Introduction

The new urban can be an exhilarating place. It can also be frightening. After the over-stimulation and simultaneity of the modernist city comes the post-modern position that cities are not only visual but offer multi-sensory experiences, and possibilities for inter-cultural and multiple modes of communication. A mix of languages, costume, music, sub-cultures, and food is found in any major city today. For the participant this may be a new kind of symphony. For the more distanced spectator it may be a cacophony.

 

For Leonie Sandercock, the post-metropolitan city is a cosmopolitan, mongrel city that enables two public goods:

 

'the critical freedom to question in thought, and challenge in practice, one's inherited cultural ways ' [and] the recognition of a widely shared aspiration to belong to a culture and a place, and so to be at home in the world.^[i]

 

In this inter-cultural, critical scene there is no question as to how much society can absorb from outside. Instead, Sandercock writes, 'an intercultural perspective advocates accepting the reality and desirability of cultural diversity '' while political life is accordingly, as 'dialogically and agonistically constituted.'^[ii] This is post-modern yet there is a trace of the idea that the city makes us free.^[iii]

 

But, the emerging post-metropolitan city has been seen also as hardly a city at all, more a geographical region containing or failing to contain diverse and conflicting interests, or a dystopian war-zone. Edward Soja writes, 'the boundaries of the city are becoming more porous, confusing our ability to draw neat lines separating what is inside as opposed to outside the city - between the natural and the artificial.'^[iv] And architect Lebbeus Woods cites Marshall Berman's account of the cutting of freeways through residential areas of post-war New York - to say, 'The wrecking machines that levelled houses and urban blocks were no less destructive to culture than if they had been the tanks and artillery of an attacking army.'^[v] There is a hint here of boys' war stories, yet in popular culture the city is a primary site for disaster movies.^[vi]

 

For Zygmunt Bauman, the new urban is produced by globalisation, and characterised by extremes of wealth and poverty, mobility and restriction, and trans-national power and local disempowerment.^[vii] In the mall of identity formation, life is frenetic:

 

Given the intrinsic volatility and unfixity of ' identities, it is the ability to shop around in the supermarket of identities ' that becomes the royal road to the fulfilment of identity fantasies. Having that ability, one is free to make an unmake identities at will. Or so it seems.^[viii]

 

For Bauman the privileging of consumer choice exacerbates the production of unsatisfied desires in a market-led society in which the role of regulation in the public interest is out-sourced to the market: public space is privatised and the robbers are in charge of public safety. It seems Louis Wirth may have been accurate in saying, 'To know one another better is often to hate one another more violently.'^[ix]

Sandercock's and Bauman's views are not incompatible - they simply look from related viewpoints at different occurrences. For Sandercock the city is cosmopolis. For Bauman it is a mall on the site of the agora. Both are for social justice but Sandercock sees this as arising in a contested inter-cultural spaces; Bauman is more traditional, seeing a need for regulation by the state and regretting its erosion The dominant image of a city, however, moulded by global competition for investment, corporate relocation, immaterial in place of material production in the financial services, media and tourism sectors, and cultural tourism is shaped largely by market interests. Inter-cultural life takes place at street level but in the towers of corporate power, culture - as art, heritage, or everyday colour - is a resource for a city's symbolic economy. City marketing promotes a vibrant cultural life, or a vibrant street and night life, but image predominates over actuality, the sign floats free from whatever it no longer signifies. The eruption of styles and cultural hybridities that occurs at street level is appropriated for brands, as Sharon Zukin comments:

 

Styles that develop on the streets are cycled through mass media ' where, divorced from their social context, they become images of cool. On urban billboards advertising designer perfumes or jeans, they are recycled top the streets, where they become a provocation ' The cacophony of demands for justice is translated into a coherent demand for jeans.^[x]

 

Even the word revolution, the E reversed to resemble its equivalent in the Cyrillic alphabet, is the name of a bar selling expensive vodka cocktails. Ideology becomes another lifestyle choice.

 

So, there are issues as to whose culture is used in the re-imaging of whose city, whose history is appropriated and de-contextualised in a world of signs signifying affluence in the illusory breadth of consumer choice. This is more than a matter of who is able or not to make consumer choices, to shop in the mall of identity formation; it is a question as to what values are represented in city spaces, what impact the city's representation has on its everyday life and cultural production, and what relation pertains between the cultures of everyday lives, the Culture of the museum and art gallery, and whatever latent desire for liberation remains. The issues are wide-ranging and run in many directions. I return to them later, but begin by focusing on a specific case: the fishmarket in Bergen.

 

Bergen fish-market

The fishmarket is in the centre of Bergen's waterfront, in sight of the UNESCO world heritage site of Bryggen, the old wooden town of merchants houses and workshops. This is a highly local case, but it raises two issues: first, the relation of programmes of urban re-presentation to local cultures; second, the impact of Culture and cultural tourism on the cultures of everyday lives.

 

Bergen is an affluent city, unusual when most debate in urbanism concerns shrinking or de-industrialised cities. But one of Bergen's industries is cruise and fjord tourism, for which it competes globally; and another education, for which it helps to be seen as a city of museums, galleries, theatres and concert halls.^[xi] The new urban is not much evident in Bergen's built environment, and the fishmarket stands as a residual pre-industrial form in which buyers meet sellers face to face, and produce brought directly from ship to shore. It is not the agora of classical Athens, in which members of the male property-owning elite are said to have exchanged political opinions while their servants, presumably, bought the provisions, but interest in farmers' markets suggests a desire on the part of consumers for the pre-modern mode of exchange exemplified by the fishmarket. But the market is no longer a resource only for local consumers, but also a hub of tourist activity when the fjord cruise-ships arrive. Siri Myrvoll observes the impact of tourism on the fish market:

 

Fresh fish is becoming scarce ' the fishmongers being busy with the more profitable business of supplying smoked salmon sandwiches to the Germans or vacuum packed smoked salmon and tinned caviar to the Japanese. It has reached the point where fish vendors themselves complain: their regular customers cannot get up to the counters, they lose interest and do not return. As a result, selling fish in the fish market after the summer season ' is an unprofitable business. Bergen may be in danger of losing the foundations upon which its cultural heritage was built.^[xii]

 

My own observation during two visits outside the tourist season was that the fish market operated each morning though with only a few stalls selling fish and a few others selling tourism goods such as knitted garments, fur hats and toy reindeer and trolls. There was smoked salmon on the fish stalls, but mainly a wide range of freshly landed white fish. I was told that prices were cheaper at shops in the city.

 

In the city efforts to increase the numbers and diversity of visitors, extending the tourist season through the year, the world heritage site is more important, along with the city's art gallery and its collection of paintings by Edward Munch, and concert hall designed on the plan of a piano and named after the national composer, Edward Grieg. At the same time, Myrvoll's point that the city might find one of its traditional attractions turned into a simulacrum for tourists has a certain resonance.

 

A year after Myrvoll's account was published, Bergen was one of nine E.U. Capitals of Culture in 2000^[xiii] (despite that Norway is not a member of the EU). The programme emphasised the generation of new transferable skills in its cultural sector, with a nominal theme of coasts and waterways. There were performances of new music by the city's orchestra working with guest conductors and composers, and new media skills were seeded in residencies with avant-garde groups. The programme addressed an imbalance in the city's external perception as a fjord tourism rather than cultural city. Myrvoll writes, 'Since the main tourist attraction has always been nature, culture comes as an added extra.'^[xiv] But cultural production and reception were seen in this case as a means to attract new visitors from other regions of Norway - its success measured by market research showing that 40% of Oslo's population now see Bergen as a cultural city, more than see their own city in this way.^[xv] A doubt still nags me. If Myrvoll was right, and, as John Urry says, mass travel 'destroys the very places which are being visited',^[xvi] does cultural tourism have the same effect on the cultures of the places that become weekend-break destinations?

 

Cities of Culture and World Cities

At this point I want to widen the focus again, before looking to another case - Barcelona - often taken as a paradigm of culturally led regeneration. I want to ask, that is, what are the intentions behind, for example, the Capitals of Culture project as a particular type of urban re-invention and re-presentation.

 

Few Cities or Capitals of Culture are national capitals, and many are small cities, among them Antwerp (1993), Weimar (1999), Porto (2001), Bruges (2002), Graz (2003), and Cork (2005). Some are a nation's second city, others heritage sites, but none world cities. This is the point: while only a few cities, namely New York, London and Tokyo, have the extent of financial services industries to be part of what Saskia Sassen has called the global city,^[xvii] others, lacking this asset, require alternative means of mapping to assume prominence in competition for investment, new industrial growth, and tourism. It is not simply that the cultural sector itself produces wealth or employment, more its leverage on other sectors via its role in a symbolic economy.

 

If the global city is a multi-site entity linked by 24-hour electronic communications, then Europe has only two of its sites - in London and Frankfurt. The culture map facilitates a revaluation of non-global city status, and contributes to a different prominence in trans-national regions in which cities by-pass the global city and national identity. In this context, the West-Mediterranean arc links Valencia, Barcelona, Montpellier, Marseilles and Genoa. But - as return of the repressed - cultural status reproduces the hegemonic attributes of world-city status when the symbolic economy overrides localised cultures to promote a manufactured image of a city geared to speculative readings of the market. As Tim Hall remarks, 'Moments of civic transformation tend to get portrayed in overly simplistic terms as seamless and unproblematic. The reality is much more messy.'^[xviii] Similarly, the literature of evaluation of culturally led urban redevelopment finds few benefits at the local level.^[xix]

 

Culture may, then, be a convenient and frequently an interesting way to promote a city. But the question recurs, whose culture is used in the construction of whose image of a city, for whom? In retrospect, a few cases - notably Glasgow as City of Culture in 1990 - are cited as moments of transition, turning a history of de-industrialization and decline of confidence into a vibrant new future. Yet if 'The ugly duckling of Europe has turned into a swan', as the Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported,^[xx] a disaffected local source said in contrast, '1990 was a year when an intellectually bankrupt and brutally undemocratic administration projected its mediocre image onto the city and ordered us to adore it.'^[xxi] Perhaps equally to the point is that Glasgow already had a vibrant scene in experimental theatre and new art, was already more exciting culturally than its rival Edinburgh, had a strong sense of community despite the city authorities' efforts to demolish it along with many of its nineteenth-century stone tenement buildings, and that around this time those authorities had begun to see that the peripheralization of the poor to tower blocks and sink estates had failed and started to invest in refurbishment. Perhaps some renewal of confidence would have happened anyway. And perhaps the legacy of the year as a City of Culture may be more the numerous international chain hotels and convention facilities now found in its centre, and the gradual gentrification of some districts, than a city-wide cultural revitalisation. As with Birmingham, perhaps Glasgow now has a new central business district in the guise of a cultural city. Elsewhere, as in Manchester, redundant industrial sites have been refurbished as urban villages for young professionals, close to sites of the night-time economy of bars and clubs. Overall prosperity has increased, but divisions between wealth and poverty, centre and margin, or style and remnant, remain.

 

Barcelona

I turn now to Barcelona, 'hailed as the most successful global model for post-industrial urban regeneration based on its urban design.'^[xxii] Barcelona is not part of the global city, but its authorities see it as the principal hub of the West Mediterranean arc, and it has a World Trade Centre designed by I. M. Pei on its renewed waterfront, incorporating a cruise ship terminal. It has a large critical mass of cultural tourist sites: the Picasso and Mir— museums, the Catalan Museum, the Caixa Foundation galleries for contemporary art, a wealth of art nouveau (modernista) architecture, plentiful public spaces and public art, plus fashionable shopping streets, countless bars and cafes (including those serving the almost mythical draft cava), and a waterfront casino. Apart from its high incidence of street crime the city makes an ideal weekend break, business convention or professional conference destination. It has achieved an economic revival and has an incipient knowledge economy sector alongside its cultural economy and role as capital of the state of Catalunya, regarded as a national state.

 

But the revitalisation of Barcelona is unique, grounded in a specific history, rooted in its Catalan culture and language, and impossible to map onto anywhere else. The national day of mourning is 11^th September, when, in 1714, the city fell to the Bourbons. Dirges are sung each year at Plaza del Fossar de les Moreres,^[xxiii] a small paved plaza near the church of S. Maria del Mar. Under Bourbon rule the city was prevented from expanding, declared a military site so that the space outside its walls could not be developed. Within its dark, twisting alleys disease spread easily, as did unrest. An outbreak of cholera in 1855, coinciding with a major strike, led Idelfons Cerdˆ to draw up a report on the city's housing conditions. This informed his 1859 plan for a northern extension (Eixample).^[xxiv] Persuading the Madrid regime to lift the city's designation and allow the demolition of the walls, Cerdˆ was able to engineer a remarkably humane city, with 50% of street space set aside for pedestrians, access to green spaces for people of all classes, street seating and lighting, and formal regulation of the proportions of a standard urban block with inner garden courtyard. He proposed a rapid transit system, mixed-use zoning, and the rational street grid in which east-west routes are for fast movement while north-south roads allow for an extension of domestic space into the street, as do the city's ubiquitous balconies. Cerdˆ wrote that, 'By distributing with total equity and perfect justice the benefits of viality [his term for liveability] ' the square grid system has the inestimable advantage of not creating odious artificial preferences.'^[xxv] The grid was the built form of an urbanization representing the liberty of a new commercial class, and, as much as it was a means to social equity, a means to prevent insurrection by improving the living standards of the poor.

 

Today, Eixample is a fashionable, quiet bourgeois district, with tree-lined avenues and small pavement cafŽs. But the city's history of liberal planning regimes resurfaced in the 1980s, when Catalan culture emerged with the city's economic fortunes after punitive repression during the fascist period - Barcelona being one of the last sites of resistance in 1937. Plaza del Fossar is one of a hundred or so small public spaces created or modified in preparation for the city's hosting the 1992 Olympic Games - not confined to the centre but spread throughout the residential districts as well. In the 1990s, the city pursued a deliberate policy to encourage cultural tourism, fused this with the creation of a Catalan cultural infrastructure.^[xxvi] Among new buildings for Catalan culture are a new National Theatre, Theatre College, and National Auditorium. Information relating to these venues was in Catalan only, not for nationalist reasons but because the cultural tourist tends to regard her or himself as a traveller, seeking out the authentic locality while enjoying the frisson of rubbing shoulders, so to speak, or literally, with sex-workers, migrants, artists and bohemians in a city's narrow streets. The image presented for external perception was, in one way, aimed at world-city status, with signature architecture and the required international public art - such as a red and yellow sculpture of book-matches by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen - and a Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA). In another way, it remained authentic in its edges, celebrating street life and local colour but, primarily, celebrating the liberation of Catalan culture and political life after the end of fascism. In all this the work of a mayor with considerable local powers was central.

 

There are tensions between these constructed identities. At the same time, the Catalan cultural infra-structure is well used, as are the cleaned-up beaches, and Monica Degen observes, 'Barcelona's cafŽ culture' is enjoyed as much by locals as by outsiders.'^[xxvii] Yet crime has risen in face of imported affluence, the waterfront area of Maremagnum is avoided by locals now that it has been colonised by fast-food outlets and lager louts while security guards can be brutal to the economic migrants who also hang out there, having nowhere else to go.

 

In the late 1990s a shift took place in the city's planning ethos, towards a cleansing of some of what were regarded as the city's riougher edges, under the guise of urban improvements. Indeed, some of the new public spaces prior to the 1992 Olympics had involved demolition, but the aim of letting light into the dark alleys seemed now to be more a moral than an urban design question. This phase of redevelopment was focused on the highly multi-cultural district of El Raval, or bario chino, the old red light district in the old city, with its twisting, narrow alleys and old-fashioned bars - a particular focus also for cultural tourism, as it remains, the frisson increased when hotel receptionists advise clients not to go there. But it is now the city's designated cultural quarter, on a familiar city marketing pattern, in the streets south of MACBA. Several urban blocks were demolished to make way for a new Ramblas connecting one narrow alley to another with no demonstrable purpose beyond spectacle. On a sunny Sunday morning in 2003 I walked between the heaps of rubble, seeing local people still sitting out on the steps of the remaining blocks, gazing at the demolition, while at the end of the void a billboard displayed an impression of the new plaza under the caption - in English (or American) not Catalan - Public Space. I had already reached the conclusion that, as the artist group Hewitt + Jordan have stated in a public work, 'The economic function of public art is to increase the value of private property'^[xxviii] but here I began to question the link between public space and democracy. If high culture affirms the status of an elite, re-enforcing social divisions, perhaps the public spaces that characterise the new urban, the spaces of a piazza-sitting, latte-drinking society, similarly reinforce the image of the city as a zone of affluence and, by extension, of exclusion.

 

It is not that I dislike the new spaces on aesthetic grounds, but that I question the efficacy of aesthetic criteria in making cities for the cultural diversity and multi-sensory life that is key to Sandercock's mongrel urbanism. To repeat the quote with which I began: the city enables the 'critical freedom to question in thought, and challenge in practice, one's inherited cultural ways ' .'^[xxix] Remembering that city air is supposed to make us free, I doubt this will be the outcome of a new urbanism based on service not to public interest or well-being but to the requirements of market economics.

 

The most recent chapter in Barcelona's development is marked by a more overt turn to a market-led agenda. While in the 1990s the public sector undertook development, selling on redeveloped sites to the private sector, in the second phase of waterfront renewal around 2002, a key site was handed over at the outset to a north American company to develop as a mall and gated, high-rise, high-rent apartment compound. This is adjacent to the new Convention hall, built for the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures. There are also 11 new hotels, and a wholesale demolition of residual nineteenth-century working-class housing and industrial buildings. The Forum sought to celebrate cultural diversity, but did so on a site in which the diversity of local communities, artists using redundant factories as studios, gypsies, and recent immigrants was erased. Of course, as graffiti at various points in the city shows, the repressed returns, if in marginalised ways.

 

Whose representations?

In Barcelona, the planners told me they welcomed new malls because they provided the city's young people with somewhere to meet. And there is evidence that in some cases specific groups do use malls for their own purposes, with minimal or no consumption.^[xxx] It is also the case that one reason for the growth of visitors to the new contemporary art museums which city after city has opened is that they are regarded by tourists as safer than the streets outside, and because they have clean toilets as well as gift shops and a cafŽ.^[xxxi] They seem rare islands of security in Bauman's rough sea of the new world order. But, as I tried to avoid setting Sandercock and Bauman in opposition in their perceptions of the new urban, I want to avoid a dualism of conformity to the image of a symbolic economy bred by fear, and the untamed energy of graffiti, seen as a sign of an authentic if dangerous underground city.^[xxxii] I do need to ask, though what kind of representation is appropriate in a city in which we are invited to be free.

 

The mythical image of a public sphere as a metaphorical site in which citizens mix and together shape the values and organisation of their society would seem to have no historical precedents. It serves as a theoretical polarity, contrasted with the oppression of colonial, monarchic rule, in north American democracy in the eighteenth century, and in France in 1789, but has no material demonstration outside rare moments of insurrection. Instead, the public spaces that are generally taken to constitute a public realm are the grandiose, rhetorical spaces in which statues and monuments convey to subjects the values to which they are required to aspire or conform. As a device of public control, the restrictive public realm of the nineteenth-century bourgeois is reproduced in twentieth-century public art (usually by internationally known artists such as Antony Gormley). In some cases, the privileging of white, male vales is reproduced, and even though the statues are at street level they still carry the burden of, if not power, then its late modern equivalent in celebrity. This is not to say there are no cases in which, say, local cultures and local memories inform a work which genuinely creates a public for itself, nor that in some cases interventions by artists are empowering for local participants in their projects, but these remain a minority of examples. But, of course, it is simplistic to say that there are empowering and disempowering projects, when most of life is a grey area, and the possibility for a democratic society is, according to Ernesto Laclau, a negotiated position between freedom and unfreedom.^[xxxiii]

 

Whose cultures?

To construct a model of argument beyond dualism, I begin from the models of economic organisation seen as rival ideologies: the free-market economy, and the state-regulated economy. Both are command economies, the state or capital being in command, serving the interests of public good or private capital. But if the state and capital are points on an axis of tension in the terms of urban or economic governance, then a third possibility is the idea of a local economy. In many places, within the conventional money economy, local economic trading systems have emerged using either a notional unit of local currency or a form of skill and goods exchange - if I fix your car, you will give me some bread you have baked or mend my roof. In the German Democratic Republic prior to 1989, this non-money skill-exchange was commonplace, and its demise is lamented^[xxxiv] From this, I conjecture that beside the (high) Culture of museums and the cultural appropriations of symbolic economies there is a zone of local cultures, as the everyday ways in which local people live. If museums were developed in the nineteenth century for public improvement in the ethos of liberal reformism, and malls and contemporary art museums follow a market-led economy's equivalent production of conformity, outside, in the residual and interstitial spaces of a city, ordinary life goes on.

Yet in the new Barcelona it seems transitional, interstitial spaces are erased when infill development of apartment buildings uses the polished surfaces and absence of balconies that denote a northern rather than a Mediterranean port city. Port cities are poor and full of drunken sailors seeking the red light district. Affluent cities are cleansed of such street encounters, in a trajectory of exclusion (of the vagrant and insane, the dead, the poor, the sick) and confinement in functionally specific institutions (the asylum, the cemetery, the workhouse, the clinic).^[xxxv] This urban ideal is projected, too, in single-use zoning and the reductive imagery of symbolic economies. It is resisted in the survival of local cultural forms and modalities, and in the everyday occupation of space. Local cultures tend to be marginalised, then, but do not need artists to invent them - they already exist and have their own means of development. But if I ask what might be a positive relation between Culture and cultures, it may be that Culture has a role in creating recognition of cultures and the usually tacit knowledges they embody, alongside the professional knowledges and aesthetic visions of professionals.

 

To concludes: first, there is a critical function of culture in, for example, questioning the given meanings of monuments and spaces as in Krzysztov Wodiczko's projection works using public monuments. This might be a way to approach what Bauman sees as the task of critical theory - 'to defend the vanishing public realm, or rather to refurnish and repopulate the public space fast emptying'^[xxxvi] due to its desertion by both the engaged citizen and what he calls real power, the latter having migrated to a territory which can 'be described as Òouter spaceÓ'^[xxxvii] (by which I think he means the decentred spaces of global corporate restructuring as well as cyberspace). This is an equivalent of the ritualised destruction of statues that takes place at moments of a sudden shift of power such as the Paris Commune of 1871, when the Vend™me Column was toppled. This possibility includes, too, the emergent participatory and collaborative practices of the 1900s, as in the London-based artists' group PLATFORM's guided walks of the city's financial and power landscapes. Of course, parallel to critical cultural practices are critical social practices, some beginning in the squats of the 1960s to 1980s, such as the free city of Christiania in Copenhagen. And there is everyday refusal of the dominant ideology, in anti-war protest, fly-posting, and in rare cases refusal of taxation. Second, there is the possibility that an aesthetic dimension offers, as Herbert Marcuse argued, a space for critical distance when political change is not viable.^[xxxviii] Avant-garde art ruptures the codes, such as perception, of the dominant society, and may spark a latent utopian imagination. Or, it may lead to a visit to the gallery shop and opportunities for conspicuous consumption. Yet, as Arnold Berleant argues, installation art makes the observer a participant in a non-standard world; from this, 'we find ourselves well on the way to a social aesthetics, for it is but a short step in this sequence of arts to a social environment.'^[xxxix] This may, however, be a view from rarefied position. Third, there is recognition of everyday creativity and the potential for liberation in the routines of the everyday. This brings me, finally, to Henri Lefebvre's theory of moments of presence in which a sudden clarity appears, for anyone. Rob Shields summarizes, 'Moments outflank the pretensions of wordy theories, rules and laws, and challenge the limits of everyday living. 'A sudden insight into a situation or an experience beyond the merely empirical routine of some activity.'^[xl] The moment is transformatory and intersects public and private spaces, re-frames public realms, may occur during acts of revolt or privacy, and denotes a creative imagination that envisages not only how things are but also how they might be. From the imagination of what might be, accompanied by a critical awareness of what is, opens a realization of the gap between the two.