Comparing cities: A Barcelona Model?

Urban History

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 173-189

  Amelang, James ^a  

^a UNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA DE MADRID   (Spain)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CAPITAL CITY; CIVIL SOCIETY; COMPARATIVE STUDY; URBAN ECONOMY; URBAN HISTORY;

BARCELONA [CATALONIA]; CATALONIA; EURASIA; EUROPE; SOUTHERN EUROPE; SPAIN;

EID: 34347388644     PISSN: 09639268     EISSN: 14698706     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0963926807004592     Document Type: Article

References (94)

1. One example would be recent attempts to compare urban planning in different capital cities, as in Michael Wagenaar's 'Monumental centre, picturesque environs: Contrasting townscapes and divergent land use in six European capitals, 1850-1914', in C.Vandermotten (ed.), Planification et stratégies de développement dans les capitales européenes (Brussels, 1994), 29-48,
2. or Thomas Hall's Planning Europe's Capital Cities: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Urban Development (London, 1997), which compares planning projects in fourteen such cities.
3. Another, and more directly inspired by the methods of historical sociology, applies the same survey questions to a wide range of cities, as in M. Gribaudi (ed.), Espaces, temporalités, stratifications: exercises sur les réseaux sociaux (Paris, 1998). In either case, the comparison focuses more on the subject under study as seen in different contexts than between the cities themselves.
4. There are, to be sure, many other ways of ordering urban comparisons. For an illuminating exercise in comparing London both to an 'ideal-type' of city-state, and to different stages in its own past, see D. Keene, 'Metropolitan comparisons: London as a city-state', Historical Research, 77 (2004), 459-80.
5. As in P. Rossi (ed.), Modelli di città: Strutture e funzioni politiche (Turin, 1988);
6. see also the reactions to this approach by Cristina La Rocca and Franco Angiolini in Quaderni Storici, 75 (1990), 955-64.
7. M. Bloc, 'A contribution towards a comparative history of European societies', in his Land and Work in Medieval Europe: Selected Papers trans. J.E. Anderson (New York, 1969; orig. edn 1928), 47.
8. See my Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations, 1490-1714 (Princeton, 1986), especially 219-21,
9. and The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, 1998), 196-201.
10. More detailed discussion can be found in L.R. Corteguera, For the Common Good: Popular Politics in Barcelona, 1580-1640 (Ithaca, 2002).
11. For a broad comparison of municipal politics in early modern Spain, see J.I. Fortea Pérez, 'Corona de Castilla-Corona de Aragón. Convergencias y divergencias de dos modelos de organización municipal en los siglos XVI y XVII', Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, n.s., 34 (2004), 17-57.
12. Surprisingly little of an analytical nature has been written about pre-modern capital cities. The two main studies are both collective works: C. Da Seta (ed.), Le città capitali (Rome and Bari, 1985);
13. and P. Clark and B. Lepetit (eds.), Capital Cities and their Hinterlands in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 1996).
14. The pioneering introductory piece by the late Marino Berengo on pp. 3-15 of the former now figures, along with many other observations of interest, in his encyclopaedic L'Europa delle città: Il volto della società urbana tra Medioevo ed Età moderna (Turin, 1999).
15. Also of special relevance is David Ringrose's work on the economic aspects of capitality. See, for example, his 'Capital cities and their hinterlands: Europe and the colonial dimension, in Clark and Lepetit (eds.), Capital Cities, 217-40,
16. and 'Capital cities, urbanization, and modernization in early modern Europe', Journal of Urban History, 24 (1998), 155-83.
17. Even less is available on ex-capitals, although see two suggestive essays: X. Gil Pujol, 'Una cultura cortesanP provincial: patria, comunicación y lenguaje en la Monarquía hispánica de los Austrias', in P. Fernández Albaladejo (ed.), Monarquía, imperio y pueblos en la España moderna (Alicante, 1997), 225-57, especially 233,
18. and F. Bouza Alvarez, 'Sola Lisboa, casi viuda. La ciudad y la mudanza de la corte en el Portugal de los Felipes', now in his Imagen y propaganda: Capítulos de historia cultural del reinado de Felipe II (Madrid, 1998), 95-120.
19. For a preliminary introduction to this aspect of Barcelona's history, see Enric Ucelay-Da Cal's Llegar a capital: Rango urbano, rivalidades interurbanas y la imaginación nacionalista en la España del siglo XX (Barcelona, 2002).
20. There is in fact a problem of scale here with important implications for civic historiography. Barcelona has lived out all of its existence as the largest city within a relatively small and, until the nineteenth century, sparsely populated territory. Its specific history as a city has thus been absorbed by its national (Catalan) history to an extent unthinkable in, say, the relation of London to England, or Paris to France.
21. See his Viles i ciutats de Catalunya, ed. M. Aritzeta (Barcelona, 1994), 81.
22. The shift actually took a bit longer, as the royal family left Kraków in 1597 after a fire in the Wawel Castle. Warsaw had already been the seat of the Polish Diet since 1569. Details in J. Lileyko, A Companion Guide to the Royal Castle in Warsaw (Warsaw, 1980), 33-4.
23. See, for example, G. Galasso, 'Una capitale dell'impero', in his Alla periferia dell'impero. Il regno di Napoli nel periodo spagnolo (secoli XVI-XVII) (Turin, 1994), 335-69.
24. This is the thesis of James Buchan's exuberant Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind (New York, 2003).
25. Some of the highlights in the large and growing bibliography on early modern Edinburgh include: A.J. Youngson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1966);
26. M. Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation (Edinburgh, 1981);
27. R.A. Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment: Edinburgh, 1660-1760 (Oxford, 1994);
28. H. Dingwall, Late Seventeenth Century Edinburgh (Aldershot, 1994);
29. and S. Nenadic, 'Middle-rank consumers and domestic culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1720-1840', Past and Present, 145 (1994), 122-56.
30. For the city's cultural history in particular, see N. Phillipson, 'Commerce and culture: Edinburgh, Edinburgh University, and the Scottish Enlightenment, in T. Bender (ed.), The University and the City from Medieval Origins to the Present (New York, 1988), 100-18,
31. as well as his earlier overview, 'The Scottish Enlightenment', in R. Porter and M. Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981), 19-40.
32. A recent essay with an up-to-date bibliography is M. Geuna, 'Republicanism and commercial society in the Scottish Enlightenment: The case of Adam Ferguson', in M. van Gelderen and Q. Skinner (eds.), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. II: The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002), 177-95.
33. For nineteenth-century Edinburgh, see the detailed study of Richard Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh: Land, Property and Trust in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001).
34. For an exemplary comparative approach to this question, see J. Robertson, 'The Enlightenment above national context: Political economy in eighteenth-century Scotland and Naples', Historical Journal, 40 (1997), 667-98,
35. and now his The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680-1760 (Cambridge, 2005).
36. The self-image of civil society was perhaps not unrelated to the fact that both cities proved to be bastions of dynastic loyalism in contrast to nearby rural insurgency, respectively in the Highlands in the 1740s and throughout the nineteenth century in regard to Carlism. I raise this point all too briefly in my 'Memoria histórica y tradición cívica: Algunas reflexiones sobre el caso de Barcelona en la Edad Moderna', in P. Fernández Albaladejo (ed.), Los Borbones: dinastía y memoria de nación en la España del siglo XVIII (Madrid, 2001), 544-5; the issue obviously merits more detailed examination.
37. For one critical evaluation of the application of this construct to the study of early modern society, see E. Muir, 'The sources of civil society in Italy', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 29 (1999), 379-406.
38. For a suggestive comparative overview of the notion of civil society that centres on voluntary associations, see S.-L. Hoffmann, 'Democracy and associations in the long nineteenth century: Toward a transnational perspective, Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), 269-99.
39. Another Enlightenment concept closely allied to civil society is that of the 'public sphere', on which I will not comment here. Suffice it to note its increasing, and at times rather confused, presence in recent discourse emanating from present-day Barcelona. One example is the official - as in the writings of the local architect and politician Oriol Bohigas - presentation of Olympic Barcelona as a showcase of 'neighborhood urban planning. For a summary, see R. Grau, 'Les opcions de Barcelona, ahir i avui: A propòsit dels; ideals urbanitzadors d'Oriol Bohigas, L'Avenç, 257 (2001), 8-13.
40. Indeed, one recent survey - Thomas Munck's The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History, 1721-1794 (London, 2000) - has no entry in its index for Barcelona. It is also fair to point out, though, that there is no entry for Spain either, and that southern Europe as a whole is virtually absent from this all too typical study.
41. See J. Robertson, 'Stuart London and the idea of a capital city, Renaissance Studies, 15 (2001), 37-58, for differing views of the architectural and urbanistic requirements of early modern capitality.
42. The legal profession would soon recover its earlier protagonism. See Stephen Jacobson's 'Professionalism, corporatism, and Catalanism: The legal profession in nineteenth-century Barcelona' (unpublished Tufts University Ph.D. thesis, 1998), soon to appear in book form.
43. The construction of Prague's self-image in opposition to Vienna is an implicit theme in Peter Demetz's Prague in Blackand Gold: Scenes in the Life of a European City (New York, 1997);
44. Lou Rose also pointed it out to me in an as yet unpublished text on Mozart and Vienna. A serious history of the peculiar yet far from unparalleled rivalry between Barcelona and Madrid has yet to be written. Such an exercise in the comparison of different types of capital cities would doubtless reveal much of interest. It may find, for example, that certain forms of classic bourgeois liberalism - such as abolitionism, or defence of free trade - were easier to find in nineteenth-century Madrid than in Barcelona, as Josep M. Fradera has suggested in his Cultura nacional en una sociedad dividida. Cataluna, 1838-1868, trans. C. Mercadal Vidal (Madrid, 2003; orig. edn 1992), 26.
45. One especially useful study in this regard is F. Bartolini, Rivali d'Italia: Roma e Milano dal Settecento a oggi (Rome and Bari, 2006).
46. I regret not having been able to see the obviously comparative work by B.A. Ruble, Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka (Cambridge, 2001).
47. Here I rely on the handy table detailing the population of the 'Leading cities of the European urban hierarchy, 1750-1950', in P.M. Hohenberg and L.H. Lees, The Making of Urban Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 227.
48. See Stefano D'Amico's 'Rebirth of a city: Immigration and trade in Milan, 1630-59', Sixteenth Century Journal, 32 (2001), 697-722,
49. as well as his earlier Le contrade e la città: Sistema produttivo e spazio urbano a Milano fra Cinque e Seicento (Milan, 1994).
50. Albert Garcia Espuche's Un siglo decisivo: Barcelona y Cataluña, 1550-1640 (Madrid, 1998) has not yet attracted the serious discussion that it merits.
51. Martin Baumeister of the University of Munich is currently preparing a comparative study of 'urban culture in action' in Barcelona and Turin from the 1860s to the 1930s. I am indebted to Prof. Baumeister for bringing his project to my attention.
52. In this respect, at least, the myth of Barcelona appears as the opposite of the modern nationalist myth of Catalonia: Where the latter conceives the past in millenarian terms as a chain of constant defeats, to be reversed in the end by a final victory, Barcelona celebrates its history as a never-ending story of success. For a recent critical assessment of some of the myths of Catalan nationalism, see the other essays in J.M. Fradera and E. Ucelay-Da Cal (eds.), Notícia nova de Catalunya (Barcelona, 2005).
53. Each of these economic phases has been studied, even if few general conclusions have been drawn from them. Two exceptions to this rule have been the observations in J.K.J. Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization: Cotton in Barcelona, 1728-1832 (Cambridge, 1992), 312,
54. regarding the unparalleled 'powers of recuperation' of Barcelona's industrial economy, and F. Fernández-Armesto, Barcelona: A Thousand Years of the City's Past (Oxford, 1992), 77, that 'gestures of confidence in response to crisis have been typical of the history of Barcelona and seem, indeed, to constitute a sort of unifying theme that underlies the experience of a thousand years of triumphs and catastrophes. The latter is a brief but engaging book with more than its share of questionable assumptions, as well as innumerable minor mistakes, but it is undoubtedly the best available general history of the city.
55. It is perhaps telling that Barcelona is cited only once in Peter Hall's massive Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (London, 1998), 8, and that is, predictably enough, in regard to its recently forming part of a group of European cities - among them Montpellier, Bologna, Hamburg and Birmingham - that 'have become more and more preoccupied by the notion that cultural industries (a term no longer thought anomalous or offensive) may provide the basis for economic regeneration'.
56. The civic origins and context of cultural creativity have long been a central theme of Schorske's unique brand of cultural history, beginning with his 1963 study of 'The idea of the city in European thought, and continuing through his later essays on Vienna and Basel. The former were published in book form as Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980);
57. for the latter, see his 'Science as vocation in Burckhardt's Basel', in Bender (ed.), The University and the City, 198-209. His more recent works have moved in an explicitly comparative direction;
58. see in particular his 'Budapest and New York compared' (co-authored with Thomas Bender), in T. Bender and C.E. Schorske (eds.), Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870-1930 (New York, 1993), 1-28,
59. and his introduction to N. Bouvier, G.A. Craig and L. Gossman, Geneva, Zurich, Basel: History, Culture, and National Identity (Princeton, 1994), 1-15, especially 11-12.
60. The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton, 1998). Needless to say, the hackneyed contrast between Budapest, a factory city without green space whose cultural leaders referred to their cafés as workshops, and Vienna, an imperial capital and court given over largely to aristocrats and administrators, seems strongly reminiscent of the Barcelona-Madrid divide. Note, by the way, Hanák's mention of Gaudí (p. 149 as an example of Modernism's having developed earlier in Catalonia, Scandinavia, Italy and Belgium than in Central Europe.
61. (Chichester, 2001). The first chapter (pp. 27-76) contrasts the development of avant-garde art, architecture and urban planning in Barcelona and Munich, both presented as 'second' or 'outsider' cities in respect to their national capitals. For a similar approach in regard to legal culture and its relation to regional and nationalist sentiment, see M. Umbach, 'A tale of second cities: Autonomy, culture, and the law in Hamburg and Barcelona in the late nineteenth century', American Historical Review, 110 (2005), 659-92.
62. As along the lines of Scott Spector's Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Kafka's Fin de Siècle (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000).
63. See above all my Honored Citizens, and G.W. McDonogh, Good Families of Barcelona: A Social History of Power in the Industrial Era (Baltimore, 1986).
64. See A.J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York, 1981).
65. Thus, for example, Josep M. Fradera, in his 'El huso y la gaita: Un esquema sobre cultura y proyectos intelectuales en la Cataluña del siglo XIX', Ayer, 40 (2000), 25-50, broadens the scope of this focus by drawing attention to the significant cultural as well as political divisions within and near this composite elite, in a context of national politics that is virtually absent from both my and McDonogh's studies.
66. As for what happens afterward, the extent to which architects constitute a recognizable cultural-professional group recently incorporated into Barcelona's present-day elite is one of the themes of Llàtzer Moix's La ciudad de los arquitectos (2nd edn, Barcelona, 2002), although this issue clearly deserves to be explored more fully.
67. For a now-classic statement of this position, see F. Choay, La regle et le modèle: Sur la théorie de l'architecture et de l'urbanisme (Paris, 1980), 284-311.
68. Tim Marshall undertakes precisely this sort of analysis in his 'Urban planning and governance: Is there a Barcelona Model?', International Planning Studies, 5 (2000), 299-319,
69. a critical appraisal of the 'Model' from the point of view of progressive urban planning.; see also T. Marshall (ed.), Transforming Barcelona: The Renewal of a European Metropolis (London, 2004).
70. For an example of broad disagreement with the 'hegemonic' vision of the Model's defenders based on specific micro-level, neighbourhood concerns, see G.W. McDonogh, 'Discourses of the city: Planning and policy in post-transitional Barcelona, City and Society, 5 (June 1991), 40-64,
71. and S. von Heeren, La remodelación de Ciutat Vella. Un análisis crítico del Modelo Barcelona (Barcelona, 2002).
72. For a much more positive reading of the same developments, see N. Calavita and A. Ferrer, 'Behind Barcelona's success story: Citizen movements', Journal of Urban History, 26 (2000), 793-807.
73. A promising exception to this rule is G. Barnosell, Orígens del sindicalisme català (Vic, 1999).
74. See also (for a later period) C. Ealham, La lucha por Barcelona: clase, cultura y conflicto, 1898-1937 (Madrid, 2005).
75. See the historiographic observations in A. Garcia Balañà, 'Sobre "la constitució del proletariat" a la Catalunya cotonera: Una crònica de la formació dels Ilenguatges de classe a peu de fabrica, 1840-1890', in Fradera and Ucelay-Da Cal (eds. , Notícia nova de Catalunya, 97-119.
76. I have briefly drawn attention to this question in 'Institucions no-institucionals? Els fonaments de la identitat social a la Barcelona moderna, in Les institucions catalanes, segles XV XVII. Actes del Tercer Congrés d'Història Moderna de Catalunya (Barcelona, 1993 [1994]), vol. II, 305-11.
77. Oller (1846-1930) was a well-known novelist whose most famous work, La febre d'or or 'The Gold Rush' (1890-2), dealt with social and economic change in late nineteenth-century Barcelona.
78. For his writing about the city, including his extensive journalistic commentary, see R. Cabré, La Barcelona de Narcís Oller. Realitat i somni de la ciutat (Valls, 2004).
79. For the larger question of Barcelona's literary image, see J. Llovet et al., 'Barcelona en la literatura', Barcelona. Metròpolis Mediterrània, Quadern central no. 20 (n.d.), 65-132,
80. and more recently, C. Carreras, La Barcelona literària. Una introducció geogràfica (Barcelona, 2003).
81. This may be the point to note the special and, frankly, odd role reserved for foreigners as confirmers of local myths from the outside. I am thinking for instance of Robert Hughes' best-selling Barcelona (New York, 1992), or the more modest Homage to Barcelona (London, 1992) by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín.
82. I have in mind studies such as I. Barea [Pollak], Vienna (New York, 1967), or P. Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA, 1996).
83. Other 'urban biographies' focusing on cultural issues include: T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Age of Manet and his Followers (London, 1984);
84. P.P. Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994);
85. D.E. Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City (Ithaca, 1995);
86. B. Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago, 1998);
87. and K. Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1998).
88. One welcome exception is Stéphane Michonneau's recent study, Barcelona: Memòria i identitat. Monuments, commemoracions i mites, trans. R. Martínez (Vic, 2002).
89. For a presentation of modern Barcelona's 'civic culture' as a form of political resistance, see T. Kaplan, Red City, Blue Period: Social Movements in Picasso's Barcelona (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992).
90. Needless to say, language is another of the more pressing cultural questions calling for a comparative approach. While I know of no historical study of specifically urban linguistic uses, there is ample material on which to build in Joan-Lluís Marfany's La llengua maltractada. El castellà i el català a Catalunya del segle XVI al segle XIX (Barcelona, 2001).
91. Felipe Fernández-Armesto is especially insistent on the self-delusion involved in this way of presenting the city's past (and present). See his Barcelona, ix, 197, 203, 207-8 and 231.
92. The most striking exception to this rule involves Barcelona's main parish archives, most of which were destroyed in local disturbances during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A vivid idea of the richness of local notarial records may be gleaned from Albert Garcia Espuche's semi-fictional El inventario (Barcelona, 2002).
93. For some preliminary remarks on early modern Catalonia as a centre of autobiographical writing, see my 'The mental world of Jeroni Pujades, in R.L. Kagan and G. Parker (eds.), Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott (Cambridge, 1995), 211-26,
94. and Cataluña desde Europa: Las raíces de una cultura autobiográfica, in Catalunya i Europa a l'Edat Moderna: IV Congrés d'Història Moderna de Catalunya (Barcelona, 1998 [2000]), vol. 1, 457-62.