The Mediterranean city of Barcelona is home to 1.7 million, or 4.5 million including its metropolitan regions; of all Spanish cities only Madrid has more people or a greater economic significance. Barcelona’s Mediterranean climate and wide collective use of urban public spaces helps to attract millions of tourists.

Since the success of the 1992 Olympic Games, Barcelona has become a popular venue for European tourists that rivals Amsterdam and Venice. The Games put the city on the map of international investment and brought visitors from all over the world. Today Barcelona is a hub for a wide spread of visitors: foreign students, flexible workers, global immigrants, rich and poor, all of whom use the city’s public spaces.

These public spaces have been an essential element of the Barcelona model, defining the city’s pattern of urban planning that has been so well received internationally. But public spaces in Barcelona have dramatically diminished the city’s capacity to define the nature of local urbanism. Considered essential spaces that offered local communities opportunities for ambitious democratic urban practise in the early 1980s, they have evolved to become much simpler and more banal. Either they are conceived according to a more functional approach and understood as transitional spaces in-between specialised urban projects, or they are designed and managed to fit into the image of a brand: Mediterranean Barcelona. The result is the simplification of a formerly complex urban space to produce a simpler branded image which supports the city’s consumption as a commodity in a global market of urban postcards.

The Barcelona model and the production of public spaces

The pre-Olympic moment: democratic urbanism
New democratic ideals of local urban design emerged in Barcelona in the 1980s after forty years of the stultifying Franco dictatorship. The design of new public spaces proved a most effective way of freeing the new democratic ambitions of the local population, in an urban design concerned with the righting of social inequalities. The improvement of the urban environment at the peripheries as well as the emphasis put on the connection between urban neighbourhoods previously isolated from the city centre were clear priorities of local urban planning at that time.

Large scale public space projects at the peripheries

Public space projects in the 1980s had a significant impact on local neighbourhoods and presented clear symbolic content and meaning, as in the city’s two main public space projects developed during the democratic urbanism period: the urbanisation of Moll de la Fusta on the waterfront, and the Via Julia in a peripheral neighbourhood.

The Moll de la Fusta project introduced, for the first time, public space as an element that added value to urban design on the waterfront and extended city life as far as the seafront. The resulting urban border became a platform for social uses of the space. The Via Julia project linked two peripheral neighbourhoods by using public space and monuments in an area previously ignored by local urban planners. Both experiences showed how public space could determine the nature of urban design and inject democratic ideals into the city arena.

Metastasis on public space: the hard plazas

The other version of public space directly inspired by democratic urbanism in Barcelona during the 1980s involved the invention of new typologies. The best example is the hard plaza, a new kind of public space neither inspired by the traditional vernacular romantic images of the plaza nor by the inherited nineteenth-century tradition of the urban park, but instead by an innovative vision of what public space means in contemporary cities. The use of artificial materials, such as iron and steel, and the standardised design of elements like seats, small fountains or tubular structures gave birth to a new type of plaza where trees and gardens were replaced by geometric pavements decorated by hard elements. This hard type of plaza appeared all over Barcelona from the centre to the outskirts and created a sense of visual continuity based on the idea of the city as the arena of one single form of citizenship.

The Olympic moment: opportunity urbanism

The organisation of the Olympic Games in 1992 provided an opportunity for rethinking a long list of urban projects which had not been developed due to the lack of funding or the lack of social and political consensus. Public spaces were important in the definition of some of those projects. The design of public spaces was dramatically transformed from the coldness of standardised materials and decor that characterised the hard plazas to a much softer and warmer approach: vegetation, greenery, sand, gravel and wood were the new formal elements defining public spaces, which offered a Mediterranean urban ambience. This was a branded image more in line with the iconographic approach the Olympic Games helped to institutionalise in local urban design and architecture.

The public spaces in the Olympic Village as a metaphor for the branded image of Barcelona
The formal elements of the archetypical and romantic Mediterranean image of the city began to appear in the new public spaces of the city, specifically in the design of the Olympic Village, the residential area built for the visiting athletes and promoted as a new neighbourhood by the sea. The design of public spaces in the Olympic Village clearly shows how the branded image of the city was an exercise in cultural nostalgia and a commodified vision of the seafront and the beach. The nostalgic imitations of typical nineteenth century city parks with fountains were combined with an historicist architecture specifically conceived to create an organic link with an idealised urban past.
The commodified vision of the seafront was clearly described by the marketing slogans used at that time. Some, like the one referring to the new waterfront as Copacabarna, sought comparisons with an idealised urban environment somewhere between LA’s Venice Beach and the vintage iconography of Martini advertisements.

Post-Olympic moment: prefab image urbanism

The urbanism of pre-Olympic Barcelona was based on public spaces as elements of urban projects. After the Olympic Games in 1992, urban design in Barcelona adopted new priorities. It was no longer thought necessary to highlight democratic ideals now that the political transition from dictatorship belonged to the past. New urban projects looked to the promotion of economic activities and urban renovation rather than the encouragement of social life within communities. New urban infrastructure projects, technological investments and specialised enclaves and resorts for global tourism characterised the position of new public spaces in the cityscape, though they lacked the inclination to orientate urban design and planning towards local residents as happened during the 1980s.

The urban image of waterfront public spaces

The ubiquitous attachment of the Mediterranean label to local urban design and architecture became apparent along the waterfront renovation area. The nostalgic gaze came with a selection of local vernacular elements that presented a simplified urban concept. An urbanism based on a prefab image of various attributes of Mediterranean Barcelona emerged, clearly affecting the production and design of public spaces, which progressively began to be considered a branding resource, helping to reinforce the established image of a Mediterranean city enjoyed by tourists from around the world.

The branding of public space: el Fossar de las Moreres

A clear example of how the branding of the urban image affects the design of local public spaces is the renovation of the Fossar de las Moreras. This public space was designed as a sunken plaza, in discrete public homage to the Catalans killed when the Spanish army of Felipe V bombarded the neighbourhood in 1714. The steady extension of the tourist itinerary from the city centre to the waterfront turned the Fosar de les Moreres into a site frequently encountered by tourists. The local authority decided to renovate this public space accordingly, feeling it necessary to include an iconic element, a new curved red column crowned by a flame right in the middle of the plaza. This exercise in nostalgic romanticism, with a flame intended as a memorial to the murdered, provides the public space with an icon which will appear in every tourist’s photo.

The unexpected uses: permeability, complexity and conflict in the public space

Some public spaces in Barcelona have gone through this process and are now effective platforms for maintaining the tourist flow that keeps the city connected to the global leisure market. Some other local public spaces still host various forms of social life which better represent citizenship. An urban future based on diversity and social cohesion can be achieved by reinforcing this urban function, sustained by the network of public spaces.

Public spaces in Barcelona face two main challenges

Firstly, there is the multiplication of uses and users, a direct consequence of the presence of new floating populations of international tourists and students as well as poor immigrants from developing countries. Both groups have their own perception of the ideal spatial and temporal use of public space. Secondly, there has been an increase in unexpected uses of public spaces as a result of the greater diversity of users and intensity of uses.

The risks of conflict arising from a multiplicity of activities taking place in the same public spaces could tempt urban authorities to use security-based urban design and the standardised security protocols which are a common trend in Western European cities. However, the management of these risks could also be negotiated through an urban design inspired by two strategies.
Guaranteeing physical accessibility and social inclusion in public spaces to reinforce the capability of urban space to integrate different types of population. Managing conflicts which result from the multiplicity of users and uses, guaranteeing safety and security without losing the diversity that assures urban complexity.

Urban life in Barcelona will continue to make intensive use of public spaces. Such a future for social uses of the city’s public spaces would have been unimaginable in the immediate post-Franco years. It would now be socially unacceptable to reduce and simplify public spaces as the branding process demands. The challenges facing daily use of urban space by global and local users urgently demand a new vision for the renovation of Barcelona’s public spaces.

Francesc Muñoz