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The City as Showcase for Ideology

Text Miquel Porta Perales Critic and columnist

© Eva Vázquez

The Forum 2004 was the penultimate expression of the city as the externalisation of well-intentioned pacifist, ecological, multicultural niceness, a discourse that today is all around us.

The city, one of humanity’s greatest creations, has always been an object of desire for ideology. Every city preserves or displays the imprint of the ideologies that have, quite literally, left their mark on them. In this sense, it might be argued that ideology, understood here as a particular conception of the world or a set of more or less coherent ideas, representations and attitudes, confers identity on the city. The city, in a process of dialectical impregnation, might be said to come to life in ideology and that ideology comes to life in the city - an experience that can be perceived, for example, in architecture, one of the fundamental elements of any city. Were we to travel, via one of those wormholes postulated by post-Einstein relativist physics, back to classical Egypt and Greece, we would find that each of these places was the bearer of a particular ideology (a way of understanding the world, ideas, representations and attitudes, as we said), as made manifest in the pyramid and the temple: the pyramid, the expression of the grandiosity and immortality of all-embracing Egyptian power; the temple, the representation of the balance and proportion of Greek civilisation. We might do a similar exercise with St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the skyscrapers of New York or the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing where the Olympic Games were held in 2008. St. Peter’s would represent heavenly power, the Eiffel Tower, industrialisation, the skyscrapers, the rise of the United States, and the Bird’s Nest, the emergence of a new world power which marries ancient tradition with advanced modernity.

       At this point, bearing in mind that the first lines of this article examine the city from the perspective of a single reference, the question arises of how to approach the city, how to look at it. Following the contemporary classics, we might address the matter in the style of philosophers, historians, geographers, economists, sociologists, or writers. Thus, we might conceive of the city as the space of conversation and political pacts (José Ortega y Gasset), as the place where the ‘soul’ of a civilisation is to be found (Oswald Spengler), as the necessary condition for the possibility of fulfilling human needs (Paul Vidal de la Blache), as the sphere of commerce and industry (Henri Pirenne), as the point or moment in history that allows us to recover from the dehumanising effects of technology by establishing integrating relations (Lewis Mumford), as the stage on which conflict leads to mutual understanding and mankind can finally come of age (Richard Sennett), or as the site where the struggle between tradition and progress can best be perceived (Benito Pérez Galdós). All of these visions are doubtless necessary and complementary, to a greater or lesser degree. And they all offer us, to a greater or lesser extent, the ‘truth’ of what the city is. However, I have decided here to concentrate on a different ‘truth’ about the city, one that is not normally given enough weight. My hypothesis is that the city, as was suggested in the first paragraph, is the showcase where ideology is displayed. Let’s talk, for example, about the Barcelona of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

       Noucentisme, progress, reformism, cosmopolitanism and Catalanism, all seasoned with the enlightenment of the age that was rooted in Vienna and Berlin, manifested itself in Barcelona through education, modernisation, intellectual elitism, urban planning and the standardisation of the Catalan language. And it expressed itself in a style of architecture (Josep Goday, Rafael Masó, Josep Puig i Cadafalch or Josep Maria Pericas) that aimed to reflect a new social and national order, to assist in the construction and modernisation of the country. Hence, schools, museums and libraries all cut from the same pattern, the opening of the Via Laietana in the style of Haussmann’s Paris, electrification, the sewers, the underground transport system, the offices, the division of the territory into comarcas, the setting up of monuments and the recovery of the cultural heritage. Not forgetting an Art Deco that embraced industrialisation, a style with clean-cut lines and brilliant colours which offered a whole new concept of space, light and comfort. All in all, the metaphor of a Noucentisme that found its showcase in the city. An Art Deco, and this was of great importance around the time of the second Catalan Industrial Revolution, just when the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie was becoming consolidated, which was capable of being reproduced and of reaching out, both commercially and ideologically, to the working classes.

       The First World War, the crisis of the Regionalist League, social conflicts and the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (who also demonstrated his particular taste for monumentalist architecture: the city remained the showcase of ideology) led, to all intents and purposes, to the death of Noucentisme. Then came the Republic and the Republican Generalitat. Barcelona became the showcase of the European avant-garde thanks to the GATCPAC (Group of Catalan Artists and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture). Constructive rationalism and composite functionalism (Sert, Torres Clavé, Subirana, Rodríguez Arias or Illescas), as well as the utopian vision of the time in the style of Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse, can be seen in the Regulatory Plan, the Central Anti-Tuberculosis Dispensary or the Casa Bloc in Sant Andreu. And not only that, for Barcelona was also the showcase for the revolutionary ideas of the time. In this sense, a quote on the Casa Bloc from the magazine Nova Ibèria is significant (tellingly, the magazine was published by the Commissariat de Propaganda of the Generalitat de Catalunya, in February 1937): "We want to believe that in this new society, the current trend towards municipal ownership of housing, dispossessing private owners of their rights over property and land, will prove to be the way of overcoming all those prejudices that in the past prevented the achievement of the only rational solution to the problem, and we technicians, who were not afraid to reach logical conclusions, knew, from studies done on this matter, that no other way was possible". In short, architecture, housing policy and ideology went hand in hand in Barcelona.

       Following the Franco dictatorship, when monumentalism once more reared its head, and after the “R” group (Bohigas, Coderch, Martorell, Moragas, and Sostres, amongst others), who were scathing of conformity and sought to reclaim the legacy of GATCPAC, the Universal Forum of Cultures Barcelona 2004 was to become the penultimate expression of the city as a showcase for ideology. The Forum was the external representation of naïvely well-intentioned pacifist, ecological, multicultural bonisme (niceness), that flaccid yet self-gratifying system of thought that defends causes which have already been won, a discourse that is all around us nowadays. The Forum turned Barcelona into the ‘City of Goodness’. It should be added that, on the back of the Forum, Barcelona recovered a significant portion of its waterfront, built a multipurpose convention centre and a park, built new hotels, dignified Poblenou, and turned the banks of the River Besòs into a garden; and all this (progressive ideology!) in a space that remains largely publicly owned. The city has always been the object of desire of ideology, as we said at the beginning. Jordi Hereu’s pragmatism (adieu to the bonista slogan “Barcelona, the best city in the world”), which threatened to bring about a divorce between the city’s residents and the Council, might yet mark the beginning of a new era. We shall see.

Spring (April - June 2010)