From: Mercedes Perez Melgosa <melgosa@u.washington.edu>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.spain
Subject: Barcelona, Barcelonaaaaa
Date: 23 Jul 1992 13:02:11 -0700
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Reply-To: Mercedes Perez Melgosa <melgosa@u.washington.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: aludra.usc.edu
Originator: Mercedes Perez Melgosa <melgosa@u.washington.edu>

Hola a todos:
	Aqui va un articulo extraido de "The Wall Street Journal" acerca
de los cambios urbanisticos que se han producido en Barcelona y como estos
cambios han afectado a todos los ciudadanos de la Ciudad Condal.
	Me parece que son de destacar los comentarios de Eduardo Mendoza y
Albert Boadella.
	Que disfruteis y perdon por los errores que pueda haber cometido
al mecanografiar :). 


		THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
		Monday, July 20 1992


In Barcelona, Olympics Are Used as Engine Of Civil Rejuvenation

by Craig Forman and Roger Thurow
Barcelona, Spain-
	With their work all but complete and the Olympics Games imminent,
Pascal Maragall and Josep Miquel Abad savor a leisurely Spanish supper and
then take a midnight stroll along the Mediterranean waterfront.
	The two friends pass a gleaming new Olympic village and
beachfront, reclaimed from the grimy industrial area that had blocked
access to the sea for decades. Behind them, cars seed along a new roadway
that connects the ring of Olympic sports sites and rep laces tangled back
streets. On a nearby hillside, lights twinkle from a state-of-the-art
telecommunications tower, testimony to the modernization of Barcelonas's
phone system.
	" A few years ago. when we began this project, only you and I
believed this could happen" says Mr Maragall, Barcelona's mayor. Mr. Abad,
the chief executive of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, laughs at the thought.
"This has been a product of a gang of craz y people".
	Crazy, maybe,. Calculating, definitely. While men who run the
international Olympic movement have used the games' image to generate
unprecedented sums, Barcelona's ambitious developers have in turn
exploited the Olympics as few other host cities have don e - perhaps as no
city will do again. After two decades of esplosive financial growth, the
Olympics may be reaching their financial apogee. Some observers foresee
television and marketing revenue - especially from the U.S. - cresting,
putting limits on th e ambitions of future host cities.
	When the Summer Games of the 25th Olympiad open Saturday ,
billions of people all around the word will behold the bold new
Barcelona., a city of 1.7 million people pinched between the Mediterranean
Sea and the Collserola Mountains. Barcelona hopes to put
 behind it a half-century of neglect and oppression, transforming itself
from Spain's gritty second city into a glittering reproach to the
hackneyed image of Spain as a "European Mexico", as one local businessman
puts it.
	From the moment they first bid for the Games in 1983, city fathers
viewed the Olympics as and engine of badly needed urban renewal. Over six
years, nearly $8 billion in public and private funds have been spent on
dozens of proyects, bringing everything f rom new multilevel highways to a
space-age airport to a city that in some ways hadn't changed much since it
welcomed Christopher Columbus back from the New Word. Of the money spent
by Barcelona. only 11% is related directly to such Olympic infrastructure
 as stadiums and athletic facilities. 

Catching Up

	The huge transformation has come with costs, forever changing the
shape, and perhaps the soul, of the city. Nonetheless, having lagged
behind other great European cities for centuries, Barcelona now is
elbowing the likes of Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and M ilan for attention
from international investors.
	"We have modernized the city, not only in what has been done, but
in what has been shown can be done," says Pedro Fontana, a local
businessman and chief of operations for the Barcelona Olympics.
	For the restless developers of Barcelona, the actual Olympic Games
will be a mere two-week fiesta, a halftime in their dreams. "Many people
see Olympics as the end of our work, but it is really only the beginning,"
says Manuel de Forn, a city planner cha rting Barcelona's course toward
the year 2000 from his chic office overlooking an old town square. "We
have created a new city. Now we need to profit from it." For starters,
Barcelona is bidding to become the headquarters of the proposed European
Central
 Bank, competing with Frankfurt, London and Amsterdam. 

In Madrid's Shadow

	That the city could be so presumptuous illustrates how t Olympics
have altered Barcelona's mind as well as its body. After all, Barcelona is
the capital of Catalonia, which celebrates a defeat as its national
holiday (Sept. 11, the day in 1714 when Catal onia lost its independence
to Spain).
	In Spain, Barcelona has always had second-city status,
overshadowed by t cosmopolitan capital, Madrid. Three times , Barcelona
bid for the Olympics but came up short. (In 1929, the city even built a
new stadium, but lost to Berlin in the bidding for the 1936 games.) In
subsequent years, Franco punished Barcelona with institutional neglecting
retaliation for its republican leanings during the Spanish Civil War.
	Thus, the Olympics are like "a coming out party for Barcelona,"
says Xavier Corbero, the well-known Catalan sculptor. "Nothing happen here
for 40 years, so it is like going to your first ball."
	Each summer Olympics is now a $2 billion enterprise including
television rights, sponsorship deals and marketing gimmicks. That's a huge
increase from 16 years ago, when Montreal hammed municipal changes ion a
similar scale; that city is still trying to
 pay debts from its Olympic Games. (In Barcelona, taxes have risen faster
than inflation for the past five years and will continue rising for
another five years to pay a roughly $800 million Olympic debt - about
equal to the city's annual tax revenues.)
	On the other hand, Los Angeles - withe its more modest planning
goals and its organization by a private-sector enterprise - had a huge
financial success with the Summer Games. And Atlanta, which will host the
games in 1996, already is a relentlessly mode rn city that doesn't meed
large-scale changes in its infrastructure.
	"Barcelona is a city that has made the best use of the Olympics for
its own benefit," says Mr. Abad. City officials and the Olympic organizers
here believe that in the future the Games may not generate the resources
to finance such a transformation. 

Heroic Scale

	In a post-modern office overlooking the Ramblas, the famed
strolling street that runs like a backbone though Barcelona's old city,
architect Oriol Bohigas, the city's cultural counselor, calls Barcelona
"the last example of the grand the organization of a city" on a scale
equal to Haussmann's plan for Paris and L'Enfant's project for Washington
D.C.
	In Barcelona's changes seem enormous it is because the city was in
monumental need of a change. Decades of political repression,
industrialization and bad development had spilled the city's unique
artistic and architectural heritage,, and made Barcelona notorious as one
of Europe's dark spots.
	Now, Barcelona is trying to reclaim the city's proud tradition.
More than 150 new squares have been built, many of therm featuring massive
sculptures and artwork bu such artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes
Oldenburg and Barcelona native Antoni Tapies. Tho usands of new buildings
and apartments have been spruced up, including the bizarre confections of
Antoni Gaudi. Meanwhile, new space-age buildings include the Olympic
indoor stadium - the Palau Sant Jordi, where gymnastics events will be
held and a soarin g television tower near the Montjuic Olympic stadium. 
 
The Pain of Progress
	
	To pave the way for such changes, Barcelona's authorities have
already destroyed 700 apartments without much protest - most of them in
the older part of the city. About two-thirds of the residents have been
relocated in new apartments. the rest, mostly o lder, single people, have
taken the money and moved in with their families elsewhere in the city.
	Of course, the changes have meant a painful end to a way of life
for some people. Down on the waterfront, where buildings have been razed
to make room for the athletes' village, the one-bustiling Con Costas
resturant is almost empty. In a age space for f urniture and memories,
Carmen Martinez, matriarch of the family-owned business, says the effects
of the Olympics have been devastating.
	Before the games, nine restaurants crowded the waterfront. Now,
Con Costas is the only one left -hanging on thorough litigation alone. "We
understand that there are some things that the city had to do for the
Olympics," says Mrs. Martinez. "For some peo ple, it has been fantastic.
But, for others, it has been painful and for us it has been horrible."
	Barcelona novelist Eduardo Mendoza, who generally welcomes the
changes, says the destruction of the restaurants on the beach "was a
disaster." But, he adds, "The sense of modernity the people wanted is what
they are getting."
	
	Spirit of Spain

	Others are more critical. Alberto Boadella, leader of the Jesters,
a sort of Spanish Monty Python, says Barcelona risks tipping the "balance
between organization and chaos" that makes Spain unique. "The danger in
joining this international culture," he s ays, "is that we lose a lot of
what Spain is about."
	For some, though, modernization can't come quickly enough. "We
look at the Games as an advertisement for Barcelona, Catalonia and Spain,"
says Luis Bassat, president of local ad agency Bassat, Ogilvy & Mather and
organizer of the opening and closing cere monies. Riding through Barcelona
in his chauffeur-driven sedan, smoothing out administrative wrinkles over
his cellular telephone, Mr Bassat says, "This is an opportunity that only
comes once."
	Of all the transformations that the games have brought to
Barcelona, the most spectacular has been down at the waterfront, where the
city is once again open to the sea. Despite the city's maritime heritage -
it us a busy seaport for Carhaginian and Roman s traders - Barcelona's
waterfront in this century had degenerated into and ugly wasteland of
factories, warehouses and rail road yards surrounded by a cement wall.
	Now the wall is down, and the city has a new perspective - as well
as more than a mile of brand-new beachfront.
	"Can you understand what it means for us to be here?' says city
spokesman Albert Montagut, standing ankle-deep in sand as he looks out
over the Mediterranean. "When I was a boy, I dreamed of being able to the
beach here, But walls and industry blocked everything. Now, finally we can
touch our sea."


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Merche