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Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City

Online ISBN:
9781846317873
Print ISBN:
9781846318320
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press
Book

Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City

Published online:
20 June 2013
Published in print:
10 October 2012
Online ISBN:
9781846317873
Print ISBN:
9781846318320
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press

Abstract

This book 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 globalisation. The transformation of Barcelona, in turn, contributed to define the ideologies of globalisation, 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.

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