Abstract
This essay interprets the implementation of “tactical urbanism” as the latest step in the urban technocratic project aimed at destroying or at least subduing all actual urban life, thus as a form of urbicide. It presents the case of Barcelona, where in the spring of 2020 the “new municipalism” city council developed several interventions based on tactical urbanism, aiming at guaranteeing a prophylactic environment against the spread of COVID19. Though presented as temporary, these transformations ended up being permanent, combining with other urban policies such as the “superblocks” (supermanzanas), justified as countering climate change. The essay argues that these policies aimed at refurbishing outdoor urban spaces reiterate the hygienist vocation of early nineteenth-century urbanism, born as a “science” precisely in the Catalan capital. The growing influence of tactical urbanism is analyzed in the framework of a left-wing municipal government that attempts to develop a new orientation in city governance and that employs as a crucial discourse a rhetoric of public space as an ethical arena for good citizenship. Though this urbanism is exhibited as environmentally friendly, it is inscribed in a long tradition of policies aimed at sanitizing cities by removing their natural tendency at being spaces for conflict.
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Notes
- 1.
The Google Books Ngram Viewer tool reveals that the concept of public space in books was almost nonexistent before 1980 but has enjoyed uninterrupted, exponentially increasing use since then.
- 2.
The health reasons for the tactical urbanism interventions in Barcelona appeared frequently in the local press as “emergency” measures required by the health crisis. See, for example, how the transformations were presented by Catalan public television, TV3: https://www.ccma.cat/324/lurbanisme-tactic-adapt-transform-the-city-durgency-per-pandemic/news/3056906/. Accessed 17 May 2022.
- 3.
- 4.
During the lockdown, “with less traffic the noise also went down. And the sum of the two factors allowed the birds to descend from the tops of the trees to streets, banks and fountains” (Mouzo et al. 2020: 4).
- 5.
For a chronicle of this process, in its different stages, please see the work of Fernández (2014) on urban planning attempts to “disinfect” what is now the Raval neighborhood in Barcelona.
- 6.
- 7.
A chronicle of this process, in its different stages, is presented in the work of Fernández (2014) on urban attempts to “disinfect” what is now the neighborhood of Raval in Barcelona.
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Delgado-Ruiz, M. (2023). The Ideology of Public Space and the New Urban Hygienism: Tactical Urbanism in Times of Pandemic. In: Carrión Mena, F., Cepeda Pico, P. (eds) Urbicide. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25304-1_8
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