Introduction

And this explains its popularity with the European centre-left, consummate consumers of fine food and architecture, and anxious to retain the city as a focus of activity. Barcelona has undergone an urban renaissance second-to-none, and has done so largely because of the efforts of its social-democrat-led city council, since their arrival in the mayoral office in 1979. While Los Angeles has become ‘the essential destination on the itinerary of any late twentieth-century intellectual…the terrain and subject of fierce ideological struggle’, torn between boosterist dreams and dystopian nightmare, Barcelona represents a less polarised —but equally ideological —vision of the happy marriage of state intervention and economic competitiveness.1 As such, it has featured heavily on the agendas of urban policymakers and politicians around the world, from Atlanta to Lisbon to Shanghai to London. And from Leeds to Manchester, Glasgow and Cardiff.