Learning from Barcelona: Discourse, Power and Praxis in the Sustainable City

Abstract

Abstractc iso_1059 135..153 In the 2004 Forum for World Cultures, Barcelona politicians and intellectuals situated sustainability as a key issue for global and local debate. This event also distilled historical experiences of place, contact and conflict that have shaped Barcelona as a global city, while subsequent discussions illuminate the complexities of the creation of an urban culture of sustainability as contemporary urban social practice. Reading sustainability as myth and practice in both spatial and temporal contexts reveals the extent to which ecological commitments combine changes in urban policy, rhetorical statements, positioning within more general competitions for urban branding and citizen responses. Drawing on archival and cultural analysis as well as longterm ethnography, this paper examines Barcelona's search for social ecological policy and the complications of multiple visions and practices of sustainable development. [Barcelona, sustainability, Worlds Fairs, Branding, environmental planning] City & Society, Vol. 23, Issue 2, pp. 135-153, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X.

The Failure of Eco-Neighborhood Projects in the City of Madrid (Spain)

“…and private videos or broadcasts in national tv-shows. The validity of this type of approach has been confirmed by multiple specialists [38][39][40][41][42].…”

Smart urbanism in Barcelona

“…Implementation of the 'Barcelona model' (Ribera-Fumaz, 2017) always involved political controversy and social and economic struggle (Aibar and Bijker, 1987;McDonogh, 2011): between social classes, over space, in the priorities and directions for development, concerning rights to the city, contradictions between attracting inward investment and attending to neighbourhood needs, and, pertinent here, the selective use of technology and knowledge about the city. Confronting the models of Barcelona's urban elite is a grassroots history of working class struggle, neighbourhood and nationalist politics, and social movements, all of which have understood their city quite differently.…”

Translating ‘Sustainability’ in Hawai'i: The Utility of Semiotic Transformation in the Transmission of Culture

“…In these works, and in many nonanthropological works (Kapelus 2002;Hartman, Rubin, and Dhanda 2007;Dobers and Springett 2010), we can see that political economic organisations, especially corporations, are proactive in translating sustainability (as a way of expressing corporate social responsibility) and that corporate ideas are influencing everyday sustainability practices in surrounding communities to an extent that corporations, which are held to be unified social agents, are seen to have 'co-opted the discourse of sustainability to promote their contributions to economic development' (Kirsch 2007, 304). What is not well known, however, despite some insights that are provided by the few available studies on corporate discourse production (Kirsch 2010;McDonogh 2011), is how corporate and institutional actors within organisations cope with the 'constant dialectic between local and global discourses that the company must traverse and negotiate' (Banks 2006, 270); and ethnographic analyses of the organisational processes or dynamics involved in the (re)interpretation of the language of sustainability are nonexistent, possibly because of limited access to such sites of practice.…”