Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century

Mediterranean Reflections: Reconstructing Nature in Modern Barcelona

Mediterranean Reflections Reconstructing Nature in Modern Barcelona Gary McDonogh The sea has been for Catalonia the principal artery of its very blood. Thus, Catalonia appears powerful in times when it enjoys preponderance over the sea, and decadent when the Mediterranean ceases to be the central sea of the known world. —Joaquim Pla Cargol, La terra Catalana Among the most striking transformations of contemporary Barcelona, in both urban culture and urban nature, is the city’s “return” to the Mediterranean . Barcelona long has been a port city whose commerce, politics, and culture have depended on the Mediterranean. Its early links to Carthage and Rome were followed by its medieval and early-modern status as the capital of a maritime empire, and its nineteenth-century renaissance as a commercialindustrial metropolis tied to Havana, Manila, and New York. Over the centuries , artists, journalists, scientists, planners, and politicians have invoked the sea and its littoral ecosystem in both pragmatic activities and abstract visions . Nevertheless, in the last four decades, Barcelona’s leaders and citizens have transformed the former working port into a focal point, “a new ‘plaça mayor’ for leisure activities in the city.”¹ Renovated and expanded parks, and miles of beaches reclaimed from industrial pollution have redefined the spaces of city and nature. They have been amplified by a vivid pedagogy of “nature” in the city’s museums— including a 2009 museum focused on sustainability—in multiple publications , and through an active Web site (www.bcn.es).² Barcelona’s leaders evoked the Mediterranean visually and metaphorically in the opening ceremonies of the 1992 Summer Olympiad; a decade later, the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures showcased redeveloped coastal spaces as ecological exhibits and prime real estate, presenting the Mediterranean as a global foundation from which to envision the twenty-first-century city.³ 58 | Gary McDonogh Yet, this “cara al mar,” as many Barcelonans have pointed out, also mythologizes the Mediterranean, distancing the imagined city from its ecological history. It conceals, for example, the transformation of the industrial city that had used the sea as its highway and sewer into a tertiary metropolis dominated by consumption, leisure, international exchanges, and migrant labor. For centuries, Barcelona’s walled seafront revealed citizens’ longstanding ambivalence toward the Mediterranean as a source of traders and pirates, food and armadas. Even the port now seen as a ludic space was described more darkly a century ago: “The Port of Barcelona is worthy of the second capital of Spain. Its most sumptuous feature is the water of the sea. Its principal adornment, the filth floating on its surface.”⁴ Modern imagery, pedagogy, and planning entail specific albeit diverse constructions of what nature is in and for the city. These discourses often value selected elements of “nature”—especially climate, water, mountains, and cultivated vegetation—while overlooking fundamental transformations in fauna, fire, soil, and geological formations created by millennia of human interactions.⁵ Interpretations of nature also reinterpret processes that have united “city” and “nature” for centuries. The very port that embraces the Mediterranean has entailed centuries of construction, surrounding and taming the sea. Other urban terrains have shifted from agricultural lands to factories to real estate. Over time, nonetheless, the lives of the city and its citizens have been intertwined with the sea and the Mediterranean littoral, its geography, climate, social organization, and cultural meanings. The region’s ecology, filtered through social and cultural transformations, has shaped the Barcelona Harbor 2009. (Photo by the author) Mediterranean Reflections | 59 form, lives, and policies of the city. Barcelona’s claims as the capital of a maritime geographical region are different, yet enmeshed with nationalist claims for rights and sovereignty in this political territory. This essay explores Barcelona’s changing relationships with the Mediterranean as physical space, social place, and cultural imaginary since the Industrial Revolution. It first contrasts evocations of the Mediterranean as form and cultural statement in the work of two architects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Antoni Gaudí (1852–1928) explored the Mediterranean in modernista monuments for patrons of a renascent economic and cultural elite who participated in the rebirth of Catalan nationalist politics. Nicolau Maria Rubió Tudurí (1891–1981), better known as a landscape architect , exemplifies a subsequent movement, noucentisme, which both embellished the modern city and reenvisioned its global presence. In both cases, erudite discourses arose in counterpoint to claims of other classes including anarchists who used the sea and land in...