Barcelona’s  Universal Forum of Cultures is covering a series of urban projects in the northeastern part of the city with an impressive image strategy. Actually, the forum is more a cultural manifestation than a pure physical urban project. The manifestation is concentrated in a small urban area (the Forum area) but its radiation is used to stimulate a series of urban projects in the northeast. The cultural embedding of urban planning builds forward on the tradition of organizing large-scale cultural events of international allure in order to mobilize social and economic energy for a structural transformation of the urban fabric. In its urban history, Barcelona used world exhibitions, global sport events, and mass cultural activities as vehicles for urban regeneration.
The last great manifestation - the organization of the Olympic Games in 1992 – gave the sea back to the city, and the present operation attempts to complete this structural reform at even larger scale. In 2004, in cooperation with UNESCO, a self-created, universal forum of cultures has been invented in order to mobilize societal energy for the regeneration of degraded parts of the city and to develop high standard physical urban qualities. The cultural event as such focused at such themes as cultural diversity, sustainable development, and conditions for world peace. During a period of four months hundreds of international mass events have been organized, ranging from carnival parades to exhibitions, dialogues of international students and world leaders, music festivals and other expressions of mass communication and entertainment. Millions of visitors and tourists have attended these manifestations. All cultural energy was mobilized in order to create social consensus and momentum for a more structural economic and spatial transformation. In contrast to American business style of urban regeneration, Barcelona is promoting (and even exporting) a citizen-oriented style of strategic urban planning. It is doing this in a non-conventional and interdisciplinary way, associating geopolitics, cultural policies, spatial planning and social and economic regeneration in loose integrative planning concepts.
Next to this mobilizing style of civic strategic planning, a business like type of operational management is used in the stage of implementation (delimitation of operational tasks by separating the cultural events and the physical operations; agencies operate relatively independent; business style of building permissions; agencies responsible for budgets). Several urban projects are injected with this cultural impetus. The largest effort for the economic regeneration is the transformation of the decayed industrial area Poblenau into a new area of sophisticated, knowledge-intensive productivity (symbolized as @22). This 200 hectares area is extended along the sea to the north east of the city, close to the urban ring highway. The industrial history of the area was in textiles and metalworking. Since the decline of these industries in the 1970s it is used for distributive goals and freight transportation. The ambition is to create a dense, complex urban environment well connected to the metropolitan system. Plans aim at the creation of a new productive center of knowledge intensive industries, such as new technologies, design, editorial production, and cultural and audio-visual industries combined with residential and retail/entertainment uses. The regeneration started with an infrastructure project in order to connect the area to the metropolitan system.
The economic regeneration itself is still in its embryonic stage. The plans only indicate the maximal possible rates of growth (a huge ceiling of 2,6 million floor space for offices, good for at most 130.000 jobs and a residential ceiling of 400.000 m2), but maximum ceilings do not tell what really will happen. In particular, the above-mentioned economic figures regarding office building and new employment (the only available official figures) are not to be considered as realistic estimates. Barcelona’s economy used to be strongly industrialized, the necessary transformation into economic service sectors in last two decades still leans strongly on tourism and other urban economies. The regional economy is not yet strongly connected to the international economic networks of the global economy of knowledge. So, the huge ambitions easily might be overestimated. In the current stage, not many offices have been realized. Permits have been provided for about 50% of the area but it is too early to review the economic proceedings of the project.
Besides the Poblenau project two of the most decayed residential areas (La Catalana and La Mina) are to be regenerated. The European Urban Program sponsors the plans for these areas. The city planners aim at upgrading the quality of life (new constructions, large public spaces and mixed activities). Next, at Segrera Station a huge urban intensification is planned if the (again Europe sponsored) fast speed train is getting there its halting-place. Finally, the urban project at the Forum area itself is representing a huge transformation of neglected urban space into a new international center of culture and communication. This 214 hectares area is fortunately situated at the end of the famous Diagonal (the largest artery of the city crosscutting the whole urban grid) and provides the connection to the sea. Barcelona’s seaside has turned into the gold coast of the city since the Olympic games enabled a renewed interconnectivity between city and sea. The Forum area is completing this spatial operation by removing the last barriers and shaping new urban qualities. In the Forum area, a new convention center (15.000 seats) and two auditoriums (3.200 seats) are realized around a huge public space (above a sanitation plant, which sustainable recycling has been awarded by European policy for inventive sustainability policy!), and many additional facilities are provided for recreation and entertainment of inhabitants and visitors at and near to the Esplanade (beaches and dunes, a yacht harbor, a new zoo, a health complex, hotels, retailing, etc.).
The innovative framing of the universal forum of cultures offers many inspiring clues for planning multiple purposed mega projects in other cities as well. Still, in one important respect Barcelona is lacking interconnectivity. All plans for cultural and physical regeneration are initiated by the public sector. The public sector, in particular the municipality of Barcelona, is actively involving private actors by inventive methods and business type implementation of the plans, but - vice versa - Barcelona’s economy is not strongly positioned in the international economic networks and the shifting hierarchies of the international knowledge economies since the early 1990s. The project of urban transformation is not pushed forward by the private sector and the intriguing question is whether the inventive public methods eventually will seduce international and national capital to invest in Barcelona’s aimed economy of knowledge. Regarding the connectivity to the second domain of action: the supra regional public policies into urban regeneration, Barcelona belongs to the top category of metropolitan strategies. Although the connections with the (semi-federal) Catalonian and the national government are rather complicated, Barcelona manages to take a front position in interregional policy making, European policy strategies and even global geopolitical strategies (e.g. the UNESCO and Latin America connections). Barcelona’s urban strategies start with reflecting on its potential position in global networks.
Regarding the inner metropolitan interrelationships, the troublesome relations between the bottom-up centripetal initiatives by the core city and the top-down tendencies into more polycentrism by the Catalonian government are troublesome, but in the present case these troubles are overcome in organizing cultural events of international allure. With respect to the framing of multiple purposed strategies of urban projects, the case of Barcelona is exemplary in organizing the economic upheaval as a public goal that is embedded in interdisciplinary thought and action (cultural, civic, social and environmental planning). Finally, regarding the methodology of democratic innovation Barcelona managed to provoke public attention and to generate a variation of ideas of urbanization in global perspective in the beginning of the process of decision-making. However, after selecting the policy alternatives new controversies have been started. The Catalans manage to project themselves to the world as an innovative nation in direct response to the challenges of globalization, but the organization risks to loose popular support and citizen involvement at a very local scale. In Barcelona s case, the planning authority seems to have failed in proving and explaining to all social agents how a new global event will bring prosperity to the most disabled communities instead of pushing them to the outskirts of the metropolitan agglomeration. |
