Writing Barcelona: Reflections on City Planning and Urban Experience, 1854--1888

454 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010.The intertextual relationships between these discourses uncover the inner tensions of a project of urban modernization which was fuelled by the emerging bourgeoisie and remains in question to this day. Indeed, this dissertation aims at exposing the initial articulation of what has recently been called the "Barcelona model," a multi-faceted plan of urban development based on the concept of the city as spectacle which has been implemented cyclically according to periodical mandatory rites of passage: the Universal Exhibition of 1888, the International Exhibition of 1929, the 1992 Olympic Games, and the Forum Internacional de les Cultures in 2004. Ultimately, I suggest that these two apparently irreconcilable positions---the overarching plans of urban transformation led by the local administration, and the local dissent of citizens threatened by these periodical revolutions---are not only an integral part of the modernization process but also that these two positions are, in the final analysis, fundamentally modern.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD