Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction: Barcelona: Cultural readings of a city
- I City, history, and territory
- II City and society
- III Art, architecture, and the city
- IV The Olympics and the city
- V Literature, cinema, and the city
- 15 La Gran Encisera: Three odes to Barcelona, and a film
- 16 The deceptive dame: Criminal revelations of the Catalan capital
17 - A Biutiful city: Alejandro González Iñárritu's filmic critique of the ‘Barcelona Model’
from V - Literature, cinema, and the city
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction: Barcelona: Cultural readings of a city
- I City, history, and territory
- II City and society
- III Art, architecture, and the city
- IV The Olympics and the city
- V Literature, cinema, and the city
- 15 La Gran Encisera: Three odes to Barcelona, and a film
- 16 The deceptive dame: Criminal revelations of the Catalan capital
Summary
Introduction
La buena parte del urbanismo moderno nunca ha dejado de animarlo –en Barcelona también– la intención de constituir una ciudad perfecta, es decir, una contra-ciudad advirtiendo que quizás la vocación última de cierto urbanismo acaso sea la de desactivar para siempre lo urbano.
[The greater part of modern urbanism has not ceased to be motivated by the intention – Barcelona is no exception – to construct a perfect city, that is, a counter-city suggesting that perhaps the final goal of a certain urbanism may be to disactivate the urban forever.]
Manuel Delgado Ruiz, La ciudad mentirosa: fraude y miseria del ‘modelo Barcelona’/The Deceitful City: The Fraud and Misery of the ‘Barcelona model’ (2007a: 17)
After so many years of international applause for Barcelona's monumental and spectacular built environment, at long last Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful (2010) shows, as this essay explores, not a dystopic future Barcelona but the dark underbelly of the Barcelona that already exists. Opposed to the city's traditional casting as a beautiful backdrop – as arguably represented in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) – here we have not the acclaimed ‘model’ Barcelona but the ‘real’ Barcelona (in the sense of the term as employed by Slavoj Žižek, see the ‘Introduction’ in Kay 2003) – that is, the drab, grimy city full of labour inequality, the collusion of police with multinationals, the reality of sickness (cancer) and the lack of real possibilities for the immigrants who come from abroad hoping to make a better life for themselves and for their families. Just like this article's epigraph penned by Barcelona-based critical urban theorist Manuel Delgado Ruiz (1956–), the filmic image of the Catalan capital presented in Iñárritu's film calls attention to the distance between self-congratulatory discourses of Barcelona as the modern city por antonomasia on one side, and the injustices faced by so many of its urbanites on the other (Delgado 2007a: 17).
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- The Barcelona ReaderCultural Readings of a City, pp. 417 - 442Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2017