ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a vision of new public spaces in Barcelona in the past
twenty years. It goes beyond stressing the transformation of the urban
landscape and its contribution to the changing of the city’s image. I have
made some contributions in this direction (Benach 1993), thus adding myself,
perhaps involuntarily, to the “architectural determinism” that has dominated
the discourse on the city in the past decades. This architectural determinism,
both in its positive and negative versions, has identified the analysis of what
happened in the city with its spatial transformations, as if the social life of
those spaces was to be construed automatically from them. This is not a new
practice in urban studies but, nevertheless, it still makes it difficult to set up
an adequate reading of urban spaces that captures the complexity of
symbols, perceptions and uses that lived spaces involve (Lees 1994).
