ABSTRACT
In the age of global flows and mass consumption, cities have gradually become just another commodity for global tourists and visitors. As a consequence, cities have started to find ways to produce an attractive “corporate urban image” that can be easily identified and consumed by all sorts of visitors. Barcelona is one of the best examples by which an old postindustrial European city has reinvented itself to become a successful global destination for visitors of all kinds. In this chapter I will review the ways in which the city of Barcelona has been transformed and adapted to its new role in this context and the use of particular images to promote a well-defined concept of what the city was and wants to be. The so-called Barcelona Model has been used both as an example of successful urban regeneration and planning and as a model of the banalization of urban landscapes (Degen, 2003; Delgado, 2004; Muñoz, 2004; Capel, 2005). In the case of Barcelona the creation of this image involves a very powerful ideological apparatus that challenges in part the symbolic economies of the Spanish state and develops a distinctive Catalan nationalist discourse that denies the similarities with the rest of Spain and promotes a very interesting mix of local and traditional symbols with a discourse of cosmopolitanism and modernity. Eventually these ideological discourses have been able to transform the urban landscape in Barcelona.
