\n
\n
Jonathan\u00a0Rouleau |\u00a0McGill University<\/p>\n
EVERY (NOCTURNAL) TOURIST LEAVES A TRACE:
\nUrban Tourism, Nighttime Landscape, and Public Places in Ciutat Vella<\/em>, Barcelona<\/h4>\n <\/p>\n
This article examines the cultural significance of nightlife in recent public discourse on the perils of tourism in Ciutat<\/em> Vella<\/em>, the oldest district in Barcelona. As the fourth most visited city in Europe, Barcelona hosted approximately eight million international tourists in 2016, a fact that has prompted tensions between citizens, policy-makers, and tourists. While Barcelona policy-makers had originally promoted its vibrant nightlife as a means of facilitating the city\u2019s cultural regeneration and attracting tourists, the illegal rentals of flats, the noise and overcrowding of public places at night, and some of the unsavoury activities associated with drunkenness, including public urination, have caused considerable anxiety on the part of locals, neighborhood associations, grassroots movements, and Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau\u2019s political party, Barcelona en Com\u00fa. Barcelona\u2019s nightlife is integral to its tourist economy, though the fallout due to its excesses threatens the city\u2019s livability and reputation in the minds of citizens and the municipal government elected in June 2015.<\/p>\nI take this fundamental tension as my point of departure, first tracing the history of Barcelona\u2019s cultural regeneration over the last one hundred years in order to provide a background for contemporary public and political discourses on tourism and nightlife. I argue that Barcelona\u2019s current crisis of tourism is deeply linked to its nighttime cultural scenes, which both contribute to a romantic construction of Barcelona and trigger local unrest over such issues as noise, gentrification, and the exclusion that marks certain public places.[1]<\/a> Following the critical tradition of the \u201cBarcelona Model\u201d by Capel, Degen, Delgado, and V\u00e1zquez Montalb\u00e1n, my article seeks to contribute to urban cultural studies scholarship on contemporary cultural scenes and to show how highly visible touristic scenes produce, shape, and represent a contested city.<\/p>\nThe Crisis of Tourism in Barcelona<\/strong><\/h5>\n[W]hoever ventures out at night will find it hard not to come across the following inevitable message on the doors of bars and clubs: \u201cPlease respect the neighbours\u2019 peace and quiet,\u201d a completely indispensable request and piece of advice in a city like Barcelona that has such a powerfully vibrant range of culture and entertainment to offer. (Ajuntament de Barcelona<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nAt night, Barcelona is a noisy city\u2014perhaps the loudest in Western Europe (Mart\u00ed 9). The Ajuntament<\/em> de<\/em> Barcelona<\/em> (Barcelona City Council), as noted above, is well aware of this fact. Barcelona is the third most densely populated city in Europe, a statistic that does not take into account the tourists who gather there, primarily in the old city\u2014approximately thirty-two million in 2016 (Plush). In addition to showcasing a variety of international festivals such as Primavera Sound, Piknic Electronik, and Sonar, Barcelona is also quintessentially part of the European Mediterranean in the sense that it hosts numerous local fiestas<\/em> that unwind far into the night, often in the city\u2019s public areas. The places in which where these cultural events unfold may sometimes be conceptualized as spaces of \u201cde-differentiation\u201d (Lash ix), as one cannot easily distinguish the locals from the tourists. However, there are occasions when locals and tourists do not cohabitate peacefully\u2014in moments when tourists are (too) visible or audible, or when they are unwelcome to locals and public authorities.<\/p>\nOn August 15, 2014, three naked Italian tourists strolled the seafront neighbourhood of La Barceloneta\u2014one of the four neighbourhoods of Ciutat Vella<\/em> (Old City)\u2014for three hours while Vicens Forner, a Barcelonan photographer, immortalized the episode.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/i.WEB_.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Figure 1. Tourists walking naked in La Barceloneta in August 2014.<\/p>\n
Several Catalan, Spanish, and international newspapers published Forner\u2019s photo and it circulated widely in social media. The incident prompted popular and media mobilization in relation to a leitmotiv theme of what Donald McNeill (1) terms the \u201cNew Barcelona\u201d era: the impact of tourism on the city. In the days following the nudists\u2019 parade, a few hundred city dwellers took to the streets to demonstrate against what they called \u201cbinge tourism,\u201d or turismo basura<\/em> (junk tourism). They also protested against unlicensed tourist flats rented on websites such as Airbnb, and to oppose the creation of a touristic monoculture from which they felt alienated. While the nudists\u2019 fl\u00e2nage<\/em> had taken place in the middle of the day, the resulting protests resonated with broader concerns that, while not addressing nightlife exclusively, had strong nocturnal components. What was at stake were various articulations of the citizens\u2019 \u201cright to the city\u201d (le droit \u00e0 la ville<\/em>), to use Lefebvre\u2019s (121) famous phrase and, in particular, their \u201cright to the night\u201d and their \u201cright to sleep.\u201d In January 2017, thousands of Barcelonans strolled down La Rambla, Barcelona\u2019s most famous street, to protest against gentrification and the number of tourists in the city. These events led to the creation of anti-tourism groups, such as the Assemblea de ve\u00efns Plataforma Resistim al G\u00f2tic<\/em>.<\/p>\nTourism was a major issue in Barcelona\u2019s 2015 municipal election. After she was elected in June 2015 as Barcelona\u2019s first female mayor, the political activist Ada Colau (of the Barcelona en Com\u00fa <\/em>party, previously Guanyem<\/em> Barcelona<\/em>) imposed a one-year moratorium on short-term rentals and new licenses for hotel rooms. Colau wished to determine the number of tourists that the city could actually handle, in an effort to \u201cstop the city becoming Venice\u201d (Badcock). The mayor was not against tourists per se, as tourism represents 15% of the GPD in a city where 80% of the workforce is in the service economy (Degen and Garc\u00eda 1029), but wished to see them less clustered in the Old Town. Indeed, most of the tourists who visit Barcelona every year end up visiting and sleeping in Ciutat<\/em> Vella<\/em>, which comprises four administrative neighbourhoods: La Barceloneta, El G\u00f2tic, El Raval, and Sant Pere\/Santa Caterina\/La Ribera.<\/p>\nIn March 2016, for the first time in its history, Barcelona implemented a plan, led by Ada Colau, to reverse the growth of tourism. As a way of controlling tourists in the Old City, Colau\u2019s government banned any groups that exceeded fifteen people from visiting Barcelona landmark La Boqueria Market at peaks times, to prevent it from losing its identity and function (Amey). It is now also forbidden to sublet a flat for less than a week; licenses for new hotel rooms in the Old City will not be issued and hotels that will close will not be replaced. This Plan Especial Urban\u00edstico de Alojamientos Tur\u00edsticos<\/em> (PEUAT) is aimed at unclogging tourism in Ciutat Vella<\/em>, developing tourist facilities in peripheral areas, and stopping gentrification. Since 2012, travelers who stay overnight in Barcelona pay a \u201ctourist tax\u201d that is mainly collected from hotels, hostels, and tourist homes, as well as from the cruise ships visiting what is now the busiest touristic port of the Mediterranean. City Councillor Gala Pin argued that the money could be used to offset the costs of tourism, \u201cnot only in terms of infrastructure, cleaning and security but also in terms of the floating population that is causing the indirect expulsion of local people\u201d (LaGrave). In January 2017, Colau\u2019s presented the ambitious \u201cStrategic Plan for Tourism 2020,\u201d a lengthy document that is mostly aimed at controlling tourism and making Barcelona less of a cheap destination for tourists.<\/p>\nThese various policy measures might seem to be novel, but artists have already taken up (and shed light on) Barcelona\u2019s tourism crisis. Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s 2010 film Biutiful<\/em> shows how multiple voices and bodies are unheard and invisible in the mainstream discourse on beautiful, touristic, and modernista<\/em> Barcelona. In an insightful analysis of the film, Benjamin Fraser, drawing upon urban theorist Manuel Delgado, underlines the film\u2019s alternative story of Barcelona, \u201cthat is, the drab, grimy city full of labour inequality, the collusion of police with multinationals, the reality of sickness (cancer) and the lack of real possibilities for the immigrants who come from abroad hoping to make a better life for themselves and for their families\u201d (20). A curated version of Catalan identity and the city\u2019s stunning architecture\u2014as well as the use of both in promotional media\u2014have been central pillars of urban renewal in Barcelona, but the film skillfully shows how the construction of the Barcelona-ness is also one of exclusion.<\/p>\nFocusing specifically on the crisis of tourism, filmmaker Eduardo Chib\u00e1s\u2019s documentary Bye Bye Barcelona <\/em>(2014) examines the coexistence of tourists and residents in the city, particularly in its older quarters. One of the main arguments of the film is that residents no longer make use of certain parts of the city, such as the pedestrian-oriented central street La Rambla. Around 80% of the people who walk on La Rambla are tourists, and it was the filmmaker\u2019s hope that city residents would succeed in taking back the street (Chib\u00e1s Fern\u00e1ndez). The message may well have been heard. In May 2016, a \u201cSpecial Plan for the Rambla\u201d was approved. It is aimed at reducing crowding and clutter and giving the promenade back to local residents. The City Council launched a contest for the redesign of the street promenade in the hope of implementing the project in 2019. Like The Venice Syndrome<\/em> (2012) and Welcome Goodby<\/em>e (2014), two documentaries that examine the impact of mass tourism on Venice and Berlin, respectively, Bye Bye Barcelona <\/em>does not argue for a non-tourist city, but rather proposes ways of achieving a more sustainable approach to tourism. Indeed, Chib\u00e1s Fern\u00e1ndez would like to see tourists visiting places other than Barcelona\u2019s most famous landmarks, and has expressed the wish that Barcelona promote itself differently, notably by publicizing and respecting the everyday life of its residents.<\/p>\nIn the same vein, playwright Marc Caellas\u2019 theatrical work Guiris Go Home<\/em> (2015)\u2014\u201cguiris\u201d being a derogatory Spanish term for tourists\u2014deployed, as characters, artists who cooked paella for those in the audience, or others, impersonating tourists, who talked loudly on their phones or went to the restrooms during performances. If these works by Fern\u00e1ndez and Caellas differ in their form and approach\u2014the former strives for a paradigm shift in the ways in which Barcelona attracts tourists, while the latter uses irony to depict what is perceived to be the deplorable state of tourism in the city\u2014they both offer an imagined monolithic construction of the average tourist. Here, the tourist is more often than not depicted in caricatural terms, a view that has become, for better or worse, a dominant perspective in present-day Barcelona.<\/p>\nBefore turning to the most problematic scenes of tourism in Barcelona, I will briefly trace the ways in which culture, in both its tangible and intangible forms, has been mobilized for urban regeneration. On the one hand, design and architecture have traditionally been used as vectors of change and mobilization in Barcelona, an approach that culminated in the 1992 Olympic Games project. On the other hand, marketing and place-making strategies have served the purpose of creating an urban imaginary, a symbolic Barcelona-ness to which tourists are attracted. Present-day Barcelona, as a major tourist hub, is the result of rapid and drastic changes that have taken place, for the most part, in the last thirty years. We must go back even further, however, to understand the rich, productive, and transformative character of planning in the city.<\/p>\n
Urban Planning, the \u201cRoaring Twenties,\u201d and Nocturnal Life<\/strong><\/h5>\nIn the mid-19th<\/sup> century the walls that surrounded Barcelona were dismantled. Catalan civic engineer Ildefons Cerd\u00e0\u2014arguably the founder of urban planning as a profession, whose main ideas were articulated in the 1859 El Pla Cerd\u00e0<\/em>\u2014led a major urban renewal plan by widening the city through the creation of an \u201cextension\u201d: the L\u2019Eixample neighbourhood (Aibar and E. Bijker; Fraser; Soria y Puig; Ward). The objective was to link the Old City to the surrounding villages. This grid-like neighbourhood, unusual for Barcelona, was constructed with large, magnificent Hausmannian boulevards. The buildings of L\u2019Eixample, no higher than three storeys and equipped with green spaces, became the residences for an elite Catalonian bourgeoisie (Marshall).<\/p>\nIn the late-19th<\/sup> century, like many other Western cities, Barcelona went through a phase in which urban development and industrialization flourished. In a context of relative political stability and wealth, the bourgeoisie started promoting and underwriting Catalan identity through arts and architecture (Marshall). The Barcelona World\u2019s Fair in 1888 marked the beginning of a cultural movement that had deep Catalan roots: Modernista <\/em>(Catalan Art Nouveau). The period between 1888 and 1910\u2014commencing with the building of Dom\u00e8nech i Montaner\u2019s caf\u00e9 for the World\u2019s Fair\u2014witnessed the creation of the city\u2019s most prominent buildings, parks, and places (Casa Batll\u00f3, <\/em>Casa Mil\u00e0, Hospital de Sant Pau, Palau de la M\u00fasica Catalana, and Park G\u00fcell). Noucentisme, <\/em>an artistic movement aimed at reviving Catalan\u2019s classical past, began to replace Modernista<\/em> in the 1910s, the reasons being twofold. The first of these were the criticisms of the aesthetic exuberances of Modernista<\/em>, as voiced by Charles Voysey, an Arts and Crafts architect. He argued against what he perceived to be the \u201csimplicity\u201d of Catalan Art Nouveau, that is \u201cthe work of a lot of imitators with nothing but mad eccentricity as a guide\u201d (Mackay 53). A second criticism was directed at the anti-academic roots of Modernista<\/em> and the accusation, by an ascendant bourgeois class, that it was too progressive. Indeed, bourgeois nationalists who rose to prominence in the early-20th<\/sup> century sought new cultural forms with which to assert their power and identity, and found these in the aesthetics of Noucentisme.<\/em><\/p>\nIn the 1920s, Barcelona entered its own \u201cRoaring Twenties,\u201d a decade marked here, as in other cities of the West, by the development of a rich nightlife in which jazz music was prominent. In his book Jazz Age Barcelona<\/em>, Robert A. Davidson has revisited the numerous articles on the Barcelona night published in the Catalan journal Mirador<\/em> (1929-1937). In particular, Sebasti\u00e0 Gasch, a Catalan art critic (and later author of the 1957 Barcelona de Nit<\/em>:\u00a0El M\u00f3n de l’Espectacle <\/em>[Barcelona by Night: The World of Spectacle]) offered accounts of nighttime concerts and performances alongside sketches of the city\u2019s most marginal neighborhoods, such as Barrio Chino (Chinatown).[2]<\/a> Sometimes referred to as a red-light district and commonly compared to the bohemian scenes of Harlem, Montmartre, or Soho, the southern tip of the neighbourhood of El Raval acquired an image involving drug abuse, prostitution, and crime. Barrio Chino<\/em>, whose golden age took place in the 1920s, was portrayed in various media forms as a mostly male-patronized hub for vice. As McDonogh reminds us, while the quarter was comprised of several types of establishments (concert venues, neighbourhood and special interests bars or clubs, and establishments linked to prostitution), it was usually the \u201cprostitution bars\u201d that drew the most attention. These bars not only provided the material with which both local and foreign writers, photographers, and filmmakers (such as Georges Bataille, Joan Colom, Jean Genet, Ignacio Gil) constructed a romantic representation of Barcelona\u2019s nighttime cultural scenes; they were also used by local residents within processes of social distinction. Underlining the gendered character of these spaces, Gary McDonogh notes:<\/p>\n\u201cSpatializing\u201d immorality allows others to differentiate themselves as virtuous by location and behaviour as space and virtue reinforce each other while intimately dividing social worlds. Good Barcelona men relax in good bars in good neighbourhoods, possibly with good women (who might also stay at home). (265)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Nevertheless, \u201cbad bars\u201d could benefit from a reputation that was perceived by some artists and writers as more authentic, and as providing an aura that could foster their creativity. Such \u201ctourists of the marginal\u201d (Ramon Resina 105) as Sebasti\u00e0 Gasch and his artist friend Joan Mir\u00f3 would often venture to the alternative bars of La Barceloneta\u2014then a fishermen\u2019s neighbourhood\u2014and Barrio Chino<\/em>. As Robert Davidson notes, their randonn\u00e9es<\/em> were motivated by a search for difference and alterity in the outskirts and edgier areas of town. Their passage from \u201csalon to tavern\u201d was a means of finding inspiration in the crude, anti-bourgeois kitsch of the latter (109-13). Their gritty nocturnal journeys clashed with the up-and-coming modernista <\/em>metropolis that had been crafted since the 1888 World\u2019s Fair. Representations of the El Raval district and Barrio Chino in the 1920s depicted the area as edgy and dangerous, a vision that persisted until the urban renewal movements of the 1980s and the 1990s.[3]<\/a><\/p>\nThe \u201cRoaring Twenties\u201d culminated with the Barcelona World\u2019s Fair of 1929. This was marked as a Spanish event, unlike the 1888 Barcelona Fair, which had been marketed as Catalan in character. Among its many effects, the 1929 Fair was a turning point in the electrification of Barcelona. As Hochadel and Nieto-Galan note:<\/p>\n
[T]he spread of electric lighting altered Barcelona\u2019s cityscape and reshaped the everyday life of its citizens. The nocturnal city became a new \u201csite,\u201d full of life, overcoming the routines dictated by natural light: from the \u201celectric\u201d night parties at the 1888 Exhibition, to the new facilities at the operating rooms of the clinics, and the electrical lights at the fun parks. The sophisticated display of lights and colours at the 1929 Exhibition was widely considered a triumph of electricity in the city. (15)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Electricity played a strong role in the transformation of urban landscape and it had a profound effect on the city dwellers\u2019 routines, although these changes are beyond the scope of this article. While technological change shaped modern Barcelona, so, too, did the political situation and the dark age of the Franco era.<\/p>\n
Following the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, General Franco held power until his death in 1975. Throughout these years, Catalonia, defeated during the Civil War, was considered an enemy of the state and Barcelona\u2019s infrastructures were left for the most part unattended. The city was denied any right to celebrate and foster its distinct Catalan identity. As Degen notes, \u201c[d]uring Franco\u2019s era public investment within Barcelona\u2019s city centre had been deliberately neglected as a way of punishing a city that had been the bastion of the republican and anarchist movements during the Civil War (132). Then, in the late 1950s, Spain promoted desarrollismo<\/em> (developmentalism) by opening its borders to foreign tourists within an atmosphere of liberalization and laissez-faire (Garc\u00eda and Claver 114). Those who benefitted most from these policies were real estate developers, who were allowed to build cheap, poorly constructed hotels and residential buildings in the inner city. However, as the tourists visiting Catalonia were mostly interested in its sunny beaches, few of them would actually visit Barcelona, which was the case until the 1980s and 1990s.<\/p>\nPost-Industrialism, the \u201cBarcelona Model,\u201d
\nand the Aestheticization of Public Places<\/u><\/h5>\n
Barcelona, like many other Western cities, was severely affected by the decline of its manufacture sector. Between 1960 and 1985, the city lost 42% of its jobs in manufacturing and 69% of those in construction (McNeill 94). The response to this crisis was to be found in post-industrialism, that is, the rise of a knowledge and service economy and the embracing by cities of policies of cultural development (Degen and Garc\u00eda). Within these doctrines, urban cores assume new primacy relative to larger metropolitan areas and cities compete against each other in the attraction of tourists through the provision of cultural amenities. Since the late 1990s, Barcelona has made use of culture in a broad, encompassing way within its plans for economic development.<\/p>\n
When the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC) was elected as the municipal government in Barcelona in 1979, it privileged small interventions in public spaces, parks, and streets in collaboration with the Federaci\u00f3<\/em> d’Associacions<\/em> de<\/em> Ve\u00efns<\/em> de<\/em> Barcelona<\/em> (neighbourhood associations) and other grassroots movements whose origins can be traced back to the Franco era. It was not until the 1992 Olympics project, however, that Barcelona\u2019s transition to a post-industrial city gathered momentum, as the city became a major tourist destination. This transition was led by a charismatic mayor, Pasqual Maragall i Mira, grandson of the renowned poet Joan Maragall. During his period in office, from 1982 to 1997, Maragall initiated and managed Barcelona\u2019s most colossal revitalization project since the creation of l\u2019Exaimple. The \u201cBarcelona Model\u201d (Fancelli) would become a celebrated version of urban policy and planning widely appropriated in the Western world, particularly in the United Kingdom (Balibrea). It was born in 1986, when Barcelona was designated as host of the Olympics Games of 1992 and the Old City was declared an \u00c0rea<\/em> de<\/em> Rehabilitaci<\/em>\u00f3<\/em> Integral<\/em> (Integral Rehabilitation Area). This model also had roots in the 1985 beautification campaign, led by the City Council, known as Barcelona<\/em> Posa\u2019t<\/em> Guapa<\/em> (Barcelona Make Yourself Beautiful) (McNeil 14).<\/p>\nThe Olympic Games of 1992 shaped, accomplished, and represented to the world the transition to the \u201cNew Barcelona.\u201d The games provided Barcelona with the resources, both local and national, that Maragall needed to carry out the project. The entrepreneurial mayor focused on two major policy components: urban infrastructure, through the revitalization and preservation of historic buildings in the city centre, and administration of the games themselves. With respect to the former, architecture and the \u201cmonumentalization of the periphery\u201d (Degen et Garc\u00eda 1027) were used a means of giving back the city to its citizens and encouraging social cohesion. Politically, Maragall had always been more interested in crafting a Barcelonan identity and encouraging democratic citizen participation than he was with questions of class and ideology (McNeil 76). The political doctrine that came to be known as Maragallisme<\/em> used the Olympics as a means for promoting Catalan identity and building a strong international image for the city and its region. If some people feared that the Olympic Games would be used to culturally \u201cde-catalanize\u201d Barcelona and Catalonia (McNeil 75), their fears were not realized. Catalan was one of the games\u2019 four official languages, and the marketing of the Olympics placed great emphasis on Catalan identity.<\/p>\nThe mandate for the planning of the Olympic Village was awarded to the firm MBMP (Martorell Bohigas Mackay Puigdomenech). Bohigas, a local starchitect, had been director of planning for the Barcelona City Council during the period 1980-1984, and his key ideas were laid out in his 1983 essay \u201cPer una Altra Urbanitat\u201d (\u201cA Different Urbanism\u201d) and 1985 book Reconstrucci\u00f3 de Barcelona <\/em>(Reconstruction of Barcelona). Unlike many other Olympic projects, Barcelona\u2019s is often seen as a success story. In 1990, the city won the Prince of Wales Prize given by Harvard University, and in 1999 it was awarded The Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, the first time that prize had been granted to a place and not to an architect. If economic accumulation was not the main motivation behind the Barcelona Model, its implementation nevertheless stimulated the city\u2019s economy by attracting tourists to the city. In particular, the redevelopment of the old port into the Maremagnum project and the revitalization of the seafront made these sites into major attractions for tourists seeking to experience a Mediterranean way of life.<\/p>\nThe Touristic Scene(s) of Barcelona<\/strong><\/h5>\nWe may approach Barcelona\u2019s current status in relation to its various \u201cscenes,\u201d as theorized by Alan Blum (164-188). Blum argues that a scene is defined by the visible and shared public co-intimacy between locals and strangers, most often tourists. In their visibility and theatricality, scenes become a key feature of urban experience. This is the scene described by Barcelona\u2019s city government as it seeks to offer a highly evocative representation of its night:<\/p>\n
Barcelona at its most\u00a0multifaceted and intense unfurls at night, the time for theatre, drinks with friends, music and dancing. This is when the Catalan capital’s\u00a0most risqu\u00e9, hidden-away and discrete spots open up, where the day lengthens and the nightlife bursts out: this is where the city at its most eclectic and select and where lovers of opera, grand settings, ground-breaking small-format theatre, cabaret, beer, wine, gin and tonic and exclusive cocktails, the old dance halls and the latest discos all come alive. (Ajuntament de Barcelona<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThis description interweaves, in romantic fashion, the visible and hidden aspects of Barcelona\u2019s nighttime scenes in order to paint the night as a time of infinite possibilities. Tourism brochures and media representations of Barcelona (including films such as Woody Allen\u2019s Vicky Cristina Barcelona<\/em> (2008), Whit Stillman\u2019s Barcelona<\/em> (1994), and Pedro Alm\u00f3dovar\u2019s All About My Mother<\/em> (1999)) celebrate the city\u2019s nightlife by aestheticizing it. The promotion of nighttime entertainment and leisure has become central to urban policy because it is perceived as giving cities a comparative advantage over others in the attraction of tourists. Barcelona has joined other cities in recognizing the importance of its nighttime economy, a phenomena defined by Brabazon and Mallinder as \u201cthe appropriation of night-time urban spaces by the leisure and entertainment industries\u201d (168). The development of a nighttime economy has become one of the key components of post-industrialist discourse on the organization of urban economies around culture and leisure. Nevertheless if Barcelona has a thriving nightlife scene, it is not a 24-hour city per se (where the distinction between day and night is blurred); rather, nighttime is intimately tied to leisure and entertainment, in other words, to the consumption of a certain type of culture. This embracing of the nighttime economy by the City Council has raised a number of issues. Instead of generating the diversity and vitality described in the above quotation, commercialized nightlife produces spatial segregation in the ways in which it excludes those who do not have the means (or desire) to participate in a rowdy sociability tied to the consumption of alcohol. The restriction of entertainment options described by Brabazon and Mallinder as increasingly characteristic of post-industrial cities has particular applicability to Barcelona:<\/p>\nConcerns with regulation serve to emphasize the extent to which the perception of night-time economies have become synonymous with social management and the degree to which these economies, once a seeming panacea for the revitalization of moribund post industrial and post-colonial centres, are now symptomatic of an alcohol fuelled monoculture. (Brabazon and Mallinder 167-8)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The most problematic dimensions of Barcelona\u2019s nighttime economy are visible in its waterfront scenes.<\/p>\n
Waterfront scenes<\/strong><\/h5>\nThe opening of the city to the sea was a key component of Maragallisme <\/em>(Nello 41). Barcelona, like many other coastal cities, has placed great emphasis on the redevelopment of its waterfront, a key focus of the international discourse on creative cities since the 1990s (Carta and Ronsivalle). In La Barceloneta, a 1.3km2 <\/sup>triangular enclave and the youngest of the four districts of the Old City, the urban revitalization undertaken as part of the Olympics Project involved the removal of train tracks, the sanitizing of water and sand along the 2.2km of beach, and the revitalization of the beachfront promenade. These transformations were undertaken with an emphasis on the production and consumption of art and design.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/ii.WEB_.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Figure 2. The neighbourhood of La Barceloneta.<\/p>\n
Rebecca Horn\u2019s L\u2019Estel Ferit<\/em> (the Wounded Shooting Star), Frank Gehry\u2019s Peix<\/em> (the Fish), and the Arts and MAPFRE Towers (the two tallest buildings in the city) are among the most famous landmarks used to aestheticize this area. In an often-unacknowledged way, Horn\u2019s sculpture\u2014sometimes dubbed Homage to Barceloneta<\/em>\u2014was:<\/p>\ndesigned to commemorate the lost, rusted beach restaurants, the landscape that had developed over generations before the sudden shock of demolition and their replacement by new white sand and new palms (non-native, but expected<\/em> by visitors). (Eaude 285; original emphasis)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/iii.WEB_.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Figure 3. Rebecca Horn\u2019s L\u2019Estel Ferit<\/em>.<\/p>\nThe neighbourhood has now become a passage oblig\u00e9<\/em> for tourists in search of a Mediterranean experience, but these visible landmarks are all central among its attractions. This is the Barcelona highlighted in so many of the images promoting tourism. In the past fifteen years, La Barceloneta has also become an international centre for nightlife, largely as a result of its lively discotheque scene.<\/p>\nLa Barceloneta has one of the most active club scenes in Spain. The neighbourhood is comprised of two distinct but interrelated nighttime cultural scenes. These gravitate towards different types of cultural experience and are relatively isolated from each other geographically, but they often involve the same participants. One of these is the restaurant and bar scene of the residential part of La Barceloneta.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/iv.WEB_.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Figure 4. La Barceloneta.<\/p>\n
The Catalan character of this scene is obvious, as it is constituted by restaurants that offer regional cuisine and includes a few bars patronized mostly by locals. However, the heart of La Barceloneta\u2019s night is usually not associated with this portion of the neighbourhood. The second cultural scene gravitates towards discotheques in the north-eastern part of the neighbourhood. These clubs are largely frequented by tourists and are usually accessed through the beachfront promenade (Catwalk, CDLC, Opium, Sh\u00f4ko, Sotavento). Some of these close at 6am and are major venues on the international DJ circuit.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/v.WEB_.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Figure 5. The CDLC Club, the ARTS and MAPFRE Towers, and Gehry\u2019s Peix<\/em>.<\/p>\nThe club scene in La Barceloneta targets young people and students by offering them an alcohol-fuelled culture. The issues that have come to surround this scene are not principally related to people actually partying in clubs, as the latter are quite isolated from the residential area of La Barceloneta. Problems arise, however, when patrons leave the bars and noisy crowds spill over into the streets (and flats) of the residential part of the neighbourhood.[4]<\/a> This creates what Luc Gwiazdzinski has called a citoyennet\u00e9<\/em> discontinue<\/em> (discontinuous citizenship) (197) in the neighbourhood, as residents feel they are losing their right to the city, to the night, and to sleep. In Gwiazdzinski\u2019s terms, the nighttime tourist scene exacerbates the tension between la ville qui dort<\/em> (the city that sleeps) and la ville qui s\u2019amuse<\/em> (the city that plays) (130). Tourists not only navigate along the traditional routes and spaces crafted for them by the city, but they also structure and shape both space and time through their itineraries. They follow a circuit from beach (day) to restaurants (evening) to bars (evening\/night) to discotheques (night) to public places (night). These places, as McDonogh suggests in his study of Barcelona\u2019s bars, \u201cbecome public markers in the description and control of zones of vice\u201d (264).<\/p>\nThe deeper we get into the night, the more problems emerge, notably in relation to the use and appropriation of public spaces. By day, public places in La Barceloneta are invested by locals, families, and tourists. Indeed, one can find plenty of stores that are aimed at different types of consumers, but these represent the same variety one would find in Kuta, Bali, or Canc\u00fan, Mexico. As Ada Colau has claimed, the area is being transformed into a \u201ctheme park\u201d (Hancox), one that may, in V\u00e1zquez Montalb\u00e1n\u2019s critical diagnosis, be understood as a \u201csimulacra\u201d of Barcelona-ness. At night, these same public spaces lose a portion of their public-ness, though the pertinence of that notion itself is challenged by the ways in which these spaces encourage (or demand) various forms of consumption. The further one goes into the night, the narrower the cultural experiences offered by the city becomes, and the area turns into a space of exclusion because the public spaces are often patronized by young males who drink until the public transit system opens again. Locals, especially women, may not feel safe in certain of Barcelona\u2019s public spaces.<\/p>\n
The tensions surrounding nightlife in Barcelona\u2019s waterfront district are not limited to those between club-goers and the residents of surrounding neighbourhoods. They also extend to exclusionary practices that mark entrance to discotheques and other sites of nighttime entertainment. In 2002, after a night out at the Maremagnum disco complex, a young immigrant from Ecuador was beaten up and thrown into the sea, where he later drowned. The murder was the climax of the various racial tensions that had been recurrent in discotheques, notably the exclusion of Black and Roma people. The Ajuntament<\/em> closed the clubs of the Maremagnum in 2004. Today, only one bar\u2014La Sure\u00f1a\u2014is located in the Maremagnum complex and it closes at 12am. As part of\u00a0the atNight project<\/a>, Mar Santamaria Varas, Pablo Mart\u00ednez Diez and Jordi Bari Corber\u00f3 produced a\u00a0map<\/a>\u00a0showing differences in the investment of Barcelona\u2019s public space during night and day.\u00a0 The club scene is in the upper-right corner of this map; the W hotel is at the bottom-left. A second\u00a0map<\/a>\u00a0shows the routes that taxis use during the day and at night in La Baceloneta.\u00a0These taxi routes present a part of the nighttime flow of La Barceloneta. Although both day and night rides circulate along main axes, the W Hotel scene and that which gravitates toward the main nightclubs draw the most taxis at night. At night, these scenes become \u201carchipels<\/em> nocturnes\u201d<\/em> (nocturnal archipelagos), in the sense that cultural options and the people who consume them are more homogeneous (Gwiazdzinski 159). As the map above demonstrates, cultural consumers of the night are more aggregated and visible in specific places. Different people invest in different places at different times, and the type of activities in which they participate also have a temporal dimension. The overcrowding of (noisy) people in public spaces also has a seasonal dimension that could be worth examining, as the phenomenon of archipels nocturnes<\/em> is exacerbated in the summer.<\/p>\nConclusion<\/strong><\/h5>\nDuring the high season (June to August), Barcelona\u2019s nighttime cultural scenes are a key component of its tourism industry. Arguably, however, the city\u2019s nighttime cultural identity is less well-defined than those of Berlin and London (with their club-based music scenes). In Barcelona, the nocturnal economy may be seen as a nighttime extension of the Mediterranean ethos of \u201csun, sea, sangria,\u201d of a never-ending fiesta. Interestingly, Barcelona does not have the most permissive nighttime culture in Europe; in many neighbourhoods, although it is legal to open new bars (which can close at 3am), it is illegal to establish a discotheque (which can close at 6am). At the same time, the city is engaged in deregulating its nightlife in other respects. Thus, since April 2016, any bar, caf\u00e9, or restaurant can now host concerts. The new policy is aimed at encouraging emergent musicians and at stopping the proliferation of illegal music venues. It is also part of a larger plan to decentralize the cultural scenes in the city. Finally, in response to the expressed desire of citizens to reclaim public spaces, the City Council announced in 2016 that it would create citizen areas in which only residents would be able to drive automobiles. A trial plan would be implemented in L\u2019Eixample and then expanded to other areas of the city.<\/p>\n
Barcelona has a deep and rich history of critical social movements, many of which emerged during Franquismo<\/em>, which provided a clear target for opposition. These movements have criticized the Barcelona model for a long time, as have scholars such as Horacio Capel and Manuel Delgado. Historically, neighborhood movements have tended to be tied to their own community rather than to a specific political party. In her transformation from housing rights activist to mayor, Colau challenged this traditional version. BCom\u00fa<\/em>\u2019s \u201cfeminized democracy and politics\u201d are generally well received because they shed new light on urban problems. For example, in 2016 the political party created the Department of Life Cycles, Feminisms, and LGBTI, whose goal is to develop working groups, reports, and campaigns aimed at fighting sexist discrimination and violence as well as tackling problems such as the feminization of poverty. Still requiring further study are issues related to tourism and their effects on cultural scenes in the city, which remain overlooked in the \u201cStrategic Plan for Tourism 2020.\u201d While the anti-tourism groups received the Plan positively, others fear that this will create more illegality in the room-rental sector and that this \u201cwar on tourism\u201d will negatively affect Barcelona\u2019s economy. With 2017 as the United Nations International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development, it will be necessary to examine these policies as their impacts unfold.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nImages Notes<\/strong><\/h5>\nFigure 1. http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2014\/aug\/21\/naked-italians-protests-drunken-tourists-barcelona<\/a> Accessed March 2 2017<\/p>\nFigure 2.\u00a0https:\/\/www.google.ca\/maps\/<\/a> Accessed 31 March 2017<\/p>\nFigure 3. Rebecca Horn\u2019s L\u2019Estel Ferit <\/em>in La Barceloneta. Jonathan Rouleau, June 2015<\/p>\nFigure 4.\u00a0http:\/\/www.barcelonina.com\/the-tiny-barcelonas-today-la-barceloneta\/<\/a> Accessed 2 March 2017<\/p>\nFigure 5. http:\/\/www.holidaysinbarcelona.co.uk\/wp\/beach-clubs-to-relax-party-in-barcelona\/<\/a> Accessed 2 March 2017<\/p>\nWorks Cited<\/strong><\/h5>\nAibar, Eduardo, and Wiebe E. Bijker. \u201cConstructing a City: The Cerd\u00e0 Plan for the Extension of Barcelona.\u201d Science, Technology & Human Values <\/em>22.1 (1997): 3-30. Print.<\/p>\nAmey, Katie. \u201cBarcelona Mayor Plans to Introduce Tourist Cap to Control Visitor Numbers and \u2018Stop the City from Becoming Venice.\u2019\u201d Daily Mail<\/em> June 1 2015. Print.<\/p>\nBadcock, James. \u201cIncoming Barcelona Mayor Wants to Introduce Tourist Cap.\u201d The Telegraph<\/em>. 2015. Web. June 7 2016.<\/p>\nBalibrea, Mari Paz. \u201cUrbanism, Culture and the Postindustrial City: Challenging the \u2018Barcelona Model.\u2019\u201d Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies <\/em>2.2 (2001): 187-210. Print.<\/p>\nBarcelona, Ajuntament de. \u201cThe City at Night.\u201d 2016. Web. July 4 2016. Accessed March 2 2017.<\/p>\n
Blanchar, Clara, and Llu\u00eds Pellicer. “La Torre Agbar I Sis Hotels M\u00e9s Esquiven La Morat\u00f2ria De Colau.” El Pa\u00eds<\/em>. 2016. Web. June 6 2016. Accessed March 2 2017.<\/p>\nBlum, Alan. The Imaginative Structure of the City<\/em>. Montreal; Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. Print.<\/p>\nBrabazon, Tara, and Stephen Mallinder. \u201cInto the Night-Time Economy: Work, Leisure, Urbanity and the Creative Industries.\u201d Nebula <\/em>4.3 (2007): 161-178. Print.<\/p>\nCapel, Horacio. El Modelo Barcelona: Un Examen Cr\u00edtico<\/em>. Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, 2005. Print.<\/p>\nCarta, Maurizio, and Daniele Ronsivalle. \u201cThe Fluid City Paradigm: Waterfront Regeneration as an Urban Renewal Strategy.\u201d 2016. Web. Accessed March 6 2017.<\/p>\n
Bye Bye Barcelona<\/em>. 2014. Documentary. Chib\u00e1s Fern\u00e1ndez, Eduardo.<\/p>\nDavidson, Robert A. Jazz Age Barcelona<\/em>. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Print.<\/p>\nDegen, Monica. \u201cBarcelona’s Games: The Olympics, Urban Design, and Global Tourism.\u201d Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play<\/em>. Eds. Sheller, Mimi and John Urry. London; New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.<\/p>\nDegen, M\u00f3nica, and Marisol Garc\u00eda. \u201cThe Transformation of the Barcelona Model: An Analysis of Culture, Urban Regeneration and Governance.\u201d IJUR International Journal of Urban and Regional Research <\/em>36.5 (2012): 1022-1038. Print.<\/p>\nDelgado, Manuel. La Ciudad Mentirosa. Fraude Y Miseria Del ‘Modelo Barcelona’.<\/em> Madrid: Los Llibros de la Catarata, 2007. Print.<\/p>\nEaude, Michael. Barcelona: The City That Re-Invented Itself<\/em>. Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2008. Print.<\/p>\nFancelli, Agust\u00ed. “Tony Blair Adopta El ‘Modelo Barcelona’.” El Pais <\/em>July 4 1999. Print.<\/p>\nFraser, Benjamin. \u201cA Biutiful City: Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s Filmic Critique of the \u2018Barcelona Model.\u2019\u201d Studies in Hispanic Cinemas <\/em>9.1 (2012): 19-34. Print.<\/p>\nGarc\u00eda, Marisol, and N\u00faria Claver. “Barcelona: Governing Coalitions, Visitors, and the Changing City Center.” Cities and Visitors: Regulating People, Markets, and City Space<\/em>. Eds. Hoffman, Lily, Susan S. Fainstein and Dennis Judd. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Print.<\/p>\nGwiazdzinski, Luc. La Nuit, Derni\u00e8re Fronti\u00e8re De La Ville<\/em>. La Tour d\u2019Aigues: Les \u00c9ditions de l’Aube, 2005. Print.<\/p>\nHancox, Dan. \u201cIs This the World\u2019s Most Radical Mayor?\u201d The Guardian<\/em>. June 6 2016. Web. Accessed March 2 2017.<\/p>\nHochadel, Oliver, and Agust\u00ed Nieto-Galan. Barcelona: An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888\u20131929<\/em>. Routledge, 2016. Print.<\/p>\nLaGrave, Katherine. \u201cBarcelona Considering New Tourist Tax.\u201d Cond\u00e9 Nast<\/em>. June 27 2016. Web. \u00a0Accessed March 12 2017.<\/p>\nLash, Scott. Sociology of Postmodernism<\/em>. London; New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.<\/p>\nLefebvre, Henri. Le Droit \u00c0 La Ville<\/em>. Paris: Anthropos, 1968. Print.<\/p>\nMackay, David. Modern Architecture in Barcelona, 1854-1939<\/em>. New York: Rizzoli, 1989. Print.<\/p>\nMarshall, Tim, ed. Transforming Barcelona<\/em>. London; New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.<\/p>\nMart\u00ed, Josep. \u201cWhen Music Becomes Noise: Sound and Music That People in Barcelona Hear but Don’t Want to Listen To.\u201d The World of Music <\/em>39.2 (1997): 9-17. Print.<\/p>\nMcDonogh, Gary W. \u201cMyth, Space, and Virtue: Bars, Gender, and Change in Barcelona\u2019s Barrio Chino.\u201d The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture<\/em>. Eds. Low, Setha M. and Denise Lawrence-Z\u00fa\u00f1iga. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Print.<\/p>\nMcNeill, Donald. Urban Change and the European Left: Tales from the New Barcelona<\/em>. London; New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.<\/p>\nNello, Orio. \u201cUrban Dynamics, Public Policies and Governance in the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona.\u201d Transforming Barcelona<\/em>. Ed. Marshall, Tim. New York: Routledge, 2004. 27-46. Print.<\/p>\nPlush, Hazel. “Barcelona Unveils New Law to Keep Tourists Away.” The Telegraph<\/em>.\u00a0 2017. Web.<\/p>\nResina, Joan Ramon. Barcelona’s Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image<\/em>. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008. Print.<\/p>\nSoria y Puig, Arturo \u201cIldefonso Cerd\u00e1’s General Theory of \u2018Urbanizaci\u00f3n.\u2019\u201d Town Planning Review <\/em>66.1 (1995): 15-39. Print.<\/p>\nV\u00e1zquez Montalb\u00e1n, Manuel. Sabotaje Ol\u00ecmpico<\/em>. Barcelona: Planeta, 1993. Print.<\/p>\nWard, Stephen V. Planning the Twentieth-Century City: The Advanced Capitalist World<\/em>. Chichester: Wiley, 2002. Print.<\/p>\nNotes<\/strong><\/h5>\n[1]<\/a> In 2015, I spent four months doing fieldwork in Barcelona (April to July). However, I started doing research on the crisis of tourism earlier, as I became interested in the topic during a one-month visit to Barcelona in August 2014, having witnessing firsthand the protests that followed the naked tourists events in La Barceloneta.<\/p>\n[2]<\/a> The term Chinatown has nothing to do with the presence of a an Asian population; this<\/p>\nquarter was labeled as such in the 1920s by Francisco Madrid, editor of El Esc<\/em>\u00e1ndalo<\/em>, who drew a romantic analogy between Barrio Chino and Chinatowns in the world.<\/p>\n[3]<\/a> As McNeill notes, \u201cBy the mid-1970s, the district was in a state of terminal decline. Hard drugs, prostitution, organised crime and appalling housing conditions were the reality behind the bohemian reputation\u201d (33). In the past few decades, however, the City Council has led many social renewal actions that have often materialized in urban regeneration initiatives. Examples include the Rambla del Raval, which grew from the demolition of five city blocks and more than fifty tenement buildings, the Cat<\/em> by Fernando Botero (located on the Rambla del Raval), the Filmoteca (a cinematheque), the Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona (MACBA), and the Centre de Cultura Contempor\u00e0nia de Barcelona.<\/p>\n
I take this fundamental tension as my point of departure, first tracing the history of Barcelona\u2019s cultural regeneration over the last one hundred years in order to provide a background for contemporary public and political discourses on tourism and nightlife. I argue that Barcelona\u2019s current crisis of tourism is deeply linked to its nighttime cultural scenes, which both contribute to a romantic construction of Barcelona and trigger local unrest over such issues as noise, gentrification, and the exclusion that marks certain public places.[1]<\/a> Following the critical tradition of the \u201cBarcelona Model\u201d by Capel, Degen, Delgado, and V\u00e1zquez Montalb\u00e1n, my article seeks to contribute to urban cultural studies scholarship on contemporary cultural scenes and to show how highly visible touristic scenes produce, shape, and represent a contested city.<\/p>\n [W]hoever ventures out at night will find it hard not to come across the following inevitable message on the doors of bars and clubs: \u201cPlease respect the neighbours\u2019 peace and quiet,\u201d a completely indispensable request and piece of advice in a city like Barcelona that has such a powerfully vibrant range of culture and entertainment to offer. (Ajuntament de Barcelona<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n At night, Barcelona is a noisy city\u2014perhaps the loudest in Western Europe (Mart\u00ed 9). The Ajuntament<\/em> de<\/em> Barcelona<\/em> (Barcelona City Council), as noted above, is well aware of this fact. Barcelona is the third most densely populated city in Europe, a statistic that does not take into account the tourists who gather there, primarily in the old city\u2014approximately thirty-two million in 2016 (Plush). In addition to showcasing a variety of international festivals such as Primavera Sound, Piknic Electronik, and Sonar, Barcelona is also quintessentially part of the European Mediterranean in the sense that it hosts numerous local fiestas<\/em> that unwind far into the night, often in the city\u2019s public areas. The places in which where these cultural events unfold may sometimes be conceptualized as spaces of \u201cde-differentiation\u201d (Lash ix), as one cannot easily distinguish the locals from the tourists. However, there are occasions when locals and tourists do not cohabitate peacefully\u2014in moments when tourists are (too) visible or audible, or when they are unwelcome to locals and public authorities.<\/p>\n On August 15, 2014, three naked Italian tourists strolled the seafront neighbourhood of La Barceloneta\u2014one of the four neighbourhoods of Ciutat Vella<\/em> (Old City)\u2014for three hours while Vicens Forner, a Barcelonan photographer, immortalized the episode.<\/p>\n Figure 1. Tourists walking naked in La Barceloneta in August 2014.<\/p>\n Several Catalan, Spanish, and international newspapers published Forner\u2019s photo and it circulated widely in social media. The incident prompted popular and media mobilization in relation to a leitmotiv theme of what Donald McNeill (1) terms the \u201cNew Barcelona\u201d era: the impact of tourism on the city. In the days following the nudists\u2019 parade, a few hundred city dwellers took to the streets to demonstrate against what they called \u201cbinge tourism,\u201d or turismo basura<\/em> (junk tourism). They also protested against unlicensed tourist flats rented on websites such as Airbnb, and to oppose the creation of a touristic monoculture from which they felt alienated. While the nudists\u2019 fl\u00e2nage<\/em> had taken place in the middle of the day, the resulting protests resonated with broader concerns that, while not addressing nightlife exclusively, had strong nocturnal components. What was at stake were various articulations of the citizens\u2019 \u201cright to the city\u201d (le droit \u00e0 la ville<\/em>), to use Lefebvre\u2019s (121) famous phrase and, in particular, their \u201cright to the night\u201d and their \u201cright to sleep.\u201d In January 2017, thousands of Barcelonans strolled down La Rambla, Barcelona\u2019s most famous street, to protest against gentrification and the number of tourists in the city. These events led to the creation of anti-tourism groups, such as the Assemblea de ve\u00efns Plataforma Resistim al G\u00f2tic<\/em>.<\/p>\n Tourism was a major issue in Barcelona\u2019s 2015 municipal election. After she was elected in June 2015 as Barcelona\u2019s first female mayor, the political activist Ada Colau (of the Barcelona en Com\u00fa <\/em>party, previously Guanyem<\/em> Barcelona<\/em>) imposed a one-year moratorium on short-term rentals and new licenses for hotel rooms. Colau wished to determine the number of tourists that the city could actually handle, in an effort to \u201cstop the city becoming Venice\u201d (Badcock). The mayor was not against tourists per se, as tourism represents 15% of the GPD in a city where 80% of the workforce is in the service economy (Degen and Garc\u00eda 1029), but wished to see them less clustered in the Old Town. Indeed, most of the tourists who visit Barcelona every year end up visiting and sleeping in Ciutat<\/em> Vella<\/em>, which comprises four administrative neighbourhoods: La Barceloneta, El G\u00f2tic, El Raval, and Sant Pere\/Santa Caterina\/La Ribera.<\/p>\n In March 2016, for the first time in its history, Barcelona implemented a plan, led by Ada Colau, to reverse the growth of tourism. As a way of controlling tourists in the Old City, Colau\u2019s government banned any groups that exceeded fifteen people from visiting Barcelona landmark La Boqueria Market at peaks times, to prevent it from losing its identity and function (Amey). It is now also forbidden to sublet a flat for less than a week; licenses for new hotel rooms in the Old City will not be issued and hotels that will close will not be replaced. This Plan Especial Urban\u00edstico de Alojamientos Tur\u00edsticos<\/em> (PEUAT) is aimed at unclogging tourism in Ciutat Vella<\/em>, developing tourist facilities in peripheral areas, and stopping gentrification. Since 2012, travelers who stay overnight in Barcelona pay a \u201ctourist tax\u201d that is mainly collected from hotels, hostels, and tourist homes, as well as from the cruise ships visiting what is now the busiest touristic port of the Mediterranean. City Councillor Gala Pin argued that the money could be used to offset the costs of tourism, \u201cnot only in terms of infrastructure, cleaning and security but also in terms of the floating population that is causing the indirect expulsion of local people\u201d (LaGrave). In January 2017, Colau\u2019s presented the ambitious \u201cStrategic Plan for Tourism 2020,\u201d a lengthy document that is mostly aimed at controlling tourism and making Barcelona less of a cheap destination for tourists.<\/p>\n These various policy measures might seem to be novel, but artists have already taken up (and shed light on) Barcelona\u2019s tourism crisis. Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s 2010 film Biutiful<\/em> shows how multiple voices and bodies are unheard and invisible in the mainstream discourse on beautiful, touristic, and modernista<\/em> Barcelona. In an insightful analysis of the film, Benjamin Fraser, drawing upon urban theorist Manuel Delgado, underlines the film\u2019s alternative story of Barcelona, \u201cthat is, the drab, grimy city full of labour inequality, the collusion of police with multinationals, the reality of sickness (cancer) and the lack of real possibilities for the immigrants who come from abroad hoping to make a better life for themselves and for their families\u201d (20). A curated version of Catalan identity and the city\u2019s stunning architecture\u2014as well as the use of both in promotional media\u2014have been central pillars of urban renewal in Barcelona, but the film skillfully shows how the construction of the Barcelona-ness is also one of exclusion.<\/p>\n Focusing specifically on the crisis of tourism, filmmaker Eduardo Chib\u00e1s\u2019s documentary Bye Bye Barcelona <\/em>(2014) examines the coexistence of tourists and residents in the city, particularly in its older quarters. One of the main arguments of the film is that residents no longer make use of certain parts of the city, such as the pedestrian-oriented central street La Rambla. Around 80% of the people who walk on La Rambla are tourists, and it was the filmmaker\u2019s hope that city residents would succeed in taking back the street (Chib\u00e1s Fern\u00e1ndez). The message may well have been heard. In May 2016, a \u201cSpecial Plan for the Rambla\u201d was approved. It is aimed at reducing crowding and clutter and giving the promenade back to local residents. The City Council launched a contest for the redesign of the street promenade in the hope of implementing the project in 2019. Like The Venice Syndrome<\/em> (2012) and Welcome Goodby<\/em>e (2014), two documentaries that examine the impact of mass tourism on Venice and Berlin, respectively, Bye Bye Barcelona <\/em>does not argue for a non-tourist city, but rather proposes ways of achieving a more sustainable approach to tourism. Indeed, Chib\u00e1s Fern\u00e1ndez would like to see tourists visiting places other than Barcelona\u2019s most famous landmarks, and has expressed the wish that Barcelona promote itself differently, notably by publicizing and respecting the everyday life of its residents.<\/p>\n In the same vein, playwright Marc Caellas\u2019 theatrical work Guiris Go Home<\/em> (2015)\u2014\u201cguiris\u201d being a derogatory Spanish term for tourists\u2014deployed, as characters, artists who cooked paella for those in the audience, or others, impersonating tourists, who talked loudly on their phones or went to the restrooms during performances. If these works by Fern\u00e1ndez and Caellas differ in their form and approach\u2014the former strives for a paradigm shift in the ways in which Barcelona attracts tourists, while the latter uses irony to depict what is perceived to be the deplorable state of tourism in the city\u2014they both offer an imagined monolithic construction of the average tourist. Here, the tourist is more often than not depicted in caricatural terms, a view that has become, for better or worse, a dominant perspective in present-day Barcelona.<\/p>\n Before turning to the most problematic scenes of tourism in Barcelona, I will briefly trace the ways in which culture, in both its tangible and intangible forms, has been mobilized for urban regeneration. On the one hand, design and architecture have traditionally been used as vectors of change and mobilization in Barcelona, an approach that culminated in the 1992 Olympic Games project. On the other hand, marketing and place-making strategies have served the purpose of creating an urban imaginary, a symbolic Barcelona-ness to which tourists are attracted. Present-day Barcelona, as a major tourist hub, is the result of rapid and drastic changes that have taken place, for the most part, in the last thirty years. We must go back even further, however, to understand the rich, productive, and transformative character of planning in the city.<\/p>\n In the mid-19th<\/sup> century the walls that surrounded Barcelona were dismantled. Catalan civic engineer Ildefons Cerd\u00e0\u2014arguably the founder of urban planning as a profession, whose main ideas were articulated in the 1859 El Pla Cerd\u00e0<\/em>\u2014led a major urban renewal plan by widening the city through the creation of an \u201cextension\u201d: the L\u2019Eixample neighbourhood (Aibar and E. Bijker; Fraser; Soria y Puig; Ward). The objective was to link the Old City to the surrounding villages. This grid-like neighbourhood, unusual for Barcelona, was constructed with large, magnificent Hausmannian boulevards. The buildings of L\u2019Eixample, no higher than three storeys and equipped with green spaces, became the residences for an elite Catalonian bourgeoisie (Marshall).<\/p>\n In the late-19th<\/sup> century, like many other Western cities, Barcelona went through a phase in which urban development and industrialization flourished. In a context of relative political stability and wealth, the bourgeoisie started promoting and underwriting Catalan identity through arts and architecture (Marshall). The Barcelona World\u2019s Fair in 1888 marked the beginning of a cultural movement that had deep Catalan roots: Modernista <\/em>(Catalan Art Nouveau). The period between 1888 and 1910\u2014commencing with the building of Dom\u00e8nech i Montaner\u2019s caf\u00e9 for the World\u2019s Fair\u2014witnessed the creation of the city\u2019s most prominent buildings, parks, and places (Casa Batll\u00f3, <\/em>Casa Mil\u00e0, Hospital de Sant Pau, Palau de la M\u00fasica Catalana, and Park G\u00fcell). Noucentisme, <\/em>an artistic movement aimed at reviving Catalan\u2019s classical past, began to replace Modernista<\/em> in the 1910s, the reasons being twofold. The first of these were the criticisms of the aesthetic exuberances of Modernista<\/em>, as voiced by Charles Voysey, an Arts and Crafts architect. He argued against what he perceived to be the \u201csimplicity\u201d of Catalan Art Nouveau, that is \u201cthe work of a lot of imitators with nothing but mad eccentricity as a guide\u201d (Mackay 53). A second criticism was directed at the anti-academic roots of Modernista<\/em> and the accusation, by an ascendant bourgeois class, that it was too progressive. Indeed, bourgeois nationalists who rose to prominence in the early-20th<\/sup> century sought new cultural forms with which to assert their power and identity, and found these in the aesthetics of Noucentisme.<\/em><\/p>\n In the 1920s, Barcelona entered its own \u201cRoaring Twenties,\u201d a decade marked here, as in other cities of the West, by the development of a rich nightlife in which jazz music was prominent. In his book Jazz Age Barcelona<\/em>, Robert A. Davidson has revisited the numerous articles on the Barcelona night published in the Catalan journal Mirador<\/em> (1929-1937). In particular, Sebasti\u00e0 Gasch, a Catalan art critic (and later author of the 1957 Barcelona de Nit<\/em>:\u00a0El M\u00f3n de l’Espectacle <\/em>[Barcelona by Night: The World of Spectacle]) offered accounts of nighttime concerts and performances alongside sketches of the city\u2019s most marginal neighborhoods, such as Barrio Chino (Chinatown).[2]<\/a> Sometimes referred to as a red-light district and commonly compared to the bohemian scenes of Harlem, Montmartre, or Soho, the southern tip of the neighbourhood of El Raval acquired an image involving drug abuse, prostitution, and crime. Barrio Chino<\/em>, whose golden age took place in the 1920s, was portrayed in various media forms as a mostly male-patronized hub for vice. As McDonogh reminds us, while the quarter was comprised of several types of establishments (concert venues, neighbourhood and special interests bars or clubs, and establishments linked to prostitution), it was usually the \u201cprostitution bars\u201d that drew the most attention. These bars not only provided the material with which both local and foreign writers, photographers, and filmmakers (such as Georges Bataille, Joan Colom, Jean Genet, Ignacio Gil) constructed a romantic representation of Barcelona\u2019s nighttime cultural scenes; they were also used by local residents within processes of social distinction. Underlining the gendered character of these spaces, Gary McDonogh notes:<\/p>\n \u201cSpatializing\u201d immorality allows others to differentiate themselves as virtuous by location and behaviour as space and virtue reinforce each other while intimately dividing social worlds. Good Barcelona men relax in good bars in good neighbourhoods, possibly with good women (who might also stay at home). (265)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Nevertheless, \u201cbad bars\u201d could benefit from a reputation that was perceived by some artists and writers as more authentic, and as providing an aura that could foster their creativity. Such \u201ctourists of the marginal\u201d (Ramon Resina 105) as Sebasti\u00e0 Gasch and his artist friend Joan Mir\u00f3 would often venture to the alternative bars of La Barceloneta\u2014then a fishermen\u2019s neighbourhood\u2014and Barrio Chino<\/em>. As Robert Davidson notes, their randonn\u00e9es<\/em> were motivated by a search for difference and alterity in the outskirts and edgier areas of town. Their passage from \u201csalon to tavern\u201d was a means of finding inspiration in the crude, anti-bourgeois kitsch of the latter (109-13). Their gritty nocturnal journeys clashed with the up-and-coming modernista <\/em>metropolis that had been crafted since the 1888 World\u2019s Fair. Representations of the El Raval district and Barrio Chino in the 1920s depicted the area as edgy and dangerous, a vision that persisted until the urban renewal movements of the 1980s and the 1990s.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n The \u201cRoaring Twenties\u201d culminated with the Barcelona World\u2019s Fair of 1929. This was marked as a Spanish event, unlike the 1888 Barcelona Fair, which had been marketed as Catalan in character. Among its many effects, the 1929 Fair was a turning point in the electrification of Barcelona. As Hochadel and Nieto-Galan note:<\/p>\n [T]he spread of electric lighting altered Barcelona\u2019s cityscape and reshaped the everyday life of its citizens. The nocturnal city became a new \u201csite,\u201d full of life, overcoming the routines dictated by natural light: from the \u201celectric\u201d night parties at the 1888 Exhibition, to the new facilities at the operating rooms of the clinics, and the electrical lights at the fun parks. The sophisticated display of lights and colours at the 1929 Exhibition was widely considered a triumph of electricity in the city. (15)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Electricity played a strong role in the transformation of urban landscape and it had a profound effect on the city dwellers\u2019 routines, although these changes are beyond the scope of this article. While technological change shaped modern Barcelona, so, too, did the political situation and the dark age of the Franco era.<\/p>\n Following the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, General Franco held power until his death in 1975. Throughout these years, Catalonia, defeated during the Civil War, was considered an enemy of the state and Barcelona\u2019s infrastructures were left for the most part unattended. The city was denied any right to celebrate and foster its distinct Catalan identity. As Degen notes, \u201c[d]uring Franco\u2019s era public investment within Barcelona\u2019s city centre had been deliberately neglected as a way of punishing a city that had been the bastion of the republican and anarchist movements during the Civil War (132). Then, in the late 1950s, Spain promoted desarrollismo<\/em> (developmentalism) by opening its borders to foreign tourists within an atmosphere of liberalization and laissez-faire (Garc\u00eda and Claver 114). Those who benefitted most from these policies were real estate developers, who were allowed to build cheap, poorly constructed hotels and residential buildings in the inner city. However, as the tourists visiting Catalonia were mostly interested in its sunny beaches, few of them would actually visit Barcelona, which was the case until the 1980s and 1990s.<\/p>\n Barcelona, like many other Western cities, was severely affected by the decline of its manufacture sector. Between 1960 and 1985, the city lost 42% of its jobs in manufacturing and 69% of those in construction (McNeill 94). The response to this crisis was to be found in post-industrialism, that is, the rise of a knowledge and service economy and the embracing by cities of policies of cultural development (Degen and Garc\u00eda). Within these doctrines, urban cores assume new primacy relative to larger metropolitan areas and cities compete against each other in the attraction of tourists through the provision of cultural amenities. Since the late 1990s, Barcelona has made use of culture in a broad, encompassing way within its plans for economic development.<\/p>\n When the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC) was elected as the municipal government in Barcelona in 1979, it privileged small interventions in public spaces, parks, and streets in collaboration with the Federaci\u00f3<\/em> d’Associacions<\/em> de<\/em> Ve\u00efns<\/em> de<\/em> Barcelona<\/em> (neighbourhood associations) and other grassroots movements whose origins can be traced back to the Franco era. It was not until the 1992 Olympics project, however, that Barcelona\u2019s transition to a post-industrial city gathered momentum, as the city became a major tourist destination. This transition was led by a charismatic mayor, Pasqual Maragall i Mira, grandson of the renowned poet Joan Maragall. During his period in office, from 1982 to 1997, Maragall initiated and managed Barcelona\u2019s most colossal revitalization project since the creation of l\u2019Exaimple. The \u201cBarcelona Model\u201d (Fancelli) would become a celebrated version of urban policy and planning widely appropriated in the Western world, particularly in the United Kingdom (Balibrea). It was born in 1986, when Barcelona was designated as host of the Olympics Games of 1992 and the Old City was declared an \u00c0rea<\/em> de<\/em> Rehabilitaci<\/em>\u00f3<\/em> Integral<\/em> (Integral Rehabilitation Area). This model also had roots in the 1985 beautification campaign, led by the City Council, known as Barcelona<\/em> Posa\u2019t<\/em> Guapa<\/em> (Barcelona Make Yourself Beautiful) (McNeil 14).<\/p>\n The Olympic Games of 1992 shaped, accomplished, and represented to the world the transition to the \u201cNew Barcelona.\u201d The games provided Barcelona with the resources, both local and national, that Maragall needed to carry out the project. The entrepreneurial mayor focused on two major policy components: urban infrastructure, through the revitalization and preservation of historic buildings in the city centre, and administration of the games themselves. With respect to the former, architecture and the \u201cmonumentalization of the periphery\u201d (Degen et Garc\u00eda 1027) were used a means of giving back the city to its citizens and encouraging social cohesion. Politically, Maragall had always been more interested in crafting a Barcelonan identity and encouraging democratic citizen participation than he was with questions of class and ideology (McNeil 76). The political doctrine that came to be known as Maragallisme<\/em> used the Olympics as a means for promoting Catalan identity and building a strong international image for the city and its region. If some people feared that the Olympic Games would be used to culturally \u201cde-catalanize\u201d Barcelona and Catalonia (McNeil 75), their fears were not realized. Catalan was one of the games\u2019 four official languages, and the marketing of the Olympics placed great emphasis on Catalan identity.<\/p>\n The mandate for the planning of the Olympic Village was awarded to the firm MBMP (Martorell Bohigas Mackay Puigdomenech). Bohigas, a local starchitect, had been director of planning for the Barcelona City Council during the period 1980-1984, and his key ideas were laid out in his 1983 essay \u201cPer una Altra Urbanitat\u201d (\u201cA Different Urbanism\u201d) and 1985 book Reconstrucci\u00f3 de Barcelona <\/em>(Reconstruction of Barcelona). Unlike many other Olympic projects, Barcelona\u2019s is often seen as a success story. In 1990, the city won the Prince of Wales Prize given by Harvard University, and in 1999 it was awarded The Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, the first time that prize had been granted to a place and not to an architect. If economic accumulation was not the main motivation behind the Barcelona Model, its implementation nevertheless stimulated the city\u2019s economy by attracting tourists to the city. In particular, the redevelopment of the old port into the Maremagnum project and the revitalization of the seafront made these sites into major attractions for tourists seeking to experience a Mediterranean way of life.<\/p>\n We may approach Barcelona\u2019s current status in relation to its various \u201cscenes,\u201d as theorized by Alan Blum (164-188). Blum argues that a scene is defined by the visible and shared public co-intimacy between locals and strangers, most often tourists. In their visibility and theatricality, scenes become a key feature of urban experience. This is the scene described by Barcelona\u2019s city government as it seeks to offer a highly evocative representation of its night:<\/p>\n Barcelona at its most\u00a0multifaceted and intense unfurls at night, the time for theatre, drinks with friends, music and dancing. This is when the Catalan capital’s\u00a0most risqu\u00e9, hidden-away and discrete spots open up, where the day lengthens and the nightlife bursts out: this is where the city at its most eclectic and select and where lovers of opera, grand settings, ground-breaking small-format theatre, cabaret, beer, wine, gin and tonic and exclusive cocktails, the old dance halls and the latest discos all come alive. (Ajuntament de Barcelona<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This description interweaves, in romantic fashion, the visible and hidden aspects of Barcelona\u2019s nighttime scenes in order to paint the night as a time of infinite possibilities. Tourism brochures and media representations of Barcelona (including films such as Woody Allen\u2019s Vicky Cristina Barcelona<\/em> (2008), Whit Stillman\u2019s Barcelona<\/em> (1994), and Pedro Alm\u00f3dovar\u2019s All About My Mother<\/em> (1999)) celebrate the city\u2019s nightlife by aestheticizing it. The promotion of nighttime entertainment and leisure has become central to urban policy because it is perceived as giving cities a comparative advantage over others in the attraction of tourists. Barcelona has joined other cities in recognizing the importance of its nighttime economy, a phenomena defined by Brabazon and Mallinder as \u201cthe appropriation of night-time urban spaces by the leisure and entertainment industries\u201d (168). The development of a nighttime economy has become one of the key components of post-industrialist discourse on the organization of urban economies around culture and leisure. Nevertheless if Barcelona has a thriving nightlife scene, it is not a 24-hour city per se (where the distinction between day and night is blurred); rather, nighttime is intimately tied to leisure and entertainment, in other words, to the consumption of a certain type of culture. This embracing of the nighttime economy by the City Council has raised a number of issues. Instead of generating the diversity and vitality described in the above quotation, commercialized nightlife produces spatial segregation in the ways in which it excludes those who do not have the means (or desire) to participate in a rowdy sociability tied to the consumption of alcohol. The restriction of entertainment options described by Brabazon and Mallinder as increasingly characteristic of post-industrial cities has particular applicability to Barcelona:<\/p>\n Concerns with regulation serve to emphasize the extent to which the perception of night-time economies have become synonymous with social management and the degree to which these economies, once a seeming panacea for the revitalization of moribund post industrial and post-colonial centres, are now symptomatic of an alcohol fuelled monoculture. (Brabazon and Mallinder 167-8)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The most problematic dimensions of Barcelona\u2019s nighttime economy are visible in its waterfront scenes.<\/p>\n The opening of the city to the sea was a key component of Maragallisme <\/em>(Nello 41). Barcelona, like many other coastal cities, has placed great emphasis on the redevelopment of its waterfront, a key focus of the international discourse on creative cities since the 1990s (Carta and Ronsivalle). In La Barceloneta, a 1.3km2 <\/sup>triangular enclave and the youngest of the four districts of the Old City, the urban revitalization undertaken as part of the Olympics Project involved the removal of train tracks, the sanitizing of water and sand along the 2.2km of beach, and the revitalization of the beachfront promenade. These transformations were undertaken with an emphasis on the production and consumption of art and design.<\/p>\n Figure 2. The neighbourhood of La Barceloneta.<\/p>\n Rebecca Horn\u2019s L\u2019Estel Ferit<\/em> (the Wounded Shooting Star), Frank Gehry\u2019s Peix<\/em> (the Fish), and the Arts and MAPFRE Towers (the two tallest buildings in the city) are among the most famous landmarks used to aestheticize this area. In an often-unacknowledged way, Horn\u2019s sculpture\u2014sometimes dubbed Homage to Barceloneta<\/em>\u2014was:<\/p>\n designed to commemorate the lost, rusted beach restaurants, the landscape that had developed over generations before the sudden shock of demolition and their replacement by new white sand and new palms (non-native, but expected<\/em> by visitors). (Eaude 285; original emphasis)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Figure 3. Rebecca Horn\u2019s L\u2019Estel Ferit<\/em>.<\/p>\n The neighbourhood has now become a passage oblig\u00e9<\/em> for tourists in search of a Mediterranean experience, but these visible landmarks are all central among its attractions. This is the Barcelona highlighted in so many of the images promoting tourism. In the past fifteen years, La Barceloneta has also become an international centre for nightlife, largely as a result of its lively discotheque scene.<\/p>\n La Barceloneta has one of the most active club scenes in Spain. The neighbourhood is comprised of two distinct but interrelated nighttime cultural scenes. These gravitate towards different types of cultural experience and are relatively isolated from each other geographically, but they often involve the same participants. One of these is the restaurant and bar scene of the residential part of La Barceloneta.<\/p>\n Figure 4. La Barceloneta.<\/p>\n The Catalan character of this scene is obvious, as it is constituted by restaurants that offer regional cuisine and includes a few bars patronized mostly by locals. However, the heart of La Barceloneta\u2019s night is usually not associated with this portion of the neighbourhood. The second cultural scene gravitates towards discotheques in the north-eastern part of the neighbourhood. These clubs are largely frequented by tourists and are usually accessed through the beachfront promenade (Catwalk, CDLC, Opium, Sh\u00f4ko, Sotavento). Some of these close at 6am and are major venues on the international DJ circuit.<\/p>\n Figure 5. The CDLC Club, the ARTS and MAPFRE Towers, and Gehry\u2019s Peix<\/em>.<\/p>\n The club scene in La Barceloneta targets young people and students by offering them an alcohol-fuelled culture. The issues that have come to surround this scene are not principally related to people actually partying in clubs, as the latter are quite isolated from the residential area of La Barceloneta. Problems arise, however, when patrons leave the bars and noisy crowds spill over into the streets (and flats) of the residential part of the neighbourhood.[4]<\/a> This creates what Luc Gwiazdzinski has called a citoyennet\u00e9<\/em> discontinue<\/em> (discontinuous citizenship) (197) in the neighbourhood, as residents feel they are losing their right to the city, to the night, and to sleep. In Gwiazdzinski\u2019s terms, the nighttime tourist scene exacerbates the tension between la ville qui dort<\/em> (the city that sleeps) and la ville qui s\u2019amuse<\/em> (the city that plays) (130). Tourists not only navigate along the traditional routes and spaces crafted for them by the city, but they also structure and shape both space and time through their itineraries. They follow a circuit from beach (day) to restaurants (evening) to bars (evening\/night) to discotheques (night) to public places (night). These places, as McDonogh suggests in his study of Barcelona\u2019s bars, \u201cbecome public markers in the description and control of zones of vice\u201d (264).<\/p>\n The deeper we get into the night, the more problems emerge, notably in relation to the use and appropriation of public spaces. By day, public places in La Barceloneta are invested by locals, families, and tourists. Indeed, one can find plenty of stores that are aimed at different types of consumers, but these represent the same variety one would find in Kuta, Bali, or Canc\u00fan, Mexico. As Ada Colau has claimed, the area is being transformed into a \u201ctheme park\u201d (Hancox), one that may, in V\u00e1zquez Montalb\u00e1n\u2019s critical diagnosis, be understood as a \u201csimulacra\u201d of Barcelona-ness. At night, these same public spaces lose a portion of their public-ness, though the pertinence of that notion itself is challenged by the ways in which these spaces encourage (or demand) various forms of consumption. The further one goes into the night, the narrower the cultural experiences offered by the city becomes, and the area turns into a space of exclusion because the public spaces are often patronized by young males who drink until the public transit system opens again. Locals, especially women, may not feel safe in certain of Barcelona\u2019s public spaces.<\/p>\n The tensions surrounding nightlife in Barcelona\u2019s waterfront district are not limited to those between club-goers and the residents of surrounding neighbourhoods. They also extend to exclusionary practices that mark entrance to discotheques and other sites of nighttime entertainment. In 2002, after a night out at the Maremagnum disco complex, a young immigrant from Ecuador was beaten up and thrown into the sea, where he later drowned. The murder was the climax of the various racial tensions that had been recurrent in discotheques, notably the exclusion of Black and Roma people. The Ajuntament<\/em> closed the clubs of the Maremagnum in 2004. Today, only one bar\u2014La Sure\u00f1a\u2014is located in the Maremagnum complex and it closes at 12am. As part of\u00a0the atNight project<\/a>, Mar Santamaria Varas, Pablo Mart\u00ednez Diez and Jordi Bari Corber\u00f3 produced a\u00a0map<\/a>\u00a0showing differences in the investment of Barcelona\u2019s public space during night and day.\u00a0 The club scene is in the upper-right corner of this map; the W hotel is at the bottom-left. A second\u00a0map<\/a>\u00a0shows the routes that taxis use during the day and at night in La Baceloneta.\u00a0These taxi routes present a part of the nighttime flow of La Barceloneta. Although both day and night rides circulate along main axes, the W Hotel scene and that which gravitates toward the main nightclubs draw the most taxis at night. At night, these scenes become \u201carchipels<\/em> nocturnes\u201d<\/em> (nocturnal archipelagos), in the sense that cultural options and the people who consume them are more homogeneous (Gwiazdzinski 159). As the map above demonstrates, cultural consumers of the night are more aggregated and visible in specific places. Different people invest in different places at different times, and the type of activities in which they participate also have a temporal dimension. The overcrowding of (noisy) people in public spaces also has a seasonal dimension that could be worth examining, as the phenomenon of archipels nocturnes<\/em> is exacerbated in the summer.<\/p>\n During the high season (June to August), Barcelona\u2019s nighttime cultural scenes are a key component of its tourism industry. Arguably, however, the city\u2019s nighttime cultural identity is less well-defined than those of Berlin and London (with their club-based music scenes). In Barcelona, the nocturnal economy may be seen as a nighttime extension of the Mediterranean ethos of \u201csun, sea, sangria,\u201d of a never-ending fiesta. Interestingly, Barcelona does not have the most permissive nighttime culture in Europe; in many neighbourhoods, although it is legal to open new bars (which can close at 3am), it is illegal to establish a discotheque (which can close at 6am). At the same time, the city is engaged in deregulating its nightlife in other respects. Thus, since April 2016, any bar, caf\u00e9, or restaurant can now host concerts. The new policy is aimed at encouraging emergent musicians and at stopping the proliferation of illegal music venues. It is also part of a larger plan to decentralize the cultural scenes in the city. Finally, in response to the expressed desire of citizens to reclaim public spaces, the City Council announced in 2016 that it would create citizen areas in which only residents would be able to drive automobiles. A trial plan would be implemented in L\u2019Eixample and then expanded to other areas of the city.<\/p>\n Barcelona has a deep and rich history of critical social movements, many of which emerged during Franquismo<\/em>, which provided a clear target for opposition. These movements have criticized the Barcelona model for a long time, as have scholars such as Horacio Capel and Manuel Delgado. Historically, neighborhood movements have tended to be tied to their own community rather than to a specific political party. In her transformation from housing rights activist to mayor, Colau challenged this traditional version. BCom\u00fa<\/em>\u2019s \u201cfeminized democracy and politics\u201d are generally well received because they shed new light on urban problems. For example, in 2016 the political party created the Department of Life Cycles, Feminisms, and LGBTI, whose goal is to develop working groups, reports, and campaigns aimed at fighting sexist discrimination and violence as well as tackling problems such as the feminization of poverty. Still requiring further study are issues related to tourism and their effects on cultural scenes in the city, which remain overlooked in the \u201cStrategic Plan for Tourism 2020.\u201d While the anti-tourism groups received the Plan positively, others fear that this will create more illegality in the room-rental sector and that this \u201cwar on tourism\u201d will negatively affect Barcelona\u2019s economy. With 2017 as the United Nations International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development, it will be necessary to examine these policies as their impacts unfold.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Figure 1. http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2014\/aug\/21\/naked-italians-protests-drunken-tourists-barcelona<\/a> Accessed March 2 2017<\/p>\n Figure 2.\u00a0https:\/\/www.google.ca\/maps\/<\/a> Accessed 31 March 2017<\/p>\n Figure 3. Rebecca Horn\u2019s L\u2019Estel Ferit <\/em>in La Barceloneta. Jonathan Rouleau, June 2015<\/p>\n Figure 4.\u00a0http:\/\/www.barcelonina.com\/the-tiny-barcelonas-today-la-barceloneta\/<\/a> Accessed 2 March 2017<\/p>\n Figure 5. http:\/\/www.holidaysinbarcelona.co.uk\/wp\/beach-clubs-to-relax-party-in-barcelona\/<\/a> Accessed 2 March 2017<\/p>\n Aibar, Eduardo, and Wiebe E. Bijker. \u201cConstructing a City: The Cerd\u00e0 Plan for the Extension of Barcelona.\u201d Science, Technology & Human Values <\/em>22.1 (1997): 3-30. Print.<\/p>\n Amey, Katie. \u201cBarcelona Mayor Plans to Introduce Tourist Cap to Control Visitor Numbers and \u2018Stop the City from Becoming Venice.\u2019\u201d Daily Mail<\/em> June 1 2015. Print.<\/p>\n Badcock, James. \u201cIncoming Barcelona Mayor Wants to Introduce Tourist Cap.\u201d The Telegraph<\/em>. 2015. Web. June 7 2016.<\/p>\n Balibrea, Mari Paz. \u201cUrbanism, Culture and the Postindustrial City: Challenging the \u2018Barcelona Model.\u2019\u201d Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies <\/em>2.2 (2001): 187-210. Print.<\/p>\n Barcelona, Ajuntament de. \u201cThe City at Night.\u201d 2016. Web. July 4 2016. Accessed March 2 2017.<\/p>\n Blanchar, Clara, and Llu\u00eds Pellicer. “La Torre Agbar I Sis Hotels M\u00e9s Esquiven La Morat\u00f2ria De Colau.” El Pa\u00eds<\/em>. 2016. Web. June 6 2016. Accessed March 2 2017.<\/p>\n Blum, Alan. The Imaginative Structure of the City<\/em>. Montreal; Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. Print.<\/p>\n Brabazon, Tara, and Stephen Mallinder. \u201cInto the Night-Time Economy: Work, Leisure, Urbanity and the Creative Industries.\u201d Nebula <\/em>4.3 (2007): 161-178. Print.<\/p>\n Capel, Horacio. El Modelo Barcelona: Un Examen Cr\u00edtico<\/em>. Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, 2005. Print.<\/p>\n Carta, Maurizio, and Daniele Ronsivalle. \u201cThe Fluid City Paradigm: Waterfront Regeneration as an Urban Renewal Strategy.\u201d 2016. Web. Accessed March 6 2017.<\/p>\n Bye Bye Barcelona<\/em>. 2014. Documentary. Chib\u00e1s Fern\u00e1ndez, Eduardo.<\/p>\n Davidson, Robert A. Jazz Age Barcelona<\/em>. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Print.<\/p>\n Degen, Monica. \u201cBarcelona’s Games: The Olympics, Urban Design, and Global Tourism.\u201d Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play<\/em>. Eds. Sheller, Mimi and John Urry. London; New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.<\/p>\n Degen, M\u00f3nica, and Marisol Garc\u00eda. \u201cThe Transformation of the Barcelona Model: An Analysis of Culture, Urban Regeneration and Governance.\u201d IJUR International Journal of Urban and Regional Research <\/em>36.5 (2012): 1022-1038. Print.<\/p>\n Delgado, Manuel. La Ciudad Mentirosa. Fraude Y Miseria Del ‘Modelo Barcelona’.<\/em> Madrid: Los Llibros de la Catarata, 2007. Print.<\/p>\n Eaude, Michael. Barcelona: The City That Re-Invented Itself<\/em>. Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2008. Print.<\/p>\n Fancelli, Agust\u00ed. “Tony Blair Adopta El ‘Modelo Barcelona’.” El Pais <\/em>July 4 1999. Print.<\/p>\n Fraser, Benjamin. \u201cA Biutiful City: Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s Filmic Critique of the \u2018Barcelona Model.\u2019\u201d Studies in Hispanic Cinemas <\/em>9.1 (2012): 19-34. Print.<\/p>\n Garc\u00eda, Marisol, and N\u00faria Claver. “Barcelona: Governing Coalitions, Visitors, and the Changing City Center.” Cities and Visitors: Regulating People, Markets, and City Space<\/em>. Eds. Hoffman, Lily, Susan S. Fainstein and Dennis Judd. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Print.<\/p>\n Gwiazdzinski, Luc. La Nuit, Derni\u00e8re Fronti\u00e8re De La Ville<\/em>. La Tour d\u2019Aigues: Les \u00c9ditions de l’Aube, 2005. Print.<\/p>\n Hancox, Dan. \u201cIs This the World\u2019s Most Radical Mayor?\u201d The Guardian<\/em>. June 6 2016. Web. Accessed March 2 2017.<\/p>\n Hochadel, Oliver, and Agust\u00ed Nieto-Galan. Barcelona: An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888\u20131929<\/em>. Routledge, 2016. Print.<\/p>\n LaGrave, Katherine. \u201cBarcelona Considering New Tourist Tax.\u201d Cond\u00e9 Nast<\/em>. June 27 2016. Web. \u00a0Accessed March 12 2017.<\/p>\n Lash, Scott. Sociology of Postmodernism<\/em>. London; New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.<\/p>\n Lefebvre, Henri. Le Droit \u00c0 La Ville<\/em>. Paris: Anthropos, 1968. Print.<\/p>\n Mackay, David. Modern Architecture in Barcelona, 1854-1939<\/em>. New York: Rizzoli, 1989. Print.<\/p>\n Marshall, Tim, ed. Transforming Barcelona<\/em>. London; New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.<\/p>\n Mart\u00ed, Josep. \u201cWhen Music Becomes Noise: Sound and Music That People in Barcelona Hear but Don’t Want to Listen To.\u201d The World of Music <\/em>39.2 (1997): 9-17. Print.<\/p>\n McDonogh, Gary W. \u201cMyth, Space, and Virtue: Bars, Gender, and Change in Barcelona\u2019s Barrio Chino.\u201d The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture<\/em>. Eds. Low, Setha M. and Denise Lawrence-Z\u00fa\u00f1iga. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Print.<\/p>\n McNeill, Donald. Urban Change and the European Left: Tales from the New Barcelona<\/em>. London; New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.<\/p>\n Nello, Orio. \u201cUrban Dynamics, Public Policies and Governance in the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona.\u201d Transforming Barcelona<\/em>. Ed. Marshall, Tim. New York: Routledge, 2004. 27-46. Print.<\/p>\n Plush, Hazel. “Barcelona Unveils New Law to Keep Tourists Away.” The Telegraph<\/em>.\u00a0 2017. Web.<\/p>\n Resina, Joan Ramon. Barcelona’s Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image<\/em>. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008. Print.<\/p>\n Soria y Puig, Arturo \u201cIldefonso Cerd\u00e1’s General Theory of \u2018Urbanizaci\u00f3n.\u2019\u201d Town Planning Review <\/em>66.1 (1995): 15-39. Print.<\/p>\n V\u00e1zquez Montalb\u00e1n, Manuel. Sabotaje Ol\u00ecmpico<\/em>. Barcelona: Planeta, 1993. Print.<\/p>\n Ward, Stephen V. Planning the Twentieth-Century City: The Advanced Capitalist World<\/em>. Chichester: Wiley, 2002. Print.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> In 2015, I spent four months doing fieldwork in Barcelona (April to July). However, I started doing research on the crisis of tourism earlier, as I became interested in the topic during a one-month visit to Barcelona in August 2014, having witnessing firsthand the protests that followed the naked tourists events in La Barceloneta.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> The term Chinatown has nothing to do with the presence of a an Asian population; this<\/p>\n quarter was labeled as such in the 1920s by Francisco Madrid, editor of El Esc<\/em>\u00e1ndalo<\/em>, who drew a romantic analogy between Barrio Chino and Chinatowns in the world.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> As McNeill notes, \u201cBy the mid-1970s, the district was in a state of terminal decline. Hard drugs, prostitution, organised crime and appalling housing conditions were the reality behind the bohemian reputation\u201d (33). In the past few decades, however, the City Council has led many social renewal actions that have often materialized in urban regeneration initiatives. Examples include the Rambla del Raval, which grew from the demolition of five city blocks and more than fifty tenement buildings, the Cat<\/em> by Fernando Botero (located on the Rambla del Raval), the Filmoteca (a cinematheque), the Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona (MACBA), and the Centre de Cultura Contempor\u00e0nia de Barcelona.<\/p>\nThe Crisis of Tourism in Barcelona<\/strong><\/h5>\n
<\/p>\nUrban Planning, the \u201cRoaring Twenties,\u201d and Nocturnal Life<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Post-Industrialism, the \u201cBarcelona Model,\u201d
\nand the Aestheticization of Public Places<\/u><\/h5>\nThe Touristic Scene(s) of Barcelona<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Waterfront scenes<\/strong><\/h5>\n
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\nConclusion<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Images Notes<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Works Cited<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Notes<\/strong><\/h5>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/88x31-1.png\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![map<\/a>\u00a0showing differences in the investment of Barcelona\u2019s public space during night and day.\u00a0 The club scene is in the upper-right corner of this map; the W hotel is at the bottom-left. A second\u00a0](\"http:\/\/www.atnight.ws\/img\/c04.png\"){kind=link}