Olympic Games: Urbanization and Controversies

One of the biggest and most drastic developments to hit the urban scene of Barcelona was the Olympic games of 1992. The city was awarded the games in 1986 and the preparation started right away, the need for an infrastructure upgrade was urgent. Barcelonans took the Olympic Games as a chance to catch up on modernity. After the end of the Franco regime in the late 1970s, they were eager to escape the “grey vestige” Franco left behind (Hochadel and Nieto-Galan 2016: 2). Catalunya was bringing back its culture and the Games were a way to show it off to the world, which is why the city was excited and proud.

Redesigning a city is no easy task, and it is also not a cheap task. There had to be funding for all the projects that were going on in the city. The central government of Spain recognized the need to upgrade the city for the 1992 Olympic Games. Some believed that “a major international event such as the Olympic Games would be high-jacked once more by the Spanish state, [but] Barcelona was able to gain the world’s attention and to maintain it” (Hochadel and Nieto-Galan 2016: 2).  There was a response from the government on the funding of the city overhaul: “the city received substantial financial aid from the central government to prepare the infrastructure needed to host the Olympics in 1992” (McNeill 1999: 247).  This funding gave Barcelona the ability to do the upgrading that needed to happen.

The city approached this endeavor by embarking upon and rendering many projects, such as new expressways, Olympic stadia, and two communications towers. Encompassed by Sant Andreu in the north, Sant Adriá del Besós in the east, the Mediterranean Sea in the south, and Ciutat Vella in the west, the Poblenou underwent a lofty renovation that commenced in the 1980s that brought upon the reconstruction of one of its districts into the Olympic Village.

Occupying ex-industrial land and extending from the Gothic Quarter into the Mediterranean Sea, six large shopping centers were opened to the public in the years between 1992 and 2002 (McNeill 1999: 247). One of these centers included the Maremagnum, a mall the currently dominates the resting place of an old dockyard, Moll d’Espanya. Within the Maremagnum exists an abundance of stores that are attributed with encouraging “continuous consumption and insulation” from the reality found outside its walls (Sánchez 2000: 295). Its surrounding environment offers much to be seen, and has also been confronted with criticism that accuses it of following the path of many cities in the United States, in which the city is allegedly geared towards gratifying tourists rather than its own people.

Antonio Sánchez’s article “Barcelona’s Magic Mirror” talks about the social repercussions that occurred as Barcelona tried to redevelop. He writes about the evolving city and how it turns from a city of nature to something filled with several large shopping malls, luxury leisure centers and tourist attractions. One of his most notable quotes was: “It can be said that Barcelona’s redevelopment has transformed the ailing modern city into a gigantic postmodern mirror reflection an idealized image of itself to local and global audiences alike” (Sánchez 2000: 303). This is a powerful statement; it essentially states that the image of the city is an illusion. Its efforts to revitalize were more concerned with improving how it was portrayed and interpreted rather than with what it truly is. This can be explained through Barcelona’s desire to be recognized as a world leader, often putting on a show so that others would believe they were just as developed.

The period of time during and immediately after the Games in 1992 is, however, marked by a series of major crises as well, coinciding with cessation of the flow in public money due to the Olympics and repercussions of a general recession in the global economy. There were also widespread job cuts and the city grew increasingly dependent on wider trends in economic restructuring. The council pushed forth a number of new projects for development on certain sites in the city that were meant to “balance and spread development through the municipal territory” (McNeill 1999: 247), but instead, these projects put the city at risk for increased gentrification and loss of greenery. The world saw the city as modern and beautiful, but the residents saw the truth and their rights were pushed down to present this image. McNeill writes about how the Olympic have lost their nobility and how the buildings once built for the events now sit unused (McNeill 1999: 257). Are hosting the Olympics a blessing or a curse? Many cities will face an economic downfall after hosting the Olympics. They spent millions of dollars building facilities that will rarely be used after the Olympic are over.

Nonetheless, the Olympics and the urbanization they entailed also had benefits, as “the city’s redevelopment has improved not only its aesthetic appearance but also its urban infrastructure and social cohesion” (Sánchez 2000: 305). The modernistic redevelopment of the city has positively affected citizens’ daily lives such as efficient public transport, improved social facilities, and full access to local public spaces. This shows that it is inevitable for a city to undergo urbanization, and in many cases, that may not be a bad thing after all.

It is a very difficult thing to determine what the most beneficial thing would be for a city – to succumb to the fact-paced nature of modernism and revamp the landscape in order to fit in with the rest of the world, or to maintain the rich history that renders a city as unique and iconic? Overall, though the games did cause a small economic downfall before and after they were held, the games also brought attention to the city of Barcelona, to Catalunya and to the Spanish State.

—Edited by Camille Kresz and Benjamin Fraser with text from Victoria Bishop, Graziella Dominado, Brooke Palmer, Lillie Rhodes, Kendall Schunk, Sarah Spangler and Jayati Vyas