Rethinking Barcelona’92 as a Cultural Milestone

Abstract

The Olympics crystallized for the first time, and with lasting effects, the effort to produce a global image of the city, what after the Games would be called the brand, at whose service culture and citizens must be. Obviously, Barcelona’s municipality had already produced an image for visitors, but what the Olympics allowed was for this image to take a qualitative leap and become omnipresent and the raison d’être for the whole city. This chapter proposes to examine this capital change as the product of the Olympic Games having produced a reconceptualization of culture. We start from a consideration of different takes on identity and their political and cultural use by the main parties involved in Barcelona’s cultural policies, the PSC and CiU, to propose that a revisit to the well-established assumptions about them is in order. Indeed, our analysis will prove that the very well-known disputes over the ownership of the Games – the battles for Barcelona – between the two administrations they respectively controlled, the Ajuntament and the Generalitat, were in the end irrelevant, and their proposals to define the identity of Olympic Barcelona marginally distinguishable and unquestionably compatible in the construction of the hugely successful Barcelona global brand.