Current events

[Joan Antoni Guerrero's chronicle]
 

“Barcelona –explained the urban planner- pioneered all of the neoliberal language that the other cities took as a model; it was with the Olympic Games that the city found a reference for growth that was later multiplied with the Forum of Cultures in 2004”. For this reason he considers that, as an object of study, the situation of Barcelona after the economic crisis will be interesting to analyze to see how it resituates itself.

In this context, says Robles-Durán, social movements such as 15-M, in Spain, or Occupy Wall Street, in the United States, could be crucial for achieving a reform of cities in the sense of making them more open to citizen participation. The planner, who lives in New York and who has actively taken part in the Occupy Wall Street movement, notes that the mobilizations have generated “a much more collective awareness of the fact that by working together we can intervene in urban production” and, to this effect, he mentions cases of organized resistance to prevent evictions. “In many areas in New York thousands of evictions have been stopped and in a myriad of ways”, he explained.

The expert, who denounces classical urban planning and advocates a new model of urban practice that takes greater account of people as opposed to political or corporate interests, believes that the development of cities cannot be left to developers or planners. “It is the people, with a desire for development, who must decide what is to be done in the city, and this is what we have forgotten”. In the opinion of to Robles-Durán there is much talk “about the capacity of citizens to make decisions about their environment”, but this has been lost “completely” because, according to him, “citizens today expect the city to think for them, that it is the developer who supplies the models and lifestyles, forgetting that it is we who construct our environment”.

Thus, the Mexican urban planner believes it is necessary “to return to a model of urban development that does not emphasize the material because we already have this –there are many empty building and lots of space”. So the challenge would now be to know how to rebuild social relations in cities; “this would be the biggest project, immaterial and one of reorganization”, he stressed.

The director of the research program Urban Transformation in the Knowledge Society (TUSC), Ramon Ribera-Fumaz, alsoreferred tothe urban model of Barcelona. He emphasized that it has been “paradigmatic in many aspects” and that its “progressivism, as stated by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán” resided in “opening the beach to its citizens”.

The model of growth of the Catalan capital evolved after the success of the Olympics "from neoliberal strategies" and gradually, “the positive aspects of the model have disappeared and it has moved towards a divided model, in which construction interests have prevailed over public space and citizens’ rights”, regrets Ribera-Fumaz.

Similarly, he adds that “more than a model, what has occurred in Barcelona is a process during which the idea of public facilities for citizens has gradually disappeared” until arriving at the situation of the Forum of Cultures 2004 and the construction of 22@. At this point, argues Ribera-Fumaz, “the modernist grid of Ildefons Cerdà is broken” and at the same time urban development “breaks with the surroundings of the working class”.