste, wants and desires is a central part of state and economic power, and
is accountable to a certain degree. Nonetheless, the echoes of the Mitterrand
‘pharaonic’ grands projets are obvious, and the council’s explicit aim of using
buildings such as the MACBA as a means of changing the social mix of certain
neighbourhoods is not a value-free policy.
These observations will not hold for all Left councils in European cities, many of
which have committed the very same atrocities in the name of modernism as
Barcelona’s very right-wing dictatorship. The misuse of state power in imposing
aesthetic agendas is something that, Left or Right, progressive or reactionary,
is always a potential issue in any redevelopment scenario. Furthermore, the
rebuilding of Barcelona took place at a unique conjuncture of opportunities—the
funding opportunities offered by the Olympics, the uncertainty of the transition
which allowed significant land purchase, and the economic boom which demanded
the modernisation of the urban landscape. While the city’s development is thus
distinctive to the contemporary European Left, I would suggest that it has
successfully ‘re-enchanted’ the city; which surely must be at the heart of restoring or
defending a socialism of citizenship.
Notes
1 Hughes (1992), p. 466.

2 Hughes (1987), p. 25.
3 Knox (1987).
4 Ley (1987).
5 Cited in Moix (1994), p. 241.
6 Rowe (1997), pp. 34–5.
7 Ley (1987).
9 Bradley (1996); Dent Coad (1995a, 1995d).
10 Moix (1994), pp. 15–16.
11 See Moix (1994), pp. 21–9.

12 Cited in Moix (1994), pp. 30–1; see Bohigas (1985) for a more detailed account of his
design philosophy.
13 Cited in Moix (1994), p. 77.
14 Account drawn from Moix (1994), quotation from p. 80; Acebillo (c. 1993) provides a
discussion of this change in scale.
15 Jimmy Burns, ‘Man with a plan tries to make sense of London’, Financial Times 5
June 1993, London supplement, p. x.
16 Cited in Febrés and Rivière (1991), p. 169.
17 See Landry and Bianchini’s (1995) booklet, The Creative City, for example.
19 See MBMP (1991) on the design influences of the Olympic Village, which has a
distinct modernist lineage.
20 ‘Presentation’, in Ajuntament de Barcelona (1987), pp. 8–9.
21 This essay is included in Bohigas (1985).
22 Moix (1994), p. 44.
23 I draw the statistical material from FAVB (1991), and the historical data from Huertas
(1996).
24 FAVB (1991), p. 25.
25 Marta Ricart, ‘La urbanización de la plaza central culmina la reforma del Raval’, La
Vanguardia 28 April 1998, ‘Vivir en Barcelona’ supplement, p. 4.
26 The council’s recent activities in the Ciutat Vella are included in Ajuntament de
Barcelona (1996), pp. 107–20.
27 A masía is a Catalan vernacular farmhouse.
28 Cited in Subirós (c. 1993), p. 32.
29 Cited in Moix (1994), p. 51.
30 Acebillo (c. 1993), p. 107.
31 Moix (1994), p. 39.
32 Cited in Moix (1994), p. 73.
33 Huertas (1996), p. 265.
34 Fisher (1991), p. 1.
35 Mitchell (1995), p. 115.
36 See, for example, the essays in Sorkin (1992).
37 In Mateo and Cervelló (1990), p. 14. Original translation, my emphasis.
38 Cited in Bouman and Van Toorn (1994), p. 188.
39 Hughes (1987), p. 26.
42 Dent Coad (1995c), p. 223.
44 Cited in Vázquez Montalbán (1992b), p. 160.
45 Fabre and Huertas (1989), p. 326.
46 Moix (1994), p. 105; Apgar (1991).
47 Tolosa and Romaní (1996).
48 In contrast to, for example, the location of the ‘Forward’ sculpture in Birmingham
(Hall, 1997).
49 Hall (1997).
50 Miles (1997), p. 77.
51 See, for example, Crilley (1993) on ‘architecture as advertising’.

52 Apgar (1991), p. 117.
53 Permanyer (1991), p. 111.
54 This account drawn from Pyne (1989).
55 Apgar (1991), p. 117.
56 Hughes (1991), p. 108.
57 Pasqual Maragall, ‘Presentation’, in Tolosa and Romaní (1996), p. 7.
58 Hughes (1987), p. 26.
59 See J.M.Jacobs (1994, 1996) for an example of this in the City of London.
60 Cited in Looseley (1995), p. 141.
61 Looseley (1995), p. 150.
62 See Ley and Olds (1988); Pred (1995).
63 Rowan Moore, untitled commentary on Richard Meier, Blueprint 126, November
1996, pp. 3–5, quotation from p. 3.
64 Deyan Sudjic, ‘Blocks on the landscape’, Guardian 18 March 1996, G2, p. 10.
65 Deyan Sudjic, ‘Blocks on the landscape’, Guardian 18 March 1996, G2, p. 10.
66 William Feaver, ‘In their element’, Observer 31 March 1996, Arts supplement, p. 11.
67 Introduction to ‘Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona’ catalogue, 1995.
68 Cited in Jimmy Burns, ‘Man with a plan tries to make sense of London’, Financial
Times 5 June 1993, London supplement, p. x.
69 In Mateo and Cervelló (1990), p. 16.
70 Moix (1994), pp. 214–16.
71 Bouman and Van Toorn (1994), p. 220; Dent Coad (1995b) points to a strong local
tradition of architectural engineering, running from Gaudí, through Candela
(Republican) and Torroja (Francoist period) up to Calatrava.
72 Tolosa and Romaní (1996), p. 114.
73 Frampton (1987), p. 20.
74 Viaplana and Piñon (1996), p. 4.
75 Viaplana and Piñon (1996), p. 122.
77 Moix (1994), pp. 66–7.
78 Frampton (1987), p. 20.
79 Bohigas (1985), pp. 277–9.
7
Progressive futures?
The New Barcelona has emerged over a similar period to a discourse of a New
Europe and, in turn, a New World Order. And what does this consist of? The end of
the old ideologies, certainly, the continuing spread of an ever-expanding global
capitalism. The pressures put on by European integration have demanded a new
approach from the Left. Whether this should be an obsequious acceptance of capital
flows or a more critical challenge which is sensitive to unemployment and
immigration has been a source of considerable tension in the socialist movement.
One of the more striking approaches has been that of Jacques Delors, who has
heralded the coming of a ‘post-modern European politics’ as perhaps the ‘most
elaborate proposal for a new left-of-center vision we have seen’.1 As president of the
European Commission, Delors was well aware of the changing context facing
political ideologies of all shades, and knew that an embrace of economic
liberalisation was a bitter pill for social democrats to take. But many have done so, with
the supposed pay-off of retaining a competitive stance vis-à-vis other global powers.
This has its own spatial logic, neatly summarised by Klaus Kunzmann, who
discusses a number of territorial trends related to European integration which will
impact upon traditional politics. There is the continuing spread of the technopole
and the European edge city. There is the clustering of post-Fordist industrial
complexes and gentrified rural enclaves, along with global distribution, finance and
tourist spaces. There are spaces of failure, of high unemployment and receding
government subsidy.2 In short, there is—arguably—a declining coherence to the
metropolis which has long been fragmenting the class identity often held as essential
to socialism. This has undermined the Left’s hold on the metropolis in a number of
ways: the increasing gender and ethnic diversity in the workplace and district, the
fragmentation of the working class in terms of skill and income, the growth of a
distinctive and relatively novel youth culture have all dispelled the myth of unified
class identity.3 Eric Hobsbawm has suggested that this diversity has long been
growing, that ‘labour in the great city’ has never been able to muster the levels of
consciousness that it achieved in the small industrial township where employees
shared both residence and workplace. The suburbanisation and de-industrialisation
of the city which has occurred over the last few decades has ‘snapped the connection
between day and night, or between the places where people live and those where
they work’. Prosperous suburbs have put a block on the administrative expansion
174 PROGRESSIVE FUTURES?
common in the early years of metropolitan governance, hindering intra-urban

redistributive strategies; the ‘inner city’ has emerged as a source of a sub-proletarian
‘underclass’; and—worst of all for Hobsbawm—the planning policies of the 1960s
destroyed many of the ‘“urban villages” upon which so much of labour strength had
rested’.4
Of course, a lot of socialist history has been written since then, and in post-war
Europe we have seen emerge a range of distinct social movements and parties that
have articulated a cross-class sense of socialist identity. Victims of economism, the
political parties of the Left have been unable to adapt to the profound social changes
that have been eroding their social bases. As Sassoon notes:
[T]he permissive society, pop culture, the revival of industrial conflicts of the
late 1960s, student power, feminism, black consciousness, homosexual rights,
the plight of the Third World, ecology, the end of ideology, European
integration, the revival of ideology, the crisis of the family, the end of
communism in Eastern Europe, the growth of nationalist separatism. Not one
novelty worth vvriting or thinking about had been envisioned or predicted by
the European socialist movement.5
New groups—from Greens to squatters to Eurocommunists and feminists—have

emerged independent of ideology and political party, more sensitive to issues of the
street. We have seen a shift away from the commanding heights to the face-to-face.
It is significant that 1968 is a marker not only of the first sustained criticism of post-
war capitalism but also of actually existing socialism (social democracy included).
From the Parisian situationists to the pro-democracy movements in Spain, the call
has been to shift away from socialism as technocracy, and to engage with the politics
of everyday life. The city is a crucible for allowing us to do so.
My aim in this book was to try to get some sort of sense of the texture of
contemporary urban politics in Europe. The tales that have emerged may be too
contingent and speculative for some readers (and too structured and determinist for
others), and there remains an enormous lacuna concerning the cultural politics of
place and Left identity. However, the aim was also to open up further possibilities
of research in this area, and therefore I want to conclude by looking across the five
main chapters and discussing some of the themes which have emerged in the course
of their telling: the increased squeeze put on the urban Left by European integration;
the growing use of urban spectacle by social democratic parties; the role of the city
as a political space in an era of political re-terrirorialisation; and the question of the
‘right’ to the city.
The Eurocity and urban entrepreneurialism

On the 2nd of May, 1998, as most of the European Union nervously inaugurated a
single currency, Barcelona’s mayor Joan Clos was speaking of the challenge it would
pose to the city:
PROGRESSIVE FUTURES ? 175
It is in this new context—that of European economic and monetary union—

that Barcelona has to compete and cooperate, because cities combine both…
The imminent introduction of the euro is going to strengthen the intrinsic
factors of differentiation between cities and nations. This new European
context…has to serve as both excuse and stimulus for improving our
capabilities…and to maximise those aspects that will make us more
competitive.6
As I described in chapter 5, Manuel Castells has provided an intriguing insight into

how the urban Left has adapted to changing economic climates in their attitudes to
the city. As Castells has put it, European cities are now caught up in a globally
competitive information economy, and soon ‘we will be witnessing a constant
struggle over the occupation of meaningful space in the main European cities’. This
will be focused on key central areas of the older city, as ‘traditional working class
neighbourhoods [become] the battleground between the redevelopment efforts of
business and the upper middle class, and the…attempts of the countercultures…to
reappropriate the use values of the city’.7 The vocabulary used by Castells is
interesting in itself: he employs the classical concepts of 1970s Marxist economics—
exchange value and use value—as a means of understanding the changing position of
the European city. And as we have seen, some of the key actors in Barcelona city
council have followed the logic of a Marxist analysis in accommodating the ever-
changing profile of global capitalism.
It is worth noting that social democrat urban leaders are often even more bullish
in their focus on competition than those in central government, as we can see in the
rhetoric of Clos. When one looks at the modernisation projects pursued by Socialist
International colleagues such as Jorge Sampaio (Lisbon), Graham Stringer
(Manchester) and Pierre Mauroy (Lille), it is clear that urban entrepreneurialism is
now a part of mainstream social democracy. It is these figures— high-profile leaders
of important European cities—who have on their doorsteps the effects of global
economic shifts: declining industrial areas, large numbers of long-term unemployed,
and declining levels of central government subsidy. Much of the subtext to the
debate on the post-Fordist, post-Keynesian cities has been the search by social
democrats for a means to ‘plug in’ to an emerging global space economy, which
induces them into an ever-growing political schizophrenia, as they embrace the
values of urban entrepreneurialism: ‘To the left, the entrepreneurial approach
promises a way of asserting local co-operation, promoting the identity of place and
strengthening municipal pride; for the Right, it can be seen to support ideas of neo-
liberalism, promotion of enterprise and belief in the virtues of the private sector’.8 It
may, in fact, be the perfect urban ideology for a post-ideological age.
Allan Pred’s account of the recently built Stockholm Globe sports arena—a quite
literal metaphor for the globalisation of the city—tells us something else: the
apparent collapse of the Swedish model of social democracy which had once been
the great hope of the mainstream European Left. While Pred may be in danger of
reading too much into such a convenient icon, he persuasively argues that the Globe
is an example of the over-commodification of Swedish society, an erosion of public

space and, furthermore, a street-level reflection of the policies that have ruined
Swedish social democracy:
The Globe as market-place where commodified bodies are used to market other
commodities, where the jerseys and pants of ice-hockey players are covered
with advertisements for global firms that market cars and household
electronic goods in Sweden (Opel, Pioneer), with advertisements for Swedish
firms that globally market steel, cars, trucks, food products and insurance,
with the advertisements of Swedish retail chains and coffee firms with global
sources.9
This Eurocommodification—the increasing inter-penetration of goods sold on a

single European market—has been a major reason for the implantation of the Globe
in Stockholm, with all the disruptions and hegemonic connotations Pred describes.
‘What remains of our self-determination, of our ability to keep joblessness to a
minimum,’ he asks, ‘if the called for monetary union results in a German(-like)
central bank which vigorously prioritises low inflation levels over low unemployment
levels?’10 At present social democrats have few answers to this question, and the
advent of the Globe—apt metaphor or not—also amply demonstrates the failure of
the ‘Swedish model’ of low unemployment and strong welfare services which was
once the envy of the European social democratic movement. The only response is an
invocation of the need to compete, despite the lack of apparent correlation between
competitiveness and social equity: the GDP of a particular urban region may rise,
and average incomes may rise, without affecting the absolute levels of poverty which
exist among certain groups in the city. Interestingly, the Barcelona councils of the
1980s made a far-reaching attempt to address the non-economic aspects of this, and
Maragall has stressed the importance of the ‘Barcelona model’ in avoiding the
polarisation of North American cities. His distinction between ‘living’ and
‘sleeping’/residing in the city is interesting, and astute when he combines it for a call
to make urban taxation regimes redistributive across metropolitan areas. While the
idea of yet more taxes is likely to be politically unpalatable, it is a useful case to
make: the huge effort to make areas such as the Olympic Village, the beaches and the
new urban parks genuinely welcoming to a diverse public is one of the distinctive
aspects of Barcelona’s urban experience, and ties in with appeals to embrace
difference, making the city the centre of a renewed citizenship.11
What does this mean for the city more generally? There are two trends which are
important to stress here. First, the European city is less and less proletarian in the
sense of political consciousness. In terms of both changing social structure and the
decline of class-based voting, social democratic parties have to look for cross-class
support for their policies to remain in power. Second, urban entrepreneurialism has
at its core the need to generate income both from direct taxation and through the
multiplier effects of increased money circulating in the local economy. Urban
policies have tended to be skewed towards attracting high earners and spenders (be
they tourists or residents), attracting them to both visit and, increasingly, live in the
city. The Ajuntament de Barcelona’s attempt to avoid ‘Marseillisation’ through the
construction of the Olympic Village is a process that has been repeated by the
private sector many times across Europe. Here, the council appear to have ‘gone
with the flow’, attempting to wring infrastructural and public space gains out of
private sector redevelopment projects. The downside is pretty apparent, however:
the demands for social housing denied in favour of attracting disposable income into
the city, the gentrification of Poble Nou and the Ciutat Vella. There is nothing
necessarily sinister in this (although the experience of property speculation under
the dictatorship was always clouded by claims of corruption). What it means is that
those on low incomes, who still seek the potentially cheap use values offered by the
city, are no longer represented by social democrat councils.
Is there any alternative? The problem facing the PSC in Barcelona is that they
have but a tenuous grasp on the city council, making radical policies electorally
unpopular. Furthermore, and as the case of Birmingham shows,12 even with back-
bench opposition to boosterist schemes, social democrat parties are now firmly
committed to maximising exchange, not use, values. There is nothing inevitable
about this, however: it requires the recognition that social democracy is now
representative of a centre-ground. As Maragall has argued, the Left to remain Left
has to seize upon the values of a general, voting public, and he has sought to seize the
centre-ground of Catalan political space. But it should also be noted that in both
Britain and France there has been a certain backlash against boosterism within
social democrat councils, aware that their once loyal voters may be deserting them.13
A move to the centre surely vacates a political space to be filled by an anti-boosterist
party (be it Green or neo-Marxist), but this requires the final recognition by many
dedicated to socialist myth and nostalgia that the days of a politically unified
working class have gone, and that more realistic, redistributive quality of life policies
must be formulated. Here is where the strengthening of the city-state proposed by
the likes of Maragall, Castells and Borja really could benefit those who continue to
struggle over the defence of use values in the urban arena. But this requires
imagination.
Culture capitals: the politics of spectacle

There have been few who have doubted the success of the 1992 Olympics for
Barcelona. It stands as an exemplar of how the urban spectacle can be manipulated
as a means of promoting the values of citizenship at the same time as pursuing
strategies of civic boosterism. Yet as Vázquez Montalbán has pointedly reminded
many in Barcelona, the modernisation process is rarely a neutral thing, above all
because of the political coalitions necessary to ensure the successful achievement of
investment. That urban spectacle—be it an Expo, the Olympics or a cultural festival
—is used as an instrument of sustaining hegemony by a local ruling elite is now a
prevalent theme of urban geography, an integral part of contemporary statecraft, for
both Left and Right. However, controversy exists over the extent to which ‘the
spectacle represent[s] the hegemonic values of an elite, foisted upon a deluded mass
public’,14 a position often articulated by Marxist geographers such as David
Harvey.15 In the cases of the Millennium Dome, Glasgow’s City of Culture
campaign, Mitterrand’s conception of Paris, the Barcelona Olympics, the interesting
point is that spectacle has been firmly in the hands of social democratic parties. To
what end?
First, these events often involve controversial re-interpretations of socialist heritage.
Unlike the public events staged by Italian communist parties and the Greater
London Council in the 1970s and early 1980s which aimed to valorise public space
and popular culture,16 there is a general consensus that recent spectacle is geared more
towards marketing and commodification, primarily through the involvement of
sponsors. Of course, few would claim that the working class still ‘owns’ the city
culturally, and there is little desire to embrace the masculinist celebrations of heavy
industry. More serious, however, is Vázquez Montalbán’s persistent questioning of
the desmemoria or un-remembering of the past in Barcelona. This was politically
expedient and perhaps acceptable in a situation of grave social conflict, when the
aftermath of the Civil War was still riddled with tensions and deeply entrenched
positions. However, in post-industrial cities more generally the development of the
heritage and theme park industry has raised a number of questions over
commemoration and memory:
A nineteenth-century quayside where casual dockworkers laboured in

appalling conditions for ridiculously low wages was a context rich in meaning
and political tinder, for instance, but such a quayside done up as the backdrop
for postmodern warehouses-turned-into-apartments occupied by a mobile
new middle-class has been stripped of its original meanings and political
resonances… Our specific source of disquiet here…concerns the
transformation that all too commonly occurs whereby one particular form of
memory—namely, that of the bourgeoisie—becomes the officially-sanctioned
History (with a capital ‘h’) of a given territory, nation or city.17
While we can wonder about the relevance of the ‘bourgeoisie’ as being the most
accurate descriptor of the realities of contemporary politics, the point is well made.
The biggest baffle on attempts by marginalised groups to gain a voice is this
conception of the city as being socially unified, united in citizenship. In this sense,
discourses such as urban renaissance and civic pride function in a way similar to
nationalism: they create an ‘imagined community’ of city-dwellers which is
dangerously illusory.18 Violence against women, discrimination against and attacks
on ethnic minorities, the exclusion of the older worker from the labour market, the
exclusion of the young from the labour market, the general stratification of access to
cultural knowledge and the new information economies, the concentration of
unemployment in certain urban areas: these are all generally recognised problems
faced in the city which contribute to a ‘feel-bad’ factor that few political parties are
prepared to take on. Again, there is a need to explode the myth that social
democracy represents a problem-free conception of the ‘public’, as we saw in the

case of the Ciutat Vella.
Second, while post-Keynesian cities may be more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of
the global economy than before, they also have the ability to insert themselves into
wider ‘mediascapes’ and economic spaces, such as global tourism markets.
Mitterrand’s attempts to use Paris as a kind of political theatre during the
bicentenary commemorations of 1989 were fiercely contested by Jacques Chirac
while mayor of the city. Such spectacles can thus form part of a wider electoral
battleground between different social groups for political control of the city.
Furthermore, certain cities—Paris and Barcelona included—form keys for control
of wider regional and national territories. We saw how Pujol seized the importance
of the Olympics as a means of projecting Catalonia’s difference worldwide.
Maragall proved equally adept at milking his status as Olympic mayor, dropping in
on George Bush, greeting Gorbachev, chatting with Pérez de Cuellar, and
schmoozing with mayors from New York to Berlin to Beijing. These tensions—
Mitterrand/Chirac and Maragall/Pujol—show the premium on symbolic and
material control of cities as embodiments of political identity. And while the former
tussle was largely directed at controlling French space, Maragall and Pujol have both
shown how the New Europe offers possibilities of by-passing the nation-state
entirely. The urban spectacle is a means of achieving this.
Political spaces in the New Europe

So, it is clear that Barcelona has been used as both a symbolic and a material base
for wider political projects, and that Maragall—‘The Prince’—has been ingenious in
establishing a political reputation that goes far, far beyond the municipal
boundaries. He has been one of the quickest and most successful municipal
politicians to interpret the ramifications of European integration for political
organisation. While he is canny enough to recognise the continuing importance of
the nation-state, he would doubtless be partial to the arguments of those who see an
‘unbundling of sovereignty’ in the contemporary world, one where nation-states are
involved in a complex negotiation of power with city-states, regions, media moguls
and transnational corporations of all kinds.19 And this has been one of the hardest
lessons for many on the Left to learn, unwilling to give up a focus on controlling the
‘commanding heights’ of the national economy.
Perhaps the most explicit and concrete embrace of such ‘postmodern
territorialities’ is the building of a Europe of the Regions, which both Maragall and
Pujol have been active in pursuing. As the case of Catalonia shows, we have two
contrasting approaches to the decentralisation of power, between a cosmopolitan
urban social democracy and a more essentialist ‘bourgeois regionalism’. The much-
vaunted Europe of the Regions is clearly by no means a homogeneous movement
towards decentralised Euro-utopia. There is a lot of ground between the chauvinism
of the Lega Nord or the cultural conservatism of Bavarian regionalists, and the more
progressive sentiments of Maragall, the German Greens or some strands of Scottish
nationalism. The path illuminated by Maragall is fascinating, but depends on

striking a judicious balance between defending an inclusive citizenship, and
ensuring that boosterism doesn’t create a consumer polity, where full participation
comes only with requisite income or cultural knowledge. This is not an easy
position for any urban leader, having to balance the books, encourage investment
for job provision, and try to ensure that public space is not eroded in the process.
But it is a terrain over which the Left will have to navigate itself in the coming years.20
However, Maragall has gone further by looking at how the new political spaces
emerging will require new forms of political organisation. We may recall his
arguments about the future role of the political party, which has been under
transformation for the best part of a century in any case. One can see the practical
projects set up in the Eurocities movement—based on apparently mundane issues
of computerised traffic systems or pollution control—as a chrysalis for future,
‘harder’ forms of political co-operation and decision-making by actors with a
common political stance (rather than the more functional co-operation taking place
in, say, the Council of Ministers). Maragall has been very quick to gange the
possibilities of the ‘mediatisation’ of politics, enhancing his own profile through urban
spectacle.
And, of course, he has long been stating that the city-state is the best basis for
building a positive conception of citizenship in a period of apparent global entropy
and neo-liberal deregulation of capital flows, a means of ‘earthing’ globalisation, and
has Manuel Castells to lend solid academic weight to this vision. This is dependent
on articulating democratic representation within Europe: Maragall’s vision of a
European party may be seductive to those who identify a real ‘democratic deficit’ at
the heart of the European Union. And if it comes to fruition, does this mean that
we will see a simultaneous de-territorialisation of politics, paradoxically combined
with the increasing importance of certain symbolic places as synergetic spaces
(where their importance outweighs their territorial delimitation or population
size)?21
Red heritage, green future?

And in the race to explore these new avenues, what about the places and people left
behind by the mainstream Left? The battle to find a sufficient electoral base to
pursue coherent policies has always been a problem for the Left in the post-war
period, as their social constituencies have fragmented. Do social democrats still
represent the guardians of progressive politics in the city?
What is fascinating about Barcelona is the starkness of the transformation of its
Left intellectuals. From possessing a Marxist-oriented, explicitly anti-rentier
intelligentsia in the 1970s, they are now among the vanguard of competitive (read
boosterist) European cities, which thrive on capturing the fickle circuits of property
capital. This is one of the deliciously ironic things about Marxist analysis: its
insights into the workings of capitalism remain as powerful as ever, but
its programmes for social change remain as derivative as ever. And this is thrown
into sharp relief when one sees how the physical sites of urban protest in 1970s
Barcelona have now been sold off to developers by the same cohort of urban
radicals. And that, somehow, illegal protests over planned developments could be
justified on moral grounds under Francoism, but not under the democratic state. It
is worth remembering two things here: first, that some of the jewels of the city
council’s public space programme—such as l’Espanya Industrial—would have been
irretrievably lost to residential development had illegal action not been taken by
grassroots groups; second, that under the dying days of the dictatorship there may
have been more democracy, more debate, more critique, than after 18 years of
democratic government. Contra Franco estábamos mejor, indeed.
Vázquez Montalbán has had the good sense to admit that much of his literary
lament for the old city is nostalgia; his call echoed by the likes of Ian Spring’s
Phantom Village, a similar requiem for lost public cultures, for forgotten industrial
cities, for the Barcelona of the North.22 Here the protest masculinity of some Left
intellectuals comes forth in anti-yuppie tirades. The snobbery and nostalgia often
clouds the real impact of this service economy. is the spread of ‘nice bookshops’23
not a positive thing, the arrival of the wine bar a more civilising, sociable
contribution, the refurbishment of old warehouses a means of recreating a damaged
public realm? This cultural terrain is one of the most emotive issues in debates on the
contemporary city, for gentrification is not a simple story. Maragall is keen to speak
about citizenship, and Barcelona is a model of a user-friendly city in terms of public
transport quality, decentralised local government and well-designed public spaces.
How do we evaluate such civic cultures? Are they stratified by occupation, by
gender, by ethnicity, by mobility and age? Is one dependent on high income and
education for full access to them? This is an important research area, yet it involves
moving beyond simple indicators of quality of life into a fuller debate on what
citizenship means in the context of contemporary Europe.
Or are we merely witnessing the continued dominion of the rentier in the city, the
city as commodity, the city ‘which has always been in the hands of the right’?24 It is
noticeable that Manuel Castells, for one, still frames part of his analysis in the now
unfashionable dichotomy of use value vs. exchange value. And as it has been the
Green movement, primarily, which has taken up the baton on defending urban use
values over the past few years—whether in the peaceful anti-airport protests in
Manchester, or the sometimes violent squatters’ movement in Berlin (and now
Barcelona)—it suggests that the anti-developer vanguard is now residing with groups
far less willing to carry the baggage of Marxism. Such groups are thus less willing to
accept the teleology of much of what has passed for Left political strategy. And the
implicit message of today’s social democrats—put up with the negative effects of
growth today, and it will trickle down tomorrow—still retains this teleology. It is
the continued existence and strengthening of these more radical groups—be they
based around neighbourhood associations, public transport or homelessness
campaigns, or urban environmentalists—which holds the greatest promise of the
defence of the public, democratic city which the Left once promised.
I made clear at the outset that Barcelona was chosen as a site of study for
the dramatic trajectory of change that the Left has undergone over the past 20 years.
Yet as the allusion to Orwell suggests, the city can also be compared with the
situation before Francoism, before dictatorship. The New Barcelona is new in two
senses: it is post-Francoist, certainly, and the shadow of the dictatorship is one of
the crucial points to bear in mind when considering its history. Second, however,
these local narratives of historical change intersect with a broader ‘end of ideology’
being felt the world over, and here it is worth wondering whether the Left has a
future at all in any meaningful sense.
Sadly, my conclusions are weakened by the absence of work on ‘actually existing
socialism’ in the contemporary European city, which makes the prescriptions put
forward in recent social science for ‘progressive politics’25 or the ‘creative city’26
difficult to situate in the messy world of political practice. While doing this
research, the fact that my focus of interest has been the direction of the Left has
been met with some curiosity. One prominent geography professor asked for my
reasons for studying a movement which was, to his reckoning, dead within the
contemporary city. My response was, and would still be, that the key to unlocking
meta-narratives such as the ‘death of the Left’ or the ‘end of ideology’ still lies in
examining the textures of the contemporary city, and in scrutinising the activities of
those who claim to be the heirs to the tradition of progressive politics in Europe.
And instead of writing urban geographies that disguise either a (masculinist)
proletarian nostalgia for the blue collar city, or else a red rose boosterism (which
lurks beneath apparently ‘social scientific’ policy studies), can we not find space for
a return to the traditions of ‘muckraking’, of popular critique in academic work? In
my research into one of the most vivid, beautiful, civic, cities in Europe, I found a
lot of muck had already been raked by local journalists and critics, and through my
reporting of this work I hope to have identified some of the political contours which
shape the contemporary European urban experience. To be continued.
Notes
1 See Coates (1998) on a radical strategy; Lafontaine (1998); Sassoon (1998) on a more
centrist approach; and Holman (1996) on why the Spanish socialists have pursued a
neo-liberal strategy; on Delors see Ross (1995), quotations from pp. 241 and 243.
2 Kunzmann (1996).
3 Anderson (1994).
4 Hobsbawm (1989), quotations from pp. 153 and 154.
5 Sassoon (1996), p. 197.
6 Joan Clos, ‘El euro en las ciudades’, El País 2 May 1998, Cataluña, p. 4.
7 Castells (1994), quotations from pp. 25 and 27.
8 Hubbard and Hall (1998), p. 6.
9 Pred (1995), p. 203.
10 Pred (1995), p. 207.
11 See Taylor et al. (1996) for an interesting insight into how different publics and social
groups participate in the restructured industrial cities of Sheffield and Manchester.
12 Loftman and Nevin (1996).
13 Le Galès (1998).
14 Ley and Olds (1988), p. 191.
15 Harvey (1989).
16 Bianchini and Schwengel (1991).
17 Philo and Kearns (1993), pp. 24–6.
18 The idea, developed by Benedict Anderson (1991), that a sense of community can be
felt between people who may never meet each other. The European city is often
represented as being a place where such a community can exist, by contrast to the
more polarised North American experience. The problems begin when such a polis is
accepted uncritically, or where membership is exclusive, requiring a certain level of
cultural knowledge, income, or mode of behaviour. See Young (1990) for a more
progressive discussion of this.
19 Anderson (1996).
20 Harvie (1992) provides some quirky analysis of the progressive potential of some of
these spaces.
21 On the impact of mediascapes on European culture, see Morley and Robins (1995).
The logical outcome of the growth of a European electronic landscape is surely the
creation of a virtual European political movement. The Left would do well to consider
its tactics here.
22 Spring’s Phantom Village (1990) is an excellent evocation of some of the pressures on
traditional socialist identity in post-industrial cities.
23 Derided by one prominent Glaswegian artist as part of the cancer of the New Glasgow;
see Boyle and Hughes (1991) on the debate over socialism, culture and identity in
Glasgow.
25 Massey (1993).
26 Landry and Bianchini (1995); Amin and Graham (1997).
Glossary1
All non-English terms included are in Catalan, except those marked with an asterisk,
which are Castilian.
Ajuntament de Barcelona Barcelona City Council.
Barri District.
Carrer Street.
CDC (Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya) Catalan nationalist party led by
Jordi Pujol, with a generally more centrist membership than their coalition
partners, the UDC.
Ciutat Vella Literally the ‘old city’, Ciutat Vella encompasses the medieval sections
of Barcelona as well as the 19th century additions of sea-front Barceloneta and the
Raval.
CiU (Convergència i Unió) Formed in 1979 with the merger of the CDC and UDC,
the CiU has governed Catalonia since 1980, but has never managed to win control
of its capital. It has, however, supported both the PSOE and the PP in government
(although not in coalition) and has used this support to further speed the process
of autonomisation. Led by Jordi Pujol, CiU is largely conservative in outlook,
containing elements of Christian democracy and centrist social democracy in its
ideological composition.
Comissions Obreres/Comisiones Obreras* The major post-war trade union
movement in Spain, Comisiones has long been associated with the PCE/PSUC as
their politically organised factory presence. Enormously important—perhaps
decisive—in bringing a relatively early end to Francoism, it was also active in
organising general strikes against the austerity policies of the PSOE government
of the 1980s.
Desarrollismo, años de* Literally ‘years of development’, the term refers particularly
to the decades of the 1950s and 1960s which saw Spanish society transformed.
Triggered by the regime’s attempt to modernise the national economy, the period
was marked by vast migration, particularly by landless labourers from the poverty-
stricken south of Spain (often from Murcia, Andalusia and Extremadura), as well
as the growing access to consumer goods such as cars and televisions. In Barcelona
this period was associated with Porciolismo (see under Porcioles below).
Eixample Urbanised from 1861 to a plan laid down by Ildefons Cerdà, the Eixample
(extension) is the distinctive grid pattern of streets which dominates the city’s
morphology.
ERC (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya) Left of centre Catalan nationalist group
which polled 5.1% of the vote in the 1995 Barcelona local elections, giving it two
councillors.
ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna) (Basque) A terrorist group born in 1959 in opposition
to the suppression of Basque culture attempted by the dictatorship. ETA has carried
out countless attacks against the Spanish state, including some indiscriminate
GLOSSARY 185
attacks on civilians, although it has focused much of its activity on Madrid and
against its enemies in the Basque country itself.
FAVB (Federació d’Associacions de Veïns de Barcelona) The federation of
neighbourhood groups which played an important role during the transition from
dictatorship. Campaigning primarily for the defence of public space,
environmental quality and local services, they remain a diminished but important
oppositional voice to both the Generalitat and the city council.
Francoism Understood as an ideology, Francoism was the Spanish variant of extreme
right-wing European nationalism that accompanied Nazism and Italian Fascism
(the governments of Germany and Italy aided Franco substantially during the Civil
War). It went through a number of mutations as the various social groups of which
it consisted waxed and waned in their favour with el Caudillo, Franco. Profoundly
anti-democratic, its early years as governing ideology were characterised by autarky,
Spain being constructed both materially and symbolically as a fortress against the
cultural infection of European and American modernity, and strongly influenced
by conservative Catholic morality. A gradual liberalisation would be compounded
by the growing influence of the Opus Dei group of Catholic modernisers, who
sought to integrate Spain into Europe (and we see the mass tourism of the costas
beginning in this period from the early 1960s). Ultimately, the ideology was
doomed to failure, maintaining a ‘backward-looking centralist, authoritarian state
which was…on a collision course with Spain’s modern society and economy’. The
last few years of the dictatorship would be characterised by a desperate return to
bloody repression. This included the notorious Burgos ETA trials of 1970, which
numbered Basque priests among the accused: the presumption of guilt before the
trial brought international condemnation and underlined the crisis of legitimacy
facing the regime. The transition to democracy had begun long before Franco’s
death on the 20-N (20th November, 1975).2
Generalitat The autonomous government of Catalonia, formed under the Second
Republic in 1932. Dissolved by Franco, it would be re-estab lished in September
1977, and from 1980 to the present has been presided over by Jordi Pujol, leader
of the CiU coalition.
IC (Iniciativa per Catalunya) Electoral grouping comprising ex-communists and
ecologists, which polled 7.6% in the 1995 Barcelona local elections, giving it three
councillors.
Maragall, Pasqual Mayor of Barcelona between 1982 and 1997, Maragall is known
by some as ‘The Prince’ for his consummate political ability. He would personify
the 1992 Olympics, the success of which may yet propel him to higher things,
notably the presidency of the Generalitat.
PCE (Partido Comunista de España)* Founded in 1921, the PCE would gain in
importance during the Civil War and provided the most dedicated Spain-wide
opposition to the dictatorship, largely through strong discipline and close links to
the illegal trade union Comisiones Obreras. Its long-term leader, Santiago Carrillo,
was widely criticised for tactical blunders during the transition, accepting
legalisation in return for abandoning its revolutionary goals. This Eurocommunist
strategy would ultimately end in disaster, with an awful general election result in
1982 contributing to a slow demise. It would revive slightly as an anti-NATO
electoral grouping of small left-wing parties, but is still riven with regional tensions
186 GLOSSARY
between the more moderate Catalan wing (Iniciativa per Catalunya) and the
harder-line Izquierda Unida.3
Plaça Square.
Porcioles, José Maria Mayor of Barcelona between 1957 and 1973, who was
responsible for a rapid, chaotic growth in the city under the rural to urban
migration of the 1950s and 1960s, and the unregulated destruction of much of
old Barcelona. This period of urban policy has become known as Porciolismo.
PP (Partido Popular)* Under José Maria Aznar, the PP ended the 14-year isolation
of the Spanish Right with a general election victory in 1996. It currently governs
with the support of small regionalist/nationalist parties such as the CiU.
PSC (Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya) Born in 1978 with the fusion of three
parties, the PSC is the major social democratic party of Catalonia. Having a limited
sovereignty from the PSOE, it has always had to fight to prove its distinctiveness
as a Catalan party, and its profile in this direction was boosted by the presence of
Pasqual Maragall as mayor of Barcelona from 1982 to 1997. The question now is
whether the PSC can win control of the Generalitat, while retaining its tenuous
hold on the Ajuntament de Barcelona.
PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español)* Founded in 1879, the PSOE was to
virtually disappear under the dictatorship, re-emerging during the latter stages of
the transition. It finally won a sweeping victory in the October 1982 general
election under its charismatic leader, Felipe González, and would remain in
government until defeat in 1996. However, its popularity had long been waning
under a spate of increasingly dubious corruption scandals, and from 1993 to 1996
it relied on the support of various small parties (notably the CiU) to maintain itself
in power.
PSUC (Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya) Formed in 1936, the PSUC was the
main opposition political party in Catalonia during the dictatorship, operating
clandestinely. It was the main communist party in Catalonia, and played an
important role in the transition, having particularly close links to the
neighbourhood movements. It collapsed, however, riven by internal schisms, at
the beginning of the 1980s.
Second Republic From its establishment in 1931, the governments of the Second
Republic set out on their long-held mission to modernise Spain. Anti-clerical and
anti-monarchical, they drew inspiration from 1789. Republican ideals were
anathema to the Spanish Right, and led to the violent reaction of Franco’s
Nationalists. The re-assertion of some Republican ideals—internationalism,
cultural modernity, citizenship—can be detected in the policies of the post-
dictatorship social democratic movement, particularly in the PSC of Maragall.
Suárez, Adolfo Chosen by King Juan Carlos as the transition prime minister, Suárez
is chiefly remembered for his consummate skill in negotiating a peaceful transition
to democracy, juggling the extreme-right Francoist ‘bunker’ of army and
landowners with the grassroots militancy of the communists, all the while trying
to keep the favour of his own party, the newly formed UCD.
Transition The peculiar period between the fall of the old order and the beginning
of the new, the Spanish transition was marked by its remarkable lack of widespread
bloodshed. While a range of terrorist groups from the ultra-right and ultra-left, as
well as from the Basque nationalist group ETA, accounted for a sizeable number
of killings, the main political parties of the period saw the need for a negotiated
GLOSSARY 187
transition. Most commentators see this period as opening with ETA’s assassination
of Franco’s only feasible successor, Carrero Blanco, in December 1973, and closing
with the victory of the PSOE in the general elections of October 1982.
UCD (Union de Centro Democrático)* Main political party to have emerged from
the ruins of the dictatorship, and as such placed firmly to the right. Led by Adolfo
Suárez, the UCD won the first two ‘democratic’ elections of the transition, before
being trounced by the PSOE in 1982.
UDC (Unió Democràtica de Catalunya) Christian democrat Catalan nationalist
party which has come to play an increasingly influential role in recent years by
virtue of its coalition with the CDC. Led by Josep Duran i Lleida.
Notes
1 I have drawn the material here from a number of sources, particularly Graham and
Labanyi (1995), Pradas (1998) and Preston (1986).
2 Drawn from Preston (1986); quotation from p. 2.
3 See Heywood (1994) and Pradas (1998, pp. 56–61), for details on this. Vázquez
Montalbán’s (1996a) novel Murder in the Central Committee (first published in Spanish
in 1981) provides an atmospheric ‘insider’ fictionalisation of the PCE and Madrid at
the height of the transition.
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Index
Location references to plans or illustrations are highlighted in bold type; those to

footnotes are indicated by a page reference followed by ‘n’ and the number of the
note.
Acebillo, Josep 144, 148, 152 Raval 33–5;
aluminosis 134 slum clearance 36;
anarchists 8 Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel 25, 28,
Andalusians: 29–32
migrants 12, 19 Basques 52n10
Ajuntament de Barcelona (city council) 35, (see also terrorism)
36, 55, 69, 111, 116, 129, 143, 149, 165, beaches:
176 clean-up 97–6
Antich, Puig (anarchist) 37 (see also waterfront)
architects and architecture 139, 158–9; beat generation 32
opposition to 168; Beauregard, R.A.:
Franco 142, 145–2; Voices of Decline 3
renewal of city 144; Benjamin, Walter 25, 27:
students 143; Marseilles 33
students’ protest 127 Blair, Eric see Orwell, George
(see also buildings; city planning; Blair, Tony 6, 10, 91–92
sculpture) Blanco, Carrero:
art gallery 162–9 assassination 37
Assemblea de Catalunya 65, 123, 128 Bohigas, Oriol (chief planner) 45, 143–40,
athletics: 152;
World Cup (1989) 78–8 A Different Urbanism 147
Azko (Dutch chemical group) 93 Borja, Jordi 94, 128;
Aznar, José Maria (Spanish prime minister) Local and Global 113, 116–14
10, 86, 102 buildings:
beach-side 98;
Bandera Roja (Red Flag) 128 renovation 14
banks and banking 66, 75 built environment see architecture;
Barcelona 2000 Economic and Social city planning
Strategic Plan 95 Butifarra! 124
Barrio Chino 13, 31:
history 32–4; Cabet, Etienne (Proudhonist) 45
planning and development 34–5; Calatrava, Santiago (architect) bridge 165;
197
198 INDEX
communications tower 142, 164–1 protest 127;

Camp Nou 50, 61, 78, 80, 120 redevelopment 99, 119, 147–4, 180;
campaigns: renovation 95 regulations 120;
Candel, Francese (writer) 52n32 wasteland 126
capitalism 37, 51, 114, 117 (see also architecture; sculpture)
Carmel 11, 19, 121 cityscape 13;
Carrillo, Santiago 38 history 11, 15–16
cartoons: citystates 58, 104, 111–10;
Butifarra! 124 Castells on 116
Carvalho, Pepe 26–51 CiU (Convergència i Unió) 55, 67, 68–9,
passim 72;
Castelldefels 12 elections 91, 129, 65–5, (1995) 14;
Castells, Manuel: 111–10, 136–3; electoral districts 17–21 passim
The City and the Grassroots 111, 114–12, Ciutat Vella 11, 31;
121; electoral district 15–16,
exile in France 114; renovation 148–6, 153
Local and Global 113, 116–14; civic realism 140–8
The Urban Question 114–12, 119–18 class structure 34:
Castilians 19 and electoral districts 15–21, 72
Catalonia: Clos, Joan (mayor of Barcelona):
political parties 14, 18; European Union 173–70
Clot 16
regional identity 55–61, 65, 67–9 CMB (Corporació Metropolitana de
Catalans 12, 60; Barcelona) 72, 83–3
language 68 coalitions see local government
catholicism 65; coastline see beaches;
Archbishop of Barcelona 64; port
Cristians Catalans 60–61, 66 Cobi (Olympic mascot) 47–8
CAU (magazine) 127 collective consumption 115
CDC (Convergència Democràtica de Commissions Obreres (trades unions) 37,
Catalunya) 67 63, 128
Cerdà, Ildefons 16 communications towers 164
Chillida, Eduardo (sculptor) 159 communism 43, 51, 55, 114–12
church see catholicism; (see also PCE)
religion consumerism 8–9, 86
city council see Ajuntament de Barcelona Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya see
City of Marvels 11, 16–17, 161 CDC
city planning 5, 10, 13, 15–21; Convergència i Unió see CiU
change of use 132–9; Corporació Metropolitana de Barcelona see
CMB v. Generalitat 73; CMB
districts 149–7; Cornellà 12
European cities 95–4, 174; Crick, Bernard: on George Orwell 4
Francoism 130–7, 154; crime:
identity 139, 146–3, 153; Barrio Chino 31–3, 35;
Olympic Village 45; public spaces 154
outskirts 152; Cristians Catalans 60–61, 66
politics 169; culture see popular culture;
urban culture
INDEX 199
DATAR (French planning agency): Euskadi ta Askatasuna see ETA

study 94–3, 104 Evening Standard 10
Davis, Mike: Expos:
City of Quartz 3–4, 25, 51 1888 161;
Delors, Jacques (European Commission 1929 146, 161
president) 172 (see also Madrid)
democracy: expressways see roads
establishment 37, 65; Extremadura 12
Olympic Games 74
demolition: fascism 8:
Ciutat Vella 149–6; end of 37
districts 151 (see also Francoism)
dereliction 13, 126 fast food 49
designers 47 FAVB (Federació d’Associacions de Veïns de
detective of the city 25 Barcelona) 113, 123, 128–5, 134;
dictatorship see Francoism newspaper 135;
diversity 172 planning 151
drugs: Federació d’Associacions de Veins de
Barrio Chino 32–3, 35; Barcelona see FAVB
public spaces 154 federalism 70–71
Figueras, Josep Maria (property developer)
economics: 41, 131
internationalism 11, 75, 94; finance see local government:
modernisation 84–4 spending
(see also European Union; industry) Fisher, J. and Ellingham, J.:
EEC see European Union Rough Guide to Spain 14
Eixample 11–12, 36, 60: football 9, 12, 18:
electoral district 16–17 regionalist icons 61
elections and electorate 14, 15, 65–5, 69, Forn, Manuel de 94
84, 91; Foster, Norman (architect) communications
municipal elections (1979) 129, (1980s) tower 164
72–2 (1995) 91; Franca, Zona:
United States 92 Els Altres Catalans 12
electoral districts: France:
descriptions 15–21 socialism 85
Ellingham, J. and Fisher, J.: Franco, Francisco, general (1892–1975) 8,
Rough Guide to Spain 14 59
els fets del Palau (1960) 60 Francoism 59–61, 74–4, 154;
employment see unemployment failure 61–1;
ERC (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya) planning and development 130–7, 145–
19, 20 2
Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya see ERC (see also nationalism)
ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna) 20, 37, 52n10 FRAP (Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y
Eurocities (network) 105 Patriota) 52n10
Eurocommunism see communism Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patriota
Europe see New Europe see FRAP
European Union 93–2, 104–3 funding 106
200 INDEX
(see local government: spending; private informationalism 113, 116

sector) inhabitants 99;
and planning 153
Galí, Beth (scuptor) 159 Iniciativa per Catalunya see IC
Galinsoga, Luis de 60 International Brigades 8, 159
Generalitat 65–5, 73, 77 internationalisation 74, 83–3, 106;
gentrification see city planning and competition 103
globalisation 113, 117 (see also globalisation)
González, Felipe 84–4
Gràcia: Jacobs, Jane M.:
electoral district 18–19 Postcolonialism and the City 1
GRAPO (Grupos de Resistencia Antifascista Jacobs, Michael:
Primero de Octubre) 52n10 Between Hopes and Memories 46, 48
grassroots see neighbourhood groups Jospin, Lionel (French prime minister) 91
Grupos de Resistencia Antifascista Primero
de Octubre see GRAPO Kearns, Gerry and Philo, C. (eds):
Guardian 9, 10 Selling Places 1
Guinardó 19 Kettle, Martin (journalist) 56
Habitat II, Istanbul, 1996 105 La España Industrial (textile company) 126,
Harvie, Chris The Rise of Regional Europe 58; 127;
Cultural Weapons 183 park 151
highways see roads La Seda (chemical company) 93
history: language:
Catalonia 55–61; Catalan 68
Spain 67 law and legislation:
Hobsbawm, Eric 172–9 planning 120
Horta-Guinardó: left-wing politics see New Left
electoral district 19 Les Corts:
housing 118–19, 132; electoral district 18
apartment block collapse 134; local government:
developers 41; coalitions 65–5, 89–93;
electoral districts 15–21; spending 10, 77, 100–102
local projects 148; (see also CMB)
squatters 135–2; London, future of 10
Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel 50
Hughes, Robert Barcelona 45–7 passim, 139; Maastricht Treaty (1991) 85, 105
The Shock of the New 58–8 MACBA see art gallery
Madrid:
IC (Iniciativa per Catalunya) 19, 20 and Barcelona 104;
identity 172–9 European City of Culture 11, 74;
immigrants see migrants Expo 2004 102;
industrial action 37, 41, 61–2; hegemony 59;
85 ‘Madrid Spring’ 38
industry 15–21, 93: Maquinista, La (factory) 63
history 12; Maragall, Joan (poet) 61, 69
red belt 61–2
INDEX 201
Maragall, Pasqual (mayor of Barcelona, Montreal 142

1982–1997) 5, 66, 69; Moreno, Eduardo 17;
architecture 144–3; [and F.Martí] Barcelona ¿A Dónde Vas
British view of 10; 127–4
Catalonia 66, 69–9;
city planning 72–2, 83–3; narratives 4
city states 105, 107; nationalism 59, 78–9
economic policy 86, 100–102; (see also Francoism; regionalism)
federal Spain 69–71; nationalists (Catalan) see CiU
foreign policy 77; neighbourhood groups 114–13, 123, 128,
Olympic Games 6–9, 89–8, 94–4, 100; 130, 134
political views 88–7, 92–1, 107, 179; (see also FAVB)
sculpture 160; neighbourhood projects 147–4
student life 88–6; New Europe 9, 85
United States 89; New Labour:
writer 103, 107 England 10
Mariscal, Xavier (designer) 47–8 New Left 58, 91–92:
marketing the city 83–3, 90, 95, 133, 176–3 Barcelona 38–9, 42, 50–1, 65
Martí, F. and Moreno, E.: noir 25
Barcelona ¿A Dónde Vas 127–4 Nou Barris:
marxism: electoral district 19, 121;
and the city 174, 179–6; apartment block collapse 134;
disenchantment with 39–40, 42, 50–1 redevelopment 152
(see also PSOE) Nova Icària 45
MBMP (architects) 45 Núñez, Josep Lluís (president of Barça) 41,
Meier, Richard (architect) 162–60 118, 131
memory and place 27–9
Mendoza, Eduardo: offices:
City of Marvels 11, 16–17, 161 development 100, 132
middle class and protest 115 Olivetti (factory) 63, 64
Mies Pavilion van der Rohe, Mies Olympic Games 21, 41–2:
migrants 12,61, 117, 120–18 Calatrava’s Tower 164–1;
military 75; districts 17, 19, 20–21;
coup (1981) 40 funding 131;
Miró, Joan (sculptor): mascot 47;
Woman and Bird 159 planning and development 44, 49, 77,
Mitterrand, François (French prime 89–8, 131, 144;
minister) 85; political aspects 5, 55, 74–9, 130;
Paris architecture 161 renovation of Barcelona 94–3, 100;
modernisation 74, 83–4 sculpture 157
monarchy 75; (see also Montjuïc)
Athletics World Cup (1989) 78–8; Olympic Village 45
Olympic Games 79–9 open spaces 147–4, 151, 154, 169
Moncloa Accords 38, 40 opera house:
Montalbán, Manuel Vázquez see Vázquez fire 134
Montalbán, Manuel Orwell, George:
Montjuïc (Olympic Hill) 11, 13, 17, 44, 48– Homage to Catalonia 6–9;
9
202 INDEX
writing style 4 passim, 128–5;

electoral districts 14–21 passim;
Parc de l’Espanya Industrial 127 Olympic Games 74–5
Parc Güell 18–19 PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español)
parks see open spaces 11, 37, 38, 55, 65, 69, 74, 76;
Partido Comunista de España see PCE corruption 86;
Partido Popular see PP economic policy 85–5, 93–2;
Partido Socialista Obrero Español see PSOE elections 83–3;
Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya see PSC Marxism 84–4
Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya see PSUC (Partit Socialista Unificat de
PSUC Catalunya) 37, 43, 72;
PCE (Partido Comunista de España) 37–8; elections 65, 129–6;
grassroots 128 grassroots 128
Petras, James: public art see sculpture
‘Spanish socialism’ 11 public spaces see open spaces
Plaça dels Països Catalans 166–4, 167 Pujol, Jordi (Catalan president) 5, 18, 55–6,
planning and development see city planning 60, 72, 76;
pluralism 178–5 abolition of CMB 73–3;
Poble Nou 16, 20, 44: concept of Barcelona 66–7;
redevelopment as Olympic Village 45; and the monarchy 79;
sea-front project 122 Olympic Games 77–9
Poble Sec 17 Putxet 11
political parties see under names of parties
popular culture: racism 106
in Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel 26–7 radicals 32, 78
population 12, 15, 17–19, 72 Rambla, La 13, 15–16
Porcioles, Josep Maria (Mayor of Barcelona) reading the city 25, 145
72, 117–17; ‘red belt’ 61–1, 62
obituary 130; regionalism 55–61, 78–9
Olympic Games 130 religion:
port 96: catholicism 60–66 passim;
expansion 95 history 74;
post-Franco era 37–44 the state 67
PP (Partido Popular): renovation see city planning
elections 17, 18, 20, 86, 91 restaurants 49–50:
Preston, Paul: design 47
The Triumph of Democracy in Spain 37 Riera, Ignasi:
private sector 83–3, 99, 116, 174; Off Barcelona 12
overseas 132 roads 13, 122, 132, 144:
property developers 17, 41–2, 114, 118, coastal 150;
126, 130–8 Via Júlia 152
prostitution 31–2 (see also transport)
protest movements 115, 123–1 Rowe, Peter:
(see also FAVB) Civic Realism 140
PSC (Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya)
55, 72–5 Sabadell 12
passim, elections 65–5, 69, 83–9 Sagrada Familia (cathedral) 17
INDEX 203
Sanahuja, Roman (property developer) 41, social democrats (Catalan) see PSC
131 social polarisation 10, 106, 175–2
Sant Adrià power station: shooting 37 socialism:
Sant Andreu: and the city x–3, 6–10, 175–1;
electoral district 20, 60 establishment of 38
Sant Martí 12, 16: socialists see PSOE
electoral district 10–x; Spanish Civil War 8, 34
redevelopment 152 Spring, Ian:
Santa Coloma de Gramenet: Phantom Village 180
Feria de Abril 12 Stalinism 8
Sants 12, 16, 17, 60; state see local government;
Carrer Ladrilleros explosion 123; elections and under the names of
neighbourhood groups 128; political parties
Parc de l’Espanya Industrial 127 Stockholm Globe sports arena 175
Sants-Montjuïc: Strategic Plan:
electoral district 17–18 Barcelona 2000 95
Samaranch, Juan Antonio (property street names 155–2
developer) 19, 41–2, 75, 131 strikes see industrial action
Sarrià-Sant Gervasi: electoral district 18 Suárez, Adolfo (Spanish prime minister) 38,
Sassoon, Donald: 65
One Hundred Years of Socialism 3 Sudjic, Deyan The 100 Mile City 102
satire:
Butifarra! 124 Tàpies, Antoni (artist) 158;
schools 121 Homage to Picasso 158
sculpture: Tarradellas, Josep (Catalan president) 65
public art 98, 139, 146, 151, 156–6; Tarragona, Carrer:
removal of fascist propaganda 155; office blocks 100
Serra, Richard: technology 116
The Wall 165–2; terrorism:
Tàpies, Antoni: Barcelona 78;
Homage to Picasso 158 ETA 20, 37, 75
SEAT car factory 17, 20, 60, 63; textiles 20
sale to Volkswagen 93–2; Tibidabo 11
shooting 37 Torres, Maruja 36
separatism see regionalism; tourism 8–9
nationalism trade fairs 95
Serra, Narcís (socialist mayor of Barcelona) (see also Expos)
75, 88, 129–6; trades unions see Commissions Obreres;
cultural background 143 industrial action
Serra, Richard (architect): transport 75, 95–4
The Wall 165–2 Trotskyists 8
Setmana Tràgica (1909) 32
Seville: UCD (Union de Centro Democrático) 65,
Expo 11, 74 69;
shanty dwellers 118 elections 129
Shifrin, Roy (sculptor) 159 UDC (Unió Democràtica de Catalunya) 67
shops 50, 96 unemployment 10, 40, 93, 117;
Single Market see European Union
204 INDEX
Ciutat Vella 149 and Francoism 61–x;

Union de Centro Democrático see UCD protest 115;
United Nations 105 red belt of Barcelona 62–2
United States: World Bank 105
party politics 92 writing style 4
University of Barcelona 18
URBAN (funding programme) 105
urban change x–3, 12
(see also architecture; city planning; see
under names of districts)
urban culture 71, 155, 176–4
urban entrepreneurs see private sector;
property developers
urban landscape see cityscape
urban planning see city planning;
see under names of districts
urban reportage 4
Urry, John:
Consuming Places 9
van der Rohe, Mies 49, 146, 169

Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel 5, 17, 22, 25:
The Angst-ridden Executive 39–40;
autobiography in novels 28–9;
Barcelonas 22, 25, 26;
Barrio Chino 25, 28, 30–4;
Crónica Sentimental de la Transición 27;
detective hero 25–34;
as flâneur 22–4, 51;
on General Franco 22;
Marxism 22–4, 29;
An Olympic Death 42–3, 45–6;
property developers 135;
protest 121;
Southern Seas 34, 40;
urban change 26,29
Viaplana and Piñon (architects):
Plaça dels Països Catalans 166–4, 167
Vizcaya 61
Viola, Joaquim 120
violence:
Barrio Chino 33
wasteland see city planning

waterfront:
renovation 149
working classes 32:

McNEIL, Donald - Urban Change and The European Left

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Urban Change and the European Left

London and New York

ISBN 0-203-98191-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-17062-1 (Print Edition)

4 The gospel according to Pasqual: mayor Maragall’s new 84

1 Barcelona: an electoral map 15

1861 The Eixample (extension) is urbanised under a variant of a plan

1962 ‘Generation of 62’ agitating in universities and factories show

1982 PSOE wins huge general election victory (October). Serra

The New Barcelona

The city and the European Left

historical geography of imperial London employs the metaphor of ‘performance’ as

1 Davis (1990), pp. 19–20.

From the air, homage to Blair

It is worth speculating that—given his apparently total disillusionment

The birth of the New Barcelona

Barcelona, the self-confident and progressive capital of Catalunya, is a

Such a discourse is interesting, coming as close as a tourist guide will come to

Figure 1 Barcelona: an electoral map. Electoral districts: 1, Ciutat Vella; 2, Eixample; 3,

substandard by the discovery of aluminosis (a disease caused by humidity which

1 Orwell (1938/1989), pp. 2–3.

And the General gradually passed away, a hypodermic needle in every

realist?) Barcelona is sometimes far-fetched, under-plotted, and very masculinist. Yet

With Carvalho novels appearing at an astounding rate—almost annually—they

Unsurprisingly, sadistic figures such as Creix, responsible for persecuting students

The Barrio Chino and the triumph of the middle classes

The Spanish transition from the dictatorship to democracy was an

districts—that political unrest tended to ignite. A centre of anarchism, communism

It is reminiscent of Benjamin in Marseilles: ‘Every step stirs a song, a quarrel, a

Sometimes he [Carvalho] began to doubt the reality of his neighbourhood.

The promoters of the operation justified it on hygienistic grounds, that they

‘From the long march to the marathon’

mutual infatuation between Suárez and Carrillo’44 —fatally overplayed the

fleeing successive terrors in Argentina; one of Carrillo’s ten right-hand men;

He…considered those comrades of yesteryear who were now working on the

pressure of completing the preparations on time. They stand accused of having

Barcelona as theme park

The novel’s meaning is clear. A disoriented Left, a fragmented landscape, and

responsible for a substantial proportion of the cloying overdesigned bars which

Unsurprisingly, the Cobi image was appropriated by all sorts of anti-Olympic

40 Preston (1986), pp. 5–6.

Barcelona has an ambiguous relationship with both Catalonia and Spain. It is

City-states or bourgeois regions?

Is it mere coincidence that, as European parties of the Left lose national

be they Breton, Scottish, Irish, Basque or Catalan—could claim histories of

Barcelona as capital of la anti-España

With…anti-centralist attitudes widespread, Barcelona became the focus for

Vanguardia, arch-Francoist Luis de Galinsoga, who had openly protested against

Figure 3 Map of Barcelona’s red belt.

model began to be mass-produced—the legendary SEAT 600, ‘Franco’s Beetle’—

appointing a civilian management. Primarily, however, the outcome was symbolic,

the balcony in Plaça Sant Jaume to lead a provisional Generalitat, in an explicit

Pujol, Maragall and the National Question: two visions

Although the activity of the Generalitat is complex and, in many sectors,

of Catalans to values of modernity such as industrialisation, hard work and

While the combination of tradition and modernity is hardly unique in nationalist

Catalunya oberta.48 He speaks of the importance of a strictly federal Spain, as

Badalona, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, or Sant Adrià de Besós, there was an in-built

They were explicitly intended to celebrate Spain’s coming of age as a modern,

Second, under his leadership Barcelona would change enormously in terms of

the council’s project in various ways, and he mounted an alternative campaign

1 Cited in Ladrón de Guevara et al. (1995).

28 See Candel (1985).