Contents 109

DossierOpen city

Open cityOpening up the city, rethinking the city

The change in era we’re currently experiencing is altering many of the values, conceptual schemes and balances upon which post-war Europe was built. The “Ciutat Oberta” (Open City)...

SHANGHAI, CHINA
Open cityFlexible Urbanisms

Much of the urban design applied around the world follows the technocratic model of the Athens Charter. This is a homogenous, one-size-fits-all model that provides simple solutions to...

Open cityA crooked, open, modest city

Judgements that the cité has ‘failed’ to open up are thus Janus-faced: one side of the coin shows angry populist prejudice, but on the other face can appear the self-satisfied...

Open cityBuilding Harmonies: Toward a Choral Architect

Although people know what they need and want, yet architecture spins into navel-gazing and drifts farther and farther from the possibility of substantive contribution to the communities...

Open cityWhere do they keep the white people?

For the first time in many years, the term “fascism” is being used in the United States to refer to the rhetorical return of white supremacists, and the threat it represents for the...

Open cityIs there a women’s city?

From a feminist perspective, cities need to respond to the human need to inhabit, not to accumulate wealth. They need to allow people to live where they were born and to access the type...

Open cityCommitment and collective action

Emancipatory political transformation doesn’t just require certain political and legal tools (such as well-established democratic institutions or certain material conditions), but also...

Open cityThe (global) city’s not for me

The large global metropolis embodies the spirit of our era, while small and medium-sized deindustrialized cities are sceptical about the future, with nostalgia for a past they identify...

Open cityRefugee cities: an alternative?

Just as borders are accepted as an inevitable part of our reality, it seems increasingly difficult to imagine a migration policy that doesn’t involve an unyielding defence of the...

Open cityHow much urban democracy can global capitalism stand?

Three decades of neoliberal deregulation from the wild side of the market have impeded and disfigured opportunities for urban democracy and have seized the city from its people. In spite...

An elderly couple sitting on a bench looking at a pond
Open city‘Ligatios’ and ‘obligatios’: ties in an open city

The space we inhabit, the environment that surrounds us, shapes our behaviour and everything about us: our character, our ethos. That’s what ethics is about. It isn’t just about...

Other contents

Building city and citizenship

Barcelona Metròpolis takes on a new era with a new format, a new design and a new digital space. The new Barcelona Metròpolis wants to be a tool for promoting and...

Fundació Vila Casas
The street kid who became an artist

Lita Cabellut

Anyone who is close to her will tell you that watching her create is a work of art in itself. Her studio is the scene of thousands of creative battles, where paint flows like water and...

Maria-Mercè Marçal in present continuous

Twenty years after her death, the work of the poet and fiction author who was ‘three times a rebel’ in her own words, is seeing a renewed vitality in the political and cultural...

Barcelona’s ring roads and some of the major highways connecting with Catalonia’s northern regions come together at the interchange of La Trinitat.
Barcelona, urban borders

There are an infinite number of borders in Barcelona. Social borders, that separate our ways of life and the possibilities they have to offer (the ‘Upper Diagonal’ concept, the Paral·lel...

Battles won and yet to win

We live in turbulent times, and culture is not immune to the upheaval caused by the change of era in which we find ourselves. 

Personas alrededor de una parada de libros en la calle
Copyright and freedom of expression in the Internet Age

The European Union has tabled a new directive on copyright to harmonize different aspects of the European digital market. 

Portrait of Eva Baltasar
“The success of Permagel was like another flash flood that washed over me”

Eva Baltasar

She was unjustly obscure until only very recently and that may have been largely due to poetry.

Sound technician working on an open air session at Sònar Festival
Deconstructing Music

Music is like water that slips through your fingers: just what is the nature of this ephemeral thing, held to be the most abstract and universal language? 

Black and white photographs by Lee Miller
Gala and Lee Miller, Surrealism in a room of one’s own

Gala was the wife and muse of Salvador Dalí, as well as his secretary and salesperson. Lee Miller was a stunningly beautiful fashion model who worked with Man Ray and served as a...

Hands of people taking pictures of La Gioconda with their cellphones.
A Certain Darkness

The exhibit A Certain Darkness can be seen until January 5 at the CaixaForum. 

Cover of the book Diumenges a Barcelona by Xavier Theros
A stroll through Can Fanga

Writing about Barcelona is a way of recuperating it. This form of resistance has inspired a great deal of literature, be they collections of oral stories, memories or articles on...

Cover from the book El cel no és per a tothom by Marta Rojals
Rojals’ most ambitious novel

Marta Rojals has taken on the challenge in the American style, using the raw materials of our own local reality. It’s what we might call the “great Catalan novel”. 

Cover of the book Les arts aplicades a Barcelona by Francesc Fontbona
The transformative power of the decorative arts

Forged iron, ceramics, wood, glass, pavement, coats of arms, clocks, bells… Art historian Francesc Fontbona edited Les arts aplicades a Barcelona (The Applied Arts in Barcelona...

Sant Pau, part of our history and part of our soul

“If the hospital were taken away, it’d change Barcelona’s soul.” The first time I read those words, written by Doctor Josep Cornudella about the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, I...

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