Stories We Live By:…and the Games Created the City

Abstract

This chapter introduces the analysis of municipal discourses by calling attention to their leaders’construction of the Olympic Games as makers of the democratic city, and the product of their managing the entire local population. To question its validity, we offer a brief genealogy proving that Barcelona’s Olympic bid was an affair originating in the Francoist period and faced the opposition of grassroots movements. This incompatible situation poses the central question that this part of the book attempts to answer: How is it that citizens went from being adamantly against such macro events to embracing them wholeheartedly? Here is where analyzing the evolution in municipal discourses on culture, and the way they addressed the citizen finds its place. By pursuing the continuities and breaks in how they made sense of the citizens’ relation to the city, we can ascertain the presence of a project to transform the citizens’ very understanding of themselves as urban agents.