Culture in the Urban Social Transformation Strategies of the Cities: Barcelona, from the Model to the Show

Abstract

Research that emerged since 1990 on culture as an element of power opens the door to an understanding of its importance in the transformation that urban spaces currently experience. In a period of changing forms and modes of regulation, culture appears as an instrument of power that, through different definitions, facilitates and legitimizes that transition. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the city of Barcelona has been conceived from the construction of an urban policy based on two pillars: urban transformation and the production of images. The language of culture and the role of public spaces are converted into urban strategies that morphologically transform the city and create images capable of agglutinating citizenship: this urban policy becomes the very image of the city. In a second stage the requirements of private investment are much greater and more evident and a paradox arises whereby the "model Barcelona" of the Olympic stage is not fulfilled in the city that created it. There is also an apparent investment on a multicultural city that is no more than a functional image used to avoid conflict and to trivialize the difference.