eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781841508283 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 155 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Judith Rugg is research coordinator and reader in fine art theory at University College for the Creative Arts in Canterbury.
Read an Excerpt
Recoveries and Reclamations
Advances in Art & Urban Futures Volume 2
By Judith Rugg, Daniel Hinchcliffe
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2002 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-828-3
CHAPTER 1
Section One
Issues of Regeneration and Cultural Change
Monica Degen
Regenerating Public Life?
* A sensory analysis of regenerated public places in El Raval, Barcelona
Introduction
Barcelona has changed. Once a grimy industrial giant, today it struts along the global catwalk, every inch 'the city of style' (La Vanguardia 9/2/01 quoting The Times). By radically transforming and redesigning its urban landscape the Catalan city has successfully reinvented itself, but at what cost? In this paper I examine one of the most recent and arguably most radical regeneration projects in the area of El Raval and attempt to answer just that question.
Better known as 'Barrio Chino' (Villar, 1996) and historically the city's red light district, El Raval is a marginal historic area at odds with its tourist-attracting geographical neighbours; the Ramblas and the Gothic quarter. But it wasn't always this way. As the cradle of the industrial revolution in 19th-century Barcelona, El Raval was a place in which the noise of machinery and its workforce never abated. Built up with factories, warehouses and cheaply built working-class housing, the industrial Raval offered a busy street-life that stimulated the growth of numerous small businesses, shops and markets alongside equally numerous cabarets, brothels and other sex related establishments. During the second half of the 20th century however, as industry declined, El Raval too gradually regressed from an 'active place' into a 'place of loss'. From the bohemian, erotic locale evoked by Jean Genet in Diary of a Thief it became the dangerous, drug and crime-ridden neighbourhood of the late 1970s.Those who could, left the area. Remaining behind were the old, the mentally ill, the unwanted citizens of Barcelona living in dilapidated housing and streets filled with "closed metallic shutters of bars and commerce, and abundant flyers advertising flat rental, and hostels that were working as 'hot beds', so-called because the clients took turns in the rooms 24 hours a day" (Villar, 1996:230).
Unsurprisingly, when the regeneration of el Raval started in the 1980s the priority was to change this 'marginal' public life, a process to be achieved by gradually transforming its public space. The official strategy was esponjamiento meaning 'loosening the weave', referring to the destruction of the most degraded parts of the neighbourhood, the cutting through the central, most marginal area of El Raval in Hausmanian fashion to create a second Ramblas and the creation of a cultural quarter in the north to attract new uses and residents. The cultural quarter was to be headed by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), designed by Richard Meier, and surrounded by a large square: the Placa dels Angels, used to stage open air events.
Both planners and politicians regard regeneration as a process that simultaneously tackles physical, social and economic conditions in 'problematic' neighbourhoods, as a recent definition illustrates:
[Regeneration entails] a comprehensive and integrated vision and action which leads to the resolution of urban problems and which seeks to bring about a lasting improvement in the economic, physical, social and environmental condition of an area that has been subject to change. (Roberts & Sykes 2000:17, emphasis added)
Implicit within this statement is a negative judgement upon an area's existing public life and space because of its perceived social, economic and physical decay. The regeneration is directed at dismissing the aura of marginality and deterioration that has identified a place in the past by revitalizing, or more accurately by changing, its public life.
The first step to transforming an area is to change its physical infrastructure. On the one hand, to physically strip it of its negative image and associations in the public imagination, on the other, to invite new uses by making it an attractive place for investing capital in the form of businesses, residences or leisure outlets. This physical redesign and spatial re-structuring of place can be interpreted, as Miles (2000) argues, as a cultural re-coding of the place. It involves demolishing obsolete buildings (as has happened around the Liverpool Docks), introducing new flagship projects (such as the Tate Modern at Bankside in London), or re-adapting old buildings to new uses (such as transforming a church into a bookshop here in el Raval). Hence, one can state that regeneration effectively means altering the 'look and feel' (Hall and Hubbard, 1998) of particular neighbourhoods in order to symbolically re-value its landscape.
These physical changes in the public spaces of a city are discussed by some post-modern commentators in terms of a set of visual strategies, which can be summed up under the heading of 'aesthetisation'. The key features of aesthetisation are described to be: The importance attached to imagery in the city; the prevalence of spectacle in the city; the self-conscious creation of a city lifestyle and the stylisation of whole city areas (Harvey 1989, Jameson 1991, Featherstone 1991, Zukin 1995). The aim of this paper is, in part, to expand and explore this notion of aesthetisation by drawing upon the original Greek meaning of the word 'aesthesis' which refers to "the perception of the external world by the senses" (Collins Dictionary, 1986). My study seeks to examine the actual articulation of aesthetisation in the everyday life of regenerated public spaces by analysing the multisensory experience derived from place. I will argue that analysing the spatial constitution of public spaces from a sensory perspective provides an insight into complex and subtle forms of power relations in regeneration projects; ways of including and excluding certain practices, memories or meanings of place that are important in the constitution of public spaces and public life. In the first section of the paper, I will briefly discuss my theoretical framework for a sensuous analysis of place before moving on to examine thesensuous landscape of el Raval and discuss the implications this has for the experience of public places and el Raval's public life.
Sensing the city
The argument I propose in this article revolves around the notion that our geographical experience and imagination are based upon the interplay of body, senses and place. The combination of different senses contributes to our spatial orientation, an awareness of spatial relationships and the appreciation of the qualities of particular places (Rodaway, 1994). How we structure a space and define a place is based on our sensory perception. While in the western world there has been a clear dominance of the visual, in our everyday perception most of us 'see' aided by the interplay of all the senses. And of course these senses do not create perceptions in themselves, but require a frame of reference, an object or objects that they define. We do not sense in a vacuum but need to be confronted with a material world to sense: a flower we smell, a path we step on and touch, food we taste, ... Thus it can be said that our environment affords us certain sensescapes.
Recently, Urry (2000) has used the notion of 'affordances' of environments or objects, to draw attention to the fact that senses connect hybrid objects, the human and non-human. The term 'affordance', first developed by ecological psychologist James Gibson (1986), suggests that the composition and layout of environments 'affords' certain types of behaviour, that there is not an objective reality but merely affordances or qualities in the environment perceived relatively to the observer. Affordances are the values and meanings of our surroundings that individuals sensuously perceive. These affordances are not inscribed in space but rather activated through the individual's sensory experiences, by the moving through, touching, smelling, hearing or sight of objects and places. It is the senses that connect human capacities with objects. Examples of affordances are: a large open square that allows the gathering of large groups of people, a tainted glass building that allows viewing the outside but not inside, or a particular building that affords and triggers certain memories. Based on these principles we can view the experience of place as an active dialogical expression between the users of space and the possibilities that the constitution of that place engenders. Space is performative in that it affords certain practices and sensory experiences, but at the same time it is also performed through the actions and experiences attributed to this particular place. As I will demonstrate, the reconfiguring of public space involves a reconfiguration of affordances and resistances, which is a very sensuous enterprise.
But how can we operationalise this sensory framework to discover power relations in the environment? Lefebvre's concept of rhythmanalysis (1991, 1996) provides a valuable model as it refers to the ways in which the predominance of particular sensescapes demarcates a place. Thinking in terms of rhythms offers us a way to capture the ephemeral process of sensory experience. It provides a tool to measure the power relations inscribed in the urban landscape as particular sensescapes that fluctuate in their intensity and relationships. Who or what is seen, heard, touched, tasted and smelled is connected to questions about what is included or excluded in the experience of public space. It is an expression of power and the "ability of certain groups to superimpose their rhythms on others." (Allen, 1999:65).
In the next section I will discuss the transformation of sensescapes in el Raval. I am focusing on the flagship area of the regeneration process: 'Eje Cultural' (Cultural Quarter), in which the regeneration began and from whence it is expected to virally expand into surrounding areas. My findings are based on an eight month ethnographic study in el Raval, which included 70 interviews with old and new residents, shop owners, workers in the new cultural establishments, residents' associations, tourists, city council representatives, planners and architects. To provide anonymity to the interviewees their names have been changed. I shall begin by discussing the sensory contrast between the regenerated and non-regenerated before moving on to explore the sensory manipulation of time in regenerated spaces and to offer an analysis of the everyday practices in regenerated spaces.
El Raval : a neighbourhood of contrasts
El Raval is a densely populated area (according to the 1996 census, 34,871 registered people live in this area which has the highest proportion of old people, working class and immigrants in Barcelona (27.8%)). The process of regeneration cannot occur uniformly but rather must make incursions at different points and develop at different speeds. Thus the present, past and future are dramatically contrasted in the sensescapes of the area. Smooth, cream coloured designer buildings stand alongside elaborately designed 19th-century grey facades. On the opposite side of the road huge advertising hoardings portraying the future image of the neighbourhood stand amidst the rubble of half-demolished buildings. Residents often refer to theirneighbourhood as a 'bombarded place' and it's easy to appreciate why: a walk through the derelict streets offers a vista of gutted houses and lonely walls that's immediately reminiscent of a war zone. Flowered pink wallpaper rustles in the wind, the shadow of a bed frame marks a tiny bedroom, blue tiles from a washbasin are all that remain of communal toilets. But if this is a war zone, then it's an ongoing conflict, as the ravaged landscape is constantly accompanied by the intense sounds of construction, foretelling its own story of new apartment blocks. Through it all, adjoining neighbours stand silently on their terraces to observe the demolition. And this is perhaps the most emotive scene, as, in the process of the dismembering of el Raval's physical past, we witness the destruction of a living social history, something altogether different to the conserved history of churches and charity houses that will remain. An artist living and working in the neighbourhood explains:
Contrast between new and old
That the outside walls are gone, it is as if the houses had opened their shells and you can see the soul of the neighbourhood, you can see how life really was inside all this (Nuria, artist and new resident of El Raval).
In the act of demolishing the houses, suddenly the memory of the people who lived in these places becomes alive and valued, albeit fleetingly and soon to be buried under new construction. In 1998 an art project started by two local artists and supported by the Museum of Modern Art, transformed el Raval into 'La ciutat de les Paraules' (The City of Words) and tried to make some of these social histories visible by drawing and writing poems on some of the leftover walls. As the artists explain:
'The City of Words' has given a proper name to small places hidden in the Raval neighbourhood, and, for a moment, has turned them into singular spaces recovered on behalf of surprise and discovery. The project started with two very simple proposals: we asked local residents to hang their favourite words from their balconies, and we encouraged artists to work out the relationship between art and literature by using the Raval neighbourhood as a blank canvas. (in: La Ciutat de les Paraules, Edicions de L'Eixample, 1998)
During the interviews carried out for this study, planners, politicians and city council-run housing associations positively associate the change of the sensory physiognomy of the neighbourhood with the 'normalization' of people living in it. Planners describe this action of opening up the neighbourhood as a necessary strategy to provide permeability of the place. If El Raval is to gain presence for the outside world, its social and public life need to change, as the following quote illustrates:
Why this insistence on public space? Because public space resolves two problems in a neighbourhood that apart from having the narrowness of a historic city centre has a second problem, namely that it has had the function of receiving the residual activities of the city for many years. The permeability, the facility of penetration by the exterior, for those who are outside the neighbourhood, for the rest of the city, the opening of the neighbourhood to the city was the principal worry [...]. (A former El Raval councillor)
The notion of public space that the councillor refers to is one that serves as a means to an end: the marketing of the neighbourhood. Public space is seen here as the opportunity to provide accessibility to the neighbourhood with the ultimate aim to substitute the existent public life for another. As a planner explains:
these types of urban changes have a lot to do with improving the social set up of the place. It opens up for other social groups. Before nobody wanted to live in the Old City and now we have changed it, people like us are moving in. (planner, Barcelona Urban Planning Dept.)
What this quote illustrates is that aesthetic manipulation and social change are here regarded as linked features. Changing the sensescapes of the place is expected to substitute the existing "undesirable" spatial practices of the place with new ones.
The 'frontstages' (Goffman, 1959) of the regeneration such as the flagship area where the Museum of Modern Art is situated, sums up the desired sensory rhythms envisaged by planners and politicians for regenerated spaces: light and spaciousness. The surfaces of the Placa dels Angels are smooth and reflect light, no trees or street furniture disrupt its uniformity, create boundaries or distract the senses from the self-referential visual celebration of the place. People look small and lost in these squares as the main attraction is the appearance of the place itself and reflections: reflections on the wet, concrete pavement, reflections on the glass wall of the museum. This leads me to describe it as a narcissistic urban landscape - a celebration of its own monumentality. Thus, the aesthetic strategies applied make this square stand in sharp contrast with older, dirtier and more chaotic, non-regenerated spaces of the area. Beautiful in its own terms it is a 'public landmark of difference' within the neighborhood. One could easily argue that this square and surrounding buildings could be anywhere and are interchangeable. It was conceived as a prestige area to attract investment and visitors to the place. This standardization of aesthetic strategies makes spaces such as the Placa dels Angels recognizable environments for tourists, they fit into Zukin's (1995) description of commercialized spaces for visual consumption.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Recoveries and Reclamations by Judith Rugg, Daniel Hinchcliffe. Copyright © 2002 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Series Introduction Malcolm Miles,Foreword Jane Rendell,
General Introduction Judith Rugg and Daniel Hinchcliffe,
Contributors,
Section One – Issues of Regeneration and Cultural Change,
Regenerating Public Life? A Sensory Analysis of Regenerated Public Places in El Raval, Barcelona Monica Degen,
Utopia from Dystopia: The Womens Playhouse Trust and the Wapping Project Judith Rugg,
New Urban Spaces: Regenerating a Design Ethos Paul Teedon,
Section Two – Artists' Reclamations/Ecological Spatial Actions,
Art, Science and Ecological Enquiry: The Case of American Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting Kirk Savage,
Three Rivers – Second Nature The River Dialogues Tim Collins,
Seeing Through Place Local Approaches to Global Problems Malcolm Miles,
Skinningrove: A photo Essay Malcolm Miles,
Section Three – The Unseen Public Space,
Collective Assemblages, Embodiment and Enuciations Helen Stratford,
From Birmingham to Bogota: Tracing the Metaphor of Submerged Space Through the Architecture of 1960's Birmingham and the Artistic Practice of Doris Salcedo Jane Calow,
Section Four – Identities and Communities,
Differences, Boundaries, Community: The Irish in Britain Mary J Hickman,
Renewing Methodologies for Socio-Cultural Research Global Refugees, Ethno-mimesis and the Transformative Role of Art Maggie O'Neil and Bea Tobolewska,