Looking to France from Barcelona: Correspondence and Travel Writing in La Vanguardia (1890-1900). (original) (raw)
Related papers
2012
Since the 19th century Barcelona has conceived itself both as a cosmopolitan and modern city, and as the capital to the historic nation of Catalonia. With the arrival of democracy, and after “a forty-year state of emergency” imposed by Francoism (Montalbán 1992), the rejection of the dictatorial past stimulated a search for new urban models that would adequately express Barcelona’s regained status as the primary city of the Catalan nation. To distinguish the city from all other Catalan and Spanish metropolis, an emphasis was placed by city planners on its “Europeanness” (Mcdonogh 1999) and on its becoming a city of avant garde culture and technology (Balibrea 2003). It is within this conjuncture (between the global and the local) that Barcelona reinvented itself as a polis of spectacle and business, and transformed itself from being a decadent post-industrial city into an internationally acclaimed model of urbanity. However, this ideal of urbanity had an important shadow: the everyday experience of the city's immigrants. This is one of the sub-themes of the documentary "En Construcción" (José Luís Guerin, 2000), a film that encapsules the transformation of Barcelona's El Raval neighbourhood into a commodity. Guerin's film creatively illustrates the the conscious and unconscious resistance of El Raval's inhabitants (traditionally of labor and mostly non Catalan origin) to the official ideal of the postmodern sustainable city, of the Catalan nation, and of what it is to be avant-garde.
Introduction: Still Paying Homage to Barcelona
2017
Is there anything new remaining to be said about Barcelona? The city’s international prestige is nowadays indisputable. There is no arguing its status as a tourist destination. In more specialized circles, Barcelona’s transformation in the post-Francoist period is widely considered as a model and has been studied in academic circles and its policies emulated across the world. This book contributes to such a crowded scene by using Barcelona as a privileged case study to understand the relation of urban dwellers to power as mediated by culture. Analyzing local government documents dating back two decades, particularly those concerning culture, show how institutional and official political discourses attempted to influence the local population’s ideas of itself and of its contribution to the good functioning and prosperity of life in the city.
8 Barcelona on the International Map of Modernity
Cultural Organizations, Networks and Mediators in Contemporary Ibero-America, 2020
The ‘Conferentia Club’ was a cultural institution in the city of Barcelona that promoted international exchange in the interwar period organizing conferences about a broad range of topics and fields of study. The speakers were the most prominent exponents of the intellectual modernity. This chapter aims to provide an overview of these conferences based on information found in the press of the time with a special focus on some aspects. First, the relationships between conferences’ format and its public; second, how the social composition of audience members played a significant role in the high percentage of international speakers; third, how the collaboration with other mediating cultural entities increased the impact of their activities.
BARCELONA: THE BUILDING OF A TERRITORIAL AND IDEOLOGICAL CAPITAL
Barcelona the building of a Medieval Capital (fragment)
The teloneum testified to the trade in Barcelona in the ninth century. The city benefited from the transformation of the nearby frontier in the tenth century and the development of an investor group at the end of the eleventh century and beginning of the twelfth century. This elite assumed the city's representativeness and invested around Barcelona, creating a region of influence. During the thirteenth century, tensions rose within the leading group regarding access to ruling posts, and strategies were developed for the control of the region. This was divided into three spaces: limits (terme), territory, and vicary (vegueria) of Barcelona. In the fourteenth century, the city, then the economic powerhouse of the Crown of Aragon, initiated new strategies for a broader geographical projection, claimed access to the king's government, and promoted actions and political discourse of pre-eminence over Catalonia and the Crown of Aragon, according to the usual participative political thought in Late Medieval Europe. The status as capital exercised by a city over its hinterland is a consequence of an economic and social evolution, but also of a political will within the city itself, backed by the corresponding ideological discourses. The consolidation of Barcelona as a capital in the Late Middle Ages was a true paradigm of the inextricable mix of territory and ideology underlying the construction of a capital. THE STARTING POINT: THE BIRTH OF THE URBAN ELITE The nineteenth-century view made it easy to imagine a clear antagonistic duality between the feudal world and urban development. 1 In fact, these were two different social states because they were also different economic situations. This is what Henri Pirenne explained in the early twentieth century, understanding that in feudal times, "le travail de la terra servait à assurer l'existence des familles; on ne cherchait pas à lui faire produire un surplus dont on n'eût su que faire." 2 In contrast, by the end of the same century, the market had found a place among explanations of the feudal rural world. 3 In this sense, Yves Barel stated that, "por todas partes, más o menos, surge la ciudad como el resultado de un doble impulso: el del feudalismo y el del comercio." 4 Explanations of medieval urban development in Europe are nowadays based on "la société en movement," to use Jean Schneider's expression, with links between economic growth, the development of trade, the mobility of the population, and a property market, including the breaking of new ground and the division of urban and suburban soil, from