It is interesting to note that from 2019, the year in which the last municipal elections were held in Barcelona, until 2023, the year in which the vote will be held again, specifically on May 28, to determine whether or not to change the municipal government, there have been been publishing a series of books that coincide in pointing out that Barcelona is a city. It may be obvious to identify Barcelona as a city, since no one doubts that it is; but it is not so, to the extent that for eight years, time in which Barcelona en Comú has been governing, there has been a drive to create a model that puts in crisis the constitutive elements of the Catalan capital established from the eighties of the last century until 2019. Aspects such as mobility, security, public space management, culture in neighborhoods, green spaces, housing, the fight against inequality, tourism, pollution or progress are re-signified from the government with the aim of establishing a change in the way of life of citizens.
The chosen essays allow us to observe to what extent Barcelona, the city, imposes itself on ideologies and the political situation. The selection of books, whose authors come from very different intellectual and political backgrounds, influences the debate on the present and the future of the city. Most of the chosen works allow us to verify, in the open debate to establish the dynamics of the future citizen, that the most natural desire of any Barcelonan is to know what happens in their neighborhood but, above all, what happens to their city.
The reissue of the essay La Catalunya ciudad / La Catalunya ciutat (Galaxia Gutenberg) by the philosopher Eugenio Trías allows us to recover the sense of the city open to its contradictions, “in the sense of the chaotic and agreed city, complex and moral, disorderly and rational, Maragalliana, full of life and strength, confident in her own overflows”. The recovery in 2020 of this work means coming into contact with the Barcelona founded under the logic of the "urban, civil individual and member of a metropolitan city". Reading Eugenio Trías' observations takes us back to a Barcelona that we must recover; a Barcelona identified with the impulse of civil society. Trías describes a vision of Joan Maragall: “In Maragall, the city is a complex and contradictory elevation of the spontaneous popular base, a conscious and civilized sublimation of the unconscious physical substratum of the people (of a physis animated by the soul of the world)…”.
From another intellectual conception, the essay by Andreu Ulied, Barcelona pròxima. Construir, inhabit, pensar les ciutats (Barcelona City Council) develops the idea that “the whole of Catalonia has been Barcelonaized throughout the twentieth century, it has already become the city of Catalonia”. This essay is the result of an exhaustive analysis of the city as an unfinished reality, with its own dynamic tensions between digitization and ruralization, of the urbanism of networks, of the ideal of the big city. Andreu Ulied takes us to the formulation of the retro-progressive vision. He states: “Advanced urbanism should be original, retrospective. Between the melancholy of lost traditions and the delirium of inventing new utopias, we should situate ourselves in the lucidity of Pániker's retro-progressivism”. Ulied's vision emphasizes the need to address the present and the future as spaces in constant dialectic to continue generating the city.
The debate on the future of Barcelona, of cities in general, is perfectly framed by the contribution of urban planner José Antonio Acebillo, who was an architect and urban planner and who between 1981 and 1987 was director of the Barcelona City Council Urban Projects Service. In his essay/study Disruptive Urbanism. Glocal Urbanity, (Actar), Acebillo sets the foundations of the new city. Although his essay does not focus on Barcelona, the scope of his reflections raises some of the key questions that the city will need to answer. One of the key elements of his proposal is to assume the leap from a tertiary economy, that is, referring to services, to the neotertiary one, which refers to "an expansion of the classic tertiary sector that appears with globalization, due to the programs and productive systems caused by new technologies”. It proposes to civil society to recover the vitality of cities and trust in urban science: "Tactical urbanism, although it lavishes its praises on knowledge, in reality it mistrusts territorial academic disciplines and conceptually rigorous urban theses...". His essay / study shows, based on 52 propositions, how to achieve a new urban model, which he calls disruptive urbanism, capable of generating new city dynamics linked to technological development and urban social capital.
At the end of 2018, the journalist and writer Miquel Molina published the essay Alerta Barcelona. Farewell to the self-indulgent city (Libros de Vanguardia). The purpose of the book, according to the author, “is about disconnections. Or from connections that were later shorted. Or, above all, how to reconnect what is no longer united. If we deem it necessary." His proposal is to reconnect the city, highlighting culture as one of the main axes to shape and develop the city; reconnect by re-understanding the awakening and drive of society as determining factors for the progress of the city. He proposes to activate "its people, associations, its companies and its town hall" to achieve more autonomy and capacity for action. The essay shows, and this is its great contribution, that the solution to the problems of citizens, including those derived from the conflict raised by the independence movement against the State, is to make Barcelona more. Three years later, Molina published Proyecto Barcelona. Ideas to prevent the decline of Barcelona (Libros de Vanguardia). If in the previous work he proposed a diagnosis of the city, Proyecto Barcelona manages to define an action plan that is both ambitious and possible. Miquel Molina proposes activating the Montjuïc mountain, committing to innovation, recovering Ciutadella, defining the city's metropolitan scope and becoming aware of its role as the Mediterranean, European and Hispanic capital, prepared to take on major contemporary cultural events. Molina's two essays establish the need to act, after a process of analysis and criticism, to improve and change things in Barcelona and leave behind past times that will no longer return.
The writer Xavier Bru de Sala, in his essay Barcelonismes: els Barcelonismes potentien Catalunya (Tibidabo Edicions), establishes a series of inquiries about the reality and psychology of the city that define its spirit. In his book, Bru de Sala warns that the best invention of the Catalans has been Barcelona; Without its potential, the political, cultural, economic and social project of Catalonia would be weakened. Barcelona is the response to individual and collective tensions and challenges in Catalonia. He invites us to investigate the foundations of a modern city built under two connected cultural traditions, such as modernism and noucentisme, which reflect its creative and organizational vitality. The city that Bru de Sala describes in 2019 is also the one that should promote the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, the key role of universities and the commitment to culture and education, which should draw up an effective action plan for the mountain of Montjuïc and, in particular, strengthen the role of the MNAC.
Three years later, La ciutat insatisfeta has just been published. All that Barcelona could become (Ara Llibres) by Miquel Puig. His proposal / his city essay reflects an exciting overview of the capacity of Barcelona, understood as an economic, social and cultural engine. His essay warns about the urgent need to recover the city of consensus, agreements and complicity. Miquel Puig, former councilor of the Barcelona city council for Esquerra Republicana, tells us: "It is around the project of a dynamic city that avoids parochialism that the economic, cultural and social forces that are expressed in the city can unite again, because only big goals are capable of achieving this miracle. These forces will not agree on what the final destination of the project should be, but, as it progresses, the rapprochement will be inevitable”. It also raises the need to discuss tourism, not to prevent its development, but to lay the foundations to promote higher quality tourism, as well as the need to manage to turn the expansion of the Hospital Clínic into a great opportunity for the city. According to Puig, the expansion of the Clínic should be used to "design a new 22@ specialized in biomedicine in the broadest sense, with space for startups, accelerators and consolidated companies and where the UB and the UPC can set up technology transfer centers" . The title The Unsatisfied City designates a city that lives with tension, that does not take advantage of the opportunities that open up to it as a result of technological and economic changes and that, at the same time, is a city that does not settle for what it has and wants. further.
Most of the authors cited here understand the city as a reality not only subject to the vagaries of ideology but also to the desire for change and improvement in Barcelona. The general approach underlying all of them is that the city is a complex, contradictory and dynamic organism. The city needs to recover the great consensus to activate new projects and close old wounds; it needs to strengthen areas such as Montjuïc, Ciutadella, 22@… so as not to miss out on its potential; it needs a metropolitan reading of its field of action; and above all, it must close the debates in relation to infrastructures (expansion of the airport, suburban trains, the port of Barcelona and access to the city), the mobility model and climate change, in order to face the challenges facing the city and its citizens. The transversal aspect in all of them is to understand culture and innovation as the main factors in generating and consolidating the new Barcelona.
The question we must ask ourselves is why culture and innovation, cultural facilities and companies, festivals, technology competitions and major city events are elements that achieve a broad consensus. It is worth asking why culture is key to the stability and progress of the city. The answer is found in a series of books that establish the close link between citizens, artists and the city. At the end of 2018, the journalist and writer Màrius Carol offered his vision of the way of living and feeling of the citizens in his city in the book entitled Els barcelonins (i les barcelonines) (Elba). Once again, we realize the complexity of the view of the people of Barcelona on their city and the way of inhabiting it. Their culture and character express their ability to reconcile, with tension, cosmopolitanism and the need not to lose sight of their own place. Màrius Carol establishes a Barcelonan being connected to the culture of his city but experiencing moments of crisis and uncertainty.
Sergio Vila-Sanjuán, in his essay Barcelona, the city of books (Libros de Vanguardia), highlights the close ties of the citizens of Barcelona with the publishing world, its writers and the Sant Jordi Day, understood as a synthesis and declaration of the cultural and civic city. It is the literary city that assumes the role of capital of the Spanish edition and that forges the boom of Latin American writers. It is a metropolis open to Europe and the Mediterranean. It is a city made of stones but, above all, of ideas, from the Romans to today. Jaume Grau, in his book La historia de Barcelona en 10 passejades (Rosa dels Vents) describes a journey through the history of the city. His walk along the Rambla shows the character of the city and its people as a meeting place and ties.
In March 2019, the writer Jordi Corominas, in his narrative Paràgrafs de Barcelona (Aticus of Books), offers his personal vision of the lived city, where culture, conflict and contractions intermingle to give it a vital character. Corominas observes that “the three chimneys of Sant Adrià are liked because they are far away. At most we contemplate them from the road or from any viewpoint and over time we have grown fond of them. They do not threaten and they are like those lifelong friends with whom you talk without ever meeting. The Atles MUHBA d'història de Barcelona (MUHBA ) has just been published by Borja de Riquer, historian, Jaume Muñoz, director of Memòria, Història i Patrimoni and Joan Roca, director of the MUHBA, in the second part of which he addresses strategic and nuclear issues of the Barcelona of the 20th century. Culture, especially literature, is activating and aware of the sensitive dimension of the city. All of them are works that have an impact on pointing out the importance of culture as the engine of the city.
During these little more than four years that go from the end of 2018 to today, Barcelona has become a reason for reflection. Never before has the city lived pending how to respond to the great challenges and problems to be faced. Barcelona matters and the authors cited are a sign of the need to reaffirm the commitment to view the city with a critical and purposeful gaze. The number of projects, initiatives and city proposals referenced in this article indicate the need to identify Barcelona with the concept of city typical of all the great metropolises of the world, that is, a city capable of being built, with its contradictions and uncertainties. , boosting its potential, not to end it, but so that it evolves hand in hand with the citizens.
We are at a time where reading about the present and the future of Barcelona is looking at oneself in a mirror in which one seeks to find oneself and is not always successful. Perhaps for this reason, both politicians and platforms, entities, journalists and writers are concentrating their efforts on defining the city as reality and not as a project in constant dispute. Perhaps for this reason, there is so much interest, not in determining what model of city to promote, but in knowing what citizens demand for their city, what is their mandate for the coming years. /
