Working for the City Image: Municipal Publicity Campaigns Redefining the Preferred Barcelona Subject

Abstract

Our analysis of the first democratic period of municipal cultural policies has revealed clearly how the Barcelonian that the municipality had in mind was that of the deprived, put-upon citizen of the working-class peripheries. But the envisioned citizen for the pre-Olympic context, as we saw him emerge in Chapter 5, was no longer this person: s/he had moved to the city center again (physically and ideologically) and should not expect that the City Hall would continue to bend over backwards to satisfy his/her demands. The municipality’s priority had shifted from the citizen and his/her well-being to the city itself, and the material conditions necessary to guarantee its successful economic restructuring. But for this endeavor, the cooperation of an enthusiastically was still needed, a citizen willing to join the City Council in servicing Barcelona in the correct way, by contributing to the tertiary, tourist, and cultural economies. Participation was therefore still very much in demand and active in municipal discourses, but under redefined governance aims. Municipal publicity campaigns are privileged spaces to witness such shifts in detail, and the ideological changes they imply. In what follows we will pursue some of the more influential examples for the key pre-Olympic years, from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.