Public Everyday Space and Culture

This first chapter introduces several wide-spread controversies related to contemporary Barcelona’s public spaces, as well as the theoretical parameters of my arguments. Drawing from writers such as Jacques Rancière, Manuel Delgado, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I explain the benefits of focusing on public space, contemporary Barcelona, everyday space (versus monumental space), and small resistance. This chapter also describes the multiples sources of agency that shape what we can do, see, and know in Barcelona’s public spaces. Using several visual examples, I demonstrate how, starting in the late 1980s when the city was nominated to host the Olympics, an expansive control apparatus (ranging from municipal ordinances and construction companies to urban furniture and films) neoliberalized public spaces and created a globally recognizable image/brand that has led to gentrification, surveillance, and the displacement of less-profitable spaces, practices, subjects, and objects. It follows that this first chapter also introduces how, through everyday practices, activism, and cultural production, individuals find ways to circumvent top-down barriers and pursue their desires in public space. Lastly, this first chapter provides an overview of my research methodology and previews the subsequent chapters.