Transforming Barcelona: The Renewal of a European Metropolis
2006; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 77; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1478-341X
Autores Tópico(s)Urbanization and City Planning
ResumoTransforming Barcelona: The Renewal of a European Metropolis, Tim Marshall (ed.), London and New York, Routledge, 2004, 288 pp., £80.00 (hb), £28.99 (pb) This important book is a professional insider's view of the urban changes wrought in Barcelona since 1980. As serious city observers and urban professionals know, Barcelona is one of the world's most beautiful and livable cities, and has been enhanced recently as the result of planning and design. Barcelona is a city whose modem development and regeneration have been plan-led and design-implemented. The plans that guide current development are not limited to those adopted in the democratic period that began with the dictator Franco's death in 1975, but include those implemented since the beginning of the industrial era. The first important reform was planned by the Catalan civil engineer Ildefons Cerda, the father of the modem city planning profession. His plan for the expansion of the city outside of the old walls that were tom down in 1854, approved by royal decree in 1860, set much more than the urban pattern - Barcelona's unique chamfered street grid. It set the tone and context for a series of high-quality transformations - the Universal Exposition of 1888, the International Exposition of 1929, the Olympic Games of 1992, and the Forum of Cultures in 2004. The last project, Forum 2004, was the final stroke that filled in the last remaining vacant district of the city that Cerda projected a century and a half ago. Curiously, Cerda's influence on the growth and development of the city of Barcelona itself, its urban planning, and the city planning profession at large are treated cursorily in a few lines in Chapters 1 and 3. As a result, this volume's stories of the transformations are told in a decontextualised and impoverished manner. The book's thirteen chapters are divided into three parts. The first nine chapters describe urban planning and development in the two decades before 2002. The next two chapters compile planning projects currently underway, and the final two provide outside critiques of the entire planning and transformation enterprise. Ten of the thirteen chapters were previously published in scholarly journals and print magazines between 1996 and 2002. The book's great virtue - that it was written largely by insiders - is also its primary weakness. Despite the last two chapters, which are meant to provide a critical perspective, it reads as a propaganda document, albeit a highly descriptive and technical one. Marshall's introduction provides a breezy sketch ('planning control of various kinds has been the norm throughout the region', p. 10) of historic, geographic, social and political factors that conditioned urban planning. Its strength is ascribing the high quality of urban planning to its twin sources in the architecture and engineering professions, and in technically trained and enlightened political leadership. That this design-based planning was put primarily to the service of improving public spaces is the Barcelona model's primary legacy. Oriol Nello's chapter on metropolitan governance is a privileged insider's view, as he was director of the Metropolitan Studies Institute at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and is now Secretary for Territorial Planning within the regional government, the Generalitat de Catalunya. Secretary Nello's chapter describes the metropolitan situation, backed by factual data from the magisterial Metropolitan Atlas he edited in the mid-nineties. His portrait convincingly makes the case for metropolitan-scale impacts of development that need metropolitan governance to solve them. Chapters 3 and 4, by Nico Calavita and Amador Ferrer, and Pasqual Maragall, respectively, make a pairing that goes a good distance towards explaining the source of much of the social and political dynamics from the 1970s to the 1990s which formed the backdrop and the arenas of action in which planning took place. …
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