Thinking Barcelona studies the ideological work that redefined Barcelona during the 1980s and adapted the city to a new economy of tourism, culture, and services. The 1992 Olympic Games offered to ...the municipal government a double opportunity to establish an internal consensus and launch Barcelona as a happy combination of European cosmopolitanism and Mediterranean rootedness. The staging of this municipal “euphoric postpolitics,” which entailed an extensive process of urban renewal, connects with the similarly exultant contexts of a reviving Catalan nation, post-transitional Spain, and post-Cold War globalization. The transformation of Barcelona, in turn, contributed to define the ideologies of globalization, as the 1992 Games were among the first global mega-events that celebrated the neoliberal “end of history.” Three types of materials are examined: political speeches and scripts of the Olympic ceremonies, with special focus on Xavier Rubert de Ventós’s screenplay for the reception of the flame in Empúries; the urban renewal of Barcelona directed by architect Oriol Bohigas; and fictional narratives by Quim Monzó, Francisco Casavella, Eduardo Mendoza, and Sergi Pàmies. This juxtaposition of heterogeneous materials pursues some type of postdisciplinary decoding linked to a strictly Marxist premise: the premise that correlations between different superstructural elements shed light on the economic instance. In this study, Barcelona emerges as a singular conjuncture overdetermined by global capitalism, but is also a space to reflect on three main problematics of postmodern globalization: the spectralization of the social in a fully commodified world; the contradiction between cosmopolitanism and the state; and the vanishing essence of the city.
This paper explores how the so-called Bilbao effect and Barcelona Model are diffused internationally through what may be called urban policy tourism: short trips made to Bilbao and Barcelona by ...policy-makers to learn from their regeneration in the past 15 years. The paper reveals for the first time the substantial extent of this practice and contextualises it within a wider phenomenon of urban policy transfer and the international 'motion' of urban policies. Although both models are internationally known for a set of elements, this research shows that in fact the messages mutate and shift as they circulate through the policy circuits. Ultimately, however, the popularity of the Bilbao and Barcelona models suggests a process of global urban policy convergence.
•Ground and truck-launched air delivery robot operations are analyzed.•For low densities, truck-launched air drones present the lowest operation costs.•For high densities, ground delivery robots ...present the lowest operation costs.•In any case, ground delivery robots generate less externalities.
The e-commerce boom has increased the complexity of last-mile logistics operations in urban environments. In this context, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as delivery drones, and ground autonomous delivery devices (GADDs) show great potentialities. The objective of this paper is to provide strategic insights to adequately match these autonomous technologies with some given characteristics of cities and help define relevant decision variables. Using continuous approximation equations, the operations costs as well as the externalities induced by a) GADDs in association with an urban consolidation center (UCC) and b) truck-launched UAVs are estimated. Then, the developed mathematical formulations are applied in two different use cases: a part of the Paris suburbs (France) and the historical center of Barcelona (Spain). In less dense and larger service regions such as the Paris suburbs, truck-launched delivery drones seem more suitable to reduce the carriers’ operations costs. In denser neighborhoods such as the Barcelona historical center, GADDs are expected to be more economically profitable. In both use cases, GADDs would generate less externalities. Finally, considering the high uncertainty of some input parameters, a sensitivity analysis of the models is done.
For hundreds of years, Barcelona and Madrid have shared a deep rivalry. Throughout history, they have competed in practically every aspect of social life, sport, politics, and culture. While ...competition between cities is commonplace in many nations around the world, in the case of Barcelona and Madrid it has been, on occasion, excessively antagonistic. Over time they have each tried to demonstrate that one was more modern than the other, or more avant-garde, or richer, or more athletic, and so on. Fortunately, the Spain of today is a democracy and every nation and region of the State has the liberty to act. As such, the rivalry between these two capitals has become productive not only for the cities themselves, but also for Spain as a whole. One hundred years ago, at the onset of the Historical Avant-Garde in Spain, the connections between Barcelona and Madrid consisted of a complicated web of politics, friendships, publications, and inter-art collaborations. Over the last century, the antagonistic relationship between these two cultural capitals has been dismissed as simply a fact of life and thereby scholars, for the most part, have focused only on Barcelona or Madrid when addressing this cultural moment. By delving deep into the myriad of cultural and political complexities that surround these two cities from the onset of Futurism (1909) to the arrival of Surrealism in Spain (1929), a complex social and cultural network is revealed. Networking between artists, poets, journalists and thinkers connected avant-garde Barcelona and Madrid, thereby creating synergy for this artistic and literary movement. In a hybrid, transdisciplarian, translingual and historical approach using a wide range of visual and textual artifacts, the complexity of interactions described here opens our imagination to new ways of thinking about culture.
Theories and concepts for understanding the political logic of social movements' everyday activities, particularly those which relate directly to political goals, have been increasingly important ...since the late 1970s. The notion of 'prefigurative politics' is becoming established in this debate and refers to scenarios where protesters express the political 'ends' of their actions through their 'means', or where they create experimental or 'alternative' social arrangements or institutions. Both meanings share the idea that prefiguration anticipates or partially actualises goals sought by movements. This article uses narratives and observations gathered in social movement 'free spaces', autonomous social centres in Barcelona, to evaluate, critique and rearticulate the concept. Participants' attention to the 'means' through which protest is carried out and emphasis on projects such as experimentation with alternative social and organisational forms suggest they engage in prefigurative politics. However, the article uses these examples to dispute the key ways through which prefiguration has been defined, arguing that it can better be deployed in referring to the relations, and tensions, between a set of political priorities. Understood as such, prefigurative politics combines five processes: collective experimentation, the imagining, production and circulation of political meanings, the creating of new and future-oriented social norms or 'conduct', their consolidation in movement infrastructure, and the diffusion and contamination of ideas, messages and goals to wider networks and constituencies.
The Barcelona reader Bou, Enric; Subirana, Jaume
2017., 20170724, 2018, 2017-07-24
eBook
Over the last twenty years there has been a growing international interest in the city of Barcelona. This has been reflected in the academic world through a series of studies, courses, seminars, and ...publications. The Barcelona Reader hinges together a selection of the best academic articles, written in English, about the city, and its main elements of identity and interest: art, urban planning, history and social movements. The book includes scholarly essays about Barcelona that can be of interest to the student and the general public alike. It focuses on cultural representations of the city: the arts (including literature) provide a complex yet discontinuous portrait of the city, similar to a patchwork. The authors selected create a kaleidoscope of views and voices thus presenting a diverse yet inclusive Barcelona portrait. The Barcelona Reader offers a multifaceted assessment that will be essential reading for anyone interested in this iconic city.
At the present time, most large cities in the world are polycentric and, at the same time, they are undergoing processes of employment decentralisation and déconcentration. It has been argued that ...polycentricity is just an intermediate stage between monocentricity and a more unstructured, chaotic and amorphous location model, scatteration. For the case of the polycentric Barcelona, the aims of this study are to test: whether its employment is moving from polycentricity to scatteration; and, whether its employment location model is increasingly random and unstructured. The results show that, in spite of the decentralisation and déconcentration processes, employment concentrated in centres still represents a significant percentage of total employment and new subcentres have emerged in the periphery. What is more, the results also show an increasing influence of employment sub-centres on employment location and density conditions. As a result, polycentricity has been reinforced.
Antibiotics, such as sulfonamides (SAs), have recently raised concern as wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) partly remove them, and thus, SAs continuously enter the aquifers. In this context, the ...aims of this work are to (1) investigate the temporal evolution of SAs and metabolites in an urban aquifer recharged by a polluted river; (2) identify the potential geochemical processes that might affect SAs in the river-groundwater interface and (3) evaluate the ecological and human health risk assessment of SAs. To this end, 14 SAs and 4 metabolites were analyzed in river and urban groundwater from the metropolitan area of Barcelona (NE, Spain) in three different sampling campaigns. These substances had a distinct behavior when river water, which is the main recharge source, infiltrates the aquifer. Mixing of the river water recharge into the aquifer drives several redox reactions such as aerobic respiration and denitrification. This reducing character of the aquifer seemed to favor the natural attenuation of some SAs as sulfamethoxazole, sulfapyridine, and sulfamethizole. However, most of the SAs detected were not likely to undergo degradation and adsorption because their concentrations were constant along groundwater flow path. In fact, the intensity of SAs adsorption is low as the retardation factors are close to 1 at average groundwater pH of 7.2 for most SAs.
Finally, risk quotients (RQs) are used to evaluate the ecological and human health risks posed by single and mixture of SAs in river water and groundwater, respectively. Life-stage RQs of the SAs detected in groundwater for the 8 age intervals were low, indicating that SAs and their mixture do not pose any risk to human beings. Concerning the environmental risk assessment, SAs do not pose any risk for algae, fish and crustaceans as the RQs evaluated are further lower than 0.1.
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•14 sulfonamides (SAs) and 4 metabolites are analyzed in river and urban groundwater.•SAs present distinct behavior when river water infiltrates the aquifer.•Some SAs are naturally removed under the nitrate reducing groundwater conditions.•Other SAs are persistent as their concentrations remain constant along the flow path.•SAs pose no ecological and human health risks at detected concentrations.
Sulfonamide antibiotics and their metabolites do not pose any risk to human health in an urban aquifer that is a potential source of water supply.
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•SWI and SGD research must be performed in a coupled way in coastal aquifers.•New experimental site integrating different characterization techniques at different scales.•An ...apparently homogeneous aquifer behaves as a multiaquifer system.•High reactivity of the site partly linked to complex mixing processes.
Coastal aquifers are affected by seawater intrusion (SWI), which causes their salinization, and yield submarine groundwater discharge (SGD), which feeds marine ecosystems. Characterizing groundwater dynamics in coastal aquifers is fundamental for understanding both processes and their interaction. In order to gain insights into SWI and SGD, we developed a 100 m-scale experimental field site located in a coastal alluvial aquifer at the mouth of an ephemeral stream on the Maresme coastline (Barcelona, Spain). Given the complexity of coastal aquifers and the dynamism of the processes occurring therein, understanding of the coupled processes can be achieved by combining methods and approaches across different hydrogeological disciplines. In this study, we conduct a detailed aquifer characterization based on the four pillars of hydrogeology: geology (lithological description and core samples analyses), geophysics (downhole and cross-hole measurements), hydraulics (pumping and tidal response tests) and hydrochemistry (major and minor elements, together with stable and Ra isotopes). Each discipline contributed to the characterization of the aquifer: (1) geological characterization revealed that the aquifer consists of fluvial sediments, organized in fining upwards sequences with alternating layers of gravel, sand and silt; (2) geophysics helped in identifying silt layers and their continuity, which play a segmenting role in the aquifer hydrodynamics; (3) hydraulics tests, specifically tidal response tests, evidenced that tidal loading, rather than hydraulic connection to the sea, drives the tidal response; and (4) hydrochemistry revealed a surprising high reactivity, as most ions reflect some reaction, beyond the expected cation exchange. The summary is that the aquifer, which initially looked like a homogeneous unconfined aquifer 22 m thick, effectively behaves as a multi-aquifer and reactive system with freshwater discharging beneath saltwater at several depths. The fact that thin silt layers caused such a significant impact opens new paths beyond this study both for coastal aquifer management (the possibility of transient pumping for freshwater resources) and marine ecology (expect diffuse groundwater discharge).
The occurrence of veterinary antibiotics and hydro-chemical parameters in eleven natural springs in a livestock production area is evaluated, jointly with the characterization of their DOM ...fingerprint by Orbitrap HRMS. Tetracycline and sulfonamide antibiotics were ubiquitous in all sites, and they were detected at low ng L−1 concentrations, except for doxycycline, that was present at μg L−1 in one location. DOM analysis revealed that most molecular formulas were CHO compounds (49 %–68 %), with a remarkable percentage containing nitrogen and sulphur (16 %–23 % and 11 %–24 %, respectively). Major DOM components were phenolic and highly unsaturated compounds (~90 %), typical for soil-derived organic matter, while approximately 11 % were unsaturated aliphatic, suggesting that springs may be susceptible to anthropogenic contamination sources. Comparing the DOM fingerprint among sites, the spring showing the most different profile was the one with surface water interaction and characterized by having lower CHO and higher CHOS formulas and aliphatic compounds. Correlations between antibiotics and DOM showed that tetracyclines positively correlate with unsaturated oxygen-rich substances, while sulfonamides relate with aliphatic and unsaturated oxygen-poor compounds. This indicates that the fate of different antibiotics will be controlled by the type of DOM present in groundwater.
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•Tetracycline and sulfonamide antibiotics were detected in natural springs.•Major DOM components were those typical for soil-derived organic matter.•DOM profile indicative of their susceptibility to anthropogenic contamination.•Different antibiotic classes correlate with specific DOM components.•Antibiotics and DOM interaction influence their transport in the subsurface.
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