It's the coolest city in Europe. Its secret? Sheer imagination.
By Melissa Rossi
Newsweek International Feb. 2004
Barcelona's gothic quarter is a tangle of narrow stone streets
winding around the old cathedral. Morning begins with a loud clanging of metal
as the gasman rumbles along, pushing a cart of dusty orange cans and bellowing
"Bu-ta-noooo!" He passes cafes, outdoor cheese markets and fountained
squares where, later in the day, old men read newspapers and string quartets
play Vivaldi. "Bu-ta-noooo!" Hearing his call, people pop onto their
balconies and yell down orders for the butane that powers most of the neighbourhood's
furnaces, stoves and hot-water heaters.
The daily ritual recalls a distant past. But slip around the
corner, past the Roman wall, dart into the sparkling subway station and 12
minutes later you emerge in the future. Here in the farthest reaches of the
city, a huge photovoltaic pergola stretches along the Mediterranean Sea,
generating solar energy. Public trash cans whisk garbage underground through
pneumatic tubes. The Big Blue Triangle, a three-sided building with shafts of
sunlight beaming through to its open-air lobby, is cooled by cascades of
recycled water. Next to it, lush gardens insulate the roof of the city's flashy
new convention center, southern Europe's largest.
Come May 9, this innovative architectural ensemble will host
the Universal Cultural Forum, a 141-day culture and design expo that city
fathers hope will stamp Barcelona's image even more vividly on the world map.
Until recently, this area where the Besòs River spills into the Mediterranean
was so polluted, locals dubbed it "Chernobyl." Now, atop an upgraded
water-treatment plant, a seaside plaza stretches for 20 football fields, the
world's largest public square outside of Tiananmen. A park wraps around a
renovated waste-recycling center, and, thanks to some 30 million euro from the
European Union, the polluted Besòs is coming back to life. Along the once
nauseating coastline, a kinetic work of art has unfolded: long, undulating
sculptures of artificial sand dunes enfold a man-made beach with seawater
swimming pools, a marina, a sailing center and a diving school. The construction
has created 5,000 jobs, says Montse Prats of Barcelona's Infrastructures del
Levant, the company overseeing what has become the biggest municipal-renovation
project in Europe. "And of the $3 billion spent here," adds Mayor Joan
Clos, president of the forum, "two thirds is private money."
The forum is only a part of an urban renaissance that has made
Barcelona one of Europe's most dynamic and innovative cities. Showered with
prestigious awards from the likes of the Royal Institute of British Architects
and the Harvard School of Design, Barcelona has become a magnet for city
planners from Shanghai to Santiago. Next month 20 mayors from across Europe will
meet there to discuss ways of injecting a bit of Barcelona's vitality into their
own cities.
So successful is this "capital of the Mediterranean"
in creatively regenerating itself that there's even a buzz phrase for how to do
it: the Barcelona model. It's shorthand for a whole new approach to urban design,
inventing fresh uses for the old, juxtaposing it with the new and creating loads
of eye-pleasing public spaces (small parks, walkways, gardens and museums) to
attract private development to previously dodgy areas. Couple that with a flair
for staging high-profile international events to market the projects, and voila.
"It's hard to overestimate the influence of the Barcelona model," says
Uwe Brandes, project manager for the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative in
Washington, D.C., one of many urban-renewal projects that have taken a page from
Barcelona. He's not alone in praising the city of 1.5 million famed for the
soft, swirling buildings of Antonio Gaudi. "What is happening in Barcelona
is absolutely a phenomenon," says Ricky Burdett, director of the Cities
Programme at the London School of Economics and adviser to London Mayor Ken
Livingstone. "Barcelona is the jewel in the crown of urban
regeneration," adds architect Lord Richard Rogers, who headed a task force
for the British government recommending that England embrace more than 100
measures first tried here. Tourists and business people all but swoon over the
city these days. Barcelona is the world's most popular convention site. Cushman
& Wakefield's international business surveys consistently rank the city No.
1 in the world in terms of quality of life. Some 20 million tourists visit each
year; 9 million or so stay overnight, five times the figure in 1992, when the
city played host to the Olympic Games.
The Olympics first brought Barcelona to tourists' attention. It
also yanked the heads of urban designers everywhere. The reason: the event
spurred an orgy of spending on huge infrastructure projects - airport expansion,
highway rings, telecommunications and sewage upgrades, and the creation of miles
of sandy beaches that entirely reoriented a city famous for "turning its
back to the sea." Twenty-five years' worth of infrastructure upgrades were
crammed into five years, says the city's chief architect, Jose Antonio Acebillo.
Aware that the Games often leave host cities with dozens of
abandoned and costly structures, Barcelona's design team engineered its
creations for the future. Football games are still played in the Olympic
stadium, but it doubles as a venue for concerts and shows. Athletes' dorms were
built as full-fledged apartments, then sold for a tidy profit. The beachfront
Olympic Village - a maze of modern architecture and sculpture that includes
Frank Gehry's huge metal "Fish" - became a magnet for trendy
restaurants, art galleries and hotels, among them the swanky Ritz-Carlton Hotel
Arts. Tourism, which previously generated only 2 percent of the city's annual
revenues, now accounts for 14 percent. And Mayor Clos believes publicity from
the forum - organizers tout it as an "intellectual Olympiad," offering
everything from seminars on world peace to edgy theater performances - will
boost tourism by a third. Preparations for the event have spurred yet another
wave of innovation, building on a decade of what experts call "layered
multiple use" of land. Across the city, parks spread out atop new highway
tunnels. Parking lots hide under squares. Seventeenth-century convents are
turned into libraries and cultural centers, palaces are transformed into hotels,
museums sprout from former textile factories. "Here you have neighbours
living and hanging out their clothes," says Burdett, gesturing to the
laundry fluttering from a Gothic Quarter balcony, "and there you have a
four-star hotel, a public square and a school."
Barcelona's appetite for beautiful public spaces, none of which
exist by happenstance, figures large in these developments. Such places might be
as simple as three benches under a palm or a tree-lined walkway. Or a grand
square that can accommodate concerts or a parade. Forbidden under Franco's
36-year rule, these espacios publicos elicit more than just civic pride: they
bring new life and development. Take Raval, the barrio next to the old docks,
long known for prostitutes and drug dealers. "Private developers wouldn't
touch it," says Derek Geary of the Barcelona Field Studies Center. But
since the city put in a rambla (pedestrian walkway), a contemporary-art museum
and more squares, businesses and restaurants are flocking.
What's now happening around the forum illustrates the power of
Barcelona's formula - and mirrors the broader success of Prime Minister Jose
Maria Aznar's pro-business policies for Spain. Its essence is a dynamic
partnership between local government and private companies, each trusting the
other to act in their (and the city's) mutual interest. Thanks to strong civic
backing, investors can confidently undertake projects that might not otherwise
be feasible - or profitable. Not far from the city's new beachfront, for
example, private developers are erecting a mini-city, complete with a shopping
center, university campus, 13 hotels and 800 new apartments. A two-bedroom goes
for 400,000 euros - or more. For some in the city, the pace of renewal has grown
almost too frenetic. A new train station is being built for the high-speed AVE.
The port is being refurbished. So is the bullring. Foreign high-tech companies
are being lured to renovated enterprise zones that mix business and housing.
Property values have skyrocketed. Slipped under the door of most every building
are notes from foreigners wanting to buy. "Barcelona is becoming a city
just for tourists," says Albert Gonzalez, owner of the wine bar Vinissim,
shaking his head at the dizzying transformation.
Clos views all this as signs of "a successful city
operating in a free market," and he may be right. Certainly the delegation
from Seattle, strolling along Barcelona's new manmade beach and seeking
inspiration for their efforts to create a "people-friendly waterfront"
back home, would agree. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Barcelona
will soon be swimming in praise.
