Writing Barcelona: Reflections on city planning and urban experience, 1854--1888

This dissertation analyzes the articulation and the reception of the new urban model that transformed the city of Barcelona between 1854 and 1888, a period of urban expansion in which Barcelona evolved from a walled industrial city to become the host of the first World's Fair beyond the Pyrenees. Through an interdisciplinary approach that includes the analysis of poetry, fiction, essays, engravings, paintings, photographs, and specific proposals of urban planning, I examine how the conception and the representations of public spaces generate, support or reject a meta-narrative of urban modernity based on a over rationalization of space. The new urban rationale brought forth new opportunities for financial speculation and, more importantly, the consolidation of the idea of the city as spectacle.;In particular, I explore the ways in which some authors---like Robert Robert, Emili Vilanova, and Narcis Oller among others---, artists---such as Lluis Rigalt---, and photographers---like Franck, Puig, and Marti---reflected on the new modern articulation of space conceived in the two major urban planning proposals of the period: Ildefons Cerda's project of urban expansion and Angel Baixeras's plan of reform of the inner city. I propose that the construction of the foundations of Barcelona's urban modernity---consolidated with the local modernista movement after 1888---depended on a dialectical debate between a new hegemonic conception of the urban space and a number of explicit and implicit critiques of the emerging urban rationale. This negotiation confronted two different notions of space: on the first hand, the conception of an almost aseptic space that proposed a extreme rationalization of the city based on hygienic, mathematical, and aesthetic grounds; and, on the other hand, a popular understanding of the urban milieu that reclaimed the central role of the urban practices of its citizens in the production of space.;The intertextual relationships between these discourses uncover the inner tensions of a project of urban modernization which was fuelled by the emerging bourgeoisie and remains in question to this day. Indeed, this dissertation aims at exposing the initial articulation of what has recently been called the "Barcelona model," a multi-faceted plan of urban development based on the concept of the city as spectacle which has been implemented cyclically according to periodical mandatory rites of passage: the Universal Exhibition of 1888, the International Exhibition of 1929, the 1992 Olympic Games, and the Forum Internacional de les Cultures in 2004. Ultimately, I suggest that these two apparently irreconcilable positions---the overarching plans of urban transformation led by the local administration, and the local dissent of citizens threatened by these periodical revolutions---are not only an integral part of the modernization process but also that these two positions are, in the final analysis, fundamentally modern.