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.
A coalition of leftist political groups, civic movements, and grassroots organizations led by social activist Ada Colau won the Barcelona municipal elections of 2015 and is now governing the Catalan ...capital. The key to this success may well have been its critical positioning in relation to its tourism. Until recently considered a best practice in urban regeneration and a successful global destination, Barcelona has seen in the last 2 years a radical change in the public perception on tourism: from “manna from heaven” to serious issues that are affecting the quality of life of its citizens.This article looks into the factors that may have determined this political change, from the growth of tourism beyond what could be considered a critical threshold for an urban system, to the development of a critical discourse on tourism by the new coalition—attributed to its peculiar constituency and working methods—and the role of the media in airing this discursive shift. The article follows the thread of the “growth machine” theorizations and questions whether the increasing dimension of tourism in urban societies could be a driver for regime changes.
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.
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.
By linking the experiences of immigrant families with the increased reliance on cheap and flexible workers for care and domestic work in Southern Europe, this study documents the lived experiences of ...neglected actors of globalization - migrant women - as well as the transformations of Western families more generally. However, while describing in detail the structural and cultural contexts within which these women have to operate, the book questions dominant paradigms about women as passive victims of patriarchal structures and brings out instead their agency and the creative ways in which they take control of their lives in often difficult circumstances. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, the author offers a valuable dual comparison between two Southern European countries on the one hand and between two migrant groups, one Christian and one Muslim, on the other, thus bringing to light unique detailed data on migration decision-making, settlement and on the multiple ways in which different women cope with the consequences of their transnational lives.
•Conducted ecological momentary assessment with residents of four European cities.•Positive mood improved within 10 min of natural environment exposure.•Findings varied by city, gender, age and ...residential green space exposure.•Negative mood declined within 10 min of natural environment exposure.•Weaker associations were found within 30 min of natural environment exposure.
Exposure to natural outdoor environments (NOE) has been shown in population-level studies to reduce anxiety and psychological distress. This study investigated how exposure to one’s everyday natural outdoor environments over one week influenced mood among residents of four European cities including Barcelona (Spain), Stoke-on-Trent (United Kingdom), Doetinchem (The Netherlands) and Kaunas (Lithuania). Participants (n = 368) wore a smartphone equipped with software applications to track location and mood (using mobile ecological momentary assessment (EMA) software), for seven consecutive days. We estimated random-effects ordered logistic regression models to examine the association between mood (positive and negative affect), and exposure to green space, represented by two binary variables indicating exposure versus no exposure to NOE using GPS tracking and satellite and aerial imagery, 10 and 30 min prior to participants’ completing the EMA. Models were adjusted for home city, day of the week, hour of the day, EMA survey type, residential NOE exposure, and sex, age, education level, mental health status and neighbourhood socioeconomic status. In addition, we tested for heterogeneity of effect by city, sex, age, residential NOE exposure and mental health status. Within 10 min of NOE exposure, compared to non-exposure, we found that overall there was a positive relationship with positive affect (OR: 1.39, 95% CI: 1.06, 1.81) of EMA surveys, and non-significant negative association with negative affect (OR: 0.80, 95% CI: 0.58, 1.10). When stratifying, associations were consistently found for Stoke-on-Trent inhabitants and men, while findings by age group were inconsistent. Weaker and less consistent associations were found for exposure 30 min prior to EMA. Our findings support increasing evidence of psychological and mental health benefits of exposure to natural outdoor environments, especially among urban populations such as those included in our study.
Xavier Pons Casacuberta ens ofereix una primera síntesi sobre la minoria religiosa jueva i la recent societat conversa barceloneses entre els anys 1391, any de la quasi destrucció del call de ...Barcelona, i el 1440, data del darrer any en què, segons l’autor, apareix l’adjectiu conversus als documents, és a dir un total de cinquanta anys. Es tracta de la publicació quasi fil per randa de la seva tesi doctoral llegida a la Universitat de Barcelona (2015), amb la diferència fonamental de què els dos-cents vint-i-sis documents de l’«Apèndix I» de la tesi han estat reduïts en la publicació a només cinquanta-cinc per raons òbvies. Obtingué la XIV Beca Ramon Noguera per realitzar el present estudi.
El artículo analiza a través de una selección de películas cómo el cine ha retratado la Barcelona postolímpica. Se distinguen a grandes rasgos dos maneras básicas de representar cinematográficamente ...la capital catalana: la primera muestra una Barcelona idealizada, análoga a la que se vende a los turistas, contribuyendo así, de forma más o menos voluntaria, a reforzar y promocionar tanto el modelo Barcelona de transformación urbana como la marca Barcelona; la segunda ofrece una mirada más crítica sobre la ciudad, centrándose en algunos de los problemas que la afectan (especulación, gentrificación, desigualdades sociales, exclusión y explotación de los inmigrantes) y retratando la existencia de los que viven en el margen de la Barcelona turística. Partiendo de esta distinción, se analizan Todo sobre mi madre (1999) de Pedro Almodóvar, L’auberge espagnole (2002) de Cédric Klapisch y Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) de Woody Allen para ilustrar la primera modalidad de representación, y En construcción (2001) de José Luis Guerín y Biutiful (2010) de Alejandro González Iñárritu para ejemplificar la segunda.
Ressenya de Miquel González i Sugranyes, La República a Barcelona, 1873-1874,edició i estudi introductori de Jordi Roca Vernet i presentació de documentsi biografies de Ginés Puente, Barcelona, ...Ajuntament de Barcelona,2023, 429 p.
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