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18 results

  • 8 - The family and the city: Power and the creation of cultural imagery

  • from II - City and society
    • By Gary Wray McDonogh, Helen Herrmann Professor and Chair of the Department of Growth and Structure of Cities at Bryn Mawr College
  • Edited by Enric Bou, Jaume Subirana
  • Book:
    The Barcelona Reader
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    12 September 2017, pp 185-208

  • Summary

    Beyond its value as an economic and social institution, the Catalan family has also been the basis for cultural imagery. As a metaphor for Catalan society the family became the cornerstone of cultural legitimization and domination by the upper class. As Bourdieu has noted, ‘The dominant factions, whose power is based on economic and political capital, seek to impose the legitimacy of their domination whether through their own symbolic production or through the intermediary of conservative ideologists’ (80). In other work I have examined the cultural presentation of the family in terms of political and economic strategies that positioned the Catalan polity between local class conflicts and state politics (McDonogh). Here the family will be analysed with regard to specifically urbanistic themes, including the control, and even the construction, of modern Barcelona.

    The family was a key symbol in the political strategies of the Catalan bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through which they sought to establish and unify a national movement. It was both an emotive image and an ambiguous one. In contrasting Catalonia and the rest of Spain the Catalan Civil Code was a symbol of unity, of a distinctive socioeconomic heritage, and of the right to political hegemony. At the same time, when challenged by internal conflicts, the elite and its ideologues interpreted the family in terms of hierarchy, authority, and order. It was the complexity of the image that made it uniquely valuable to one elite in its epoch and to a particular embodiment of Catalan nationalism.

    Within everyday interaction in the Catalan capital, however, family was evoked as the basis for a new understanding of the changing social order. In this regard it became an element in an elite sociology of classes and rights. To understand this cultural manipulation of the family, it is necessary to analyse more complex representations of urban society and their impact upon urban planning and urban life.

    This chapter focuses on two institutions that embodied an elite ‘sociology’ of industrial society: the Cementiri Vell (Old Cemetery) and the Gran Teatre del Liceu (the Barcelona Opera House). Both were built in the nineteenth century under the aegis of the emergent elite. Both have been dynamic constructions whose physical structure and interpretation have been sensitive to shifting power relations.

Sustainability in the Global City
  • Myth and Practice
  • Edited by Cindy Isenhour, Gary McDonogh, Melissa Checker
  • Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    05 March 2015
  • Cities play a pivotal but paradoxical role in the future of our planet. As world leaders and citizens grapple with the consequences of growth, pollution, climate change, and waste, urban sustainability has become a ubiquitous catchphrase and a beacon of hope. Yet we know little about how the concept is implemented in daily life, particularly with regard to questions of social justice and equity. This volume provides a unique and vital contribution to ongoing conversations about urban sustainability by looking beyond the promises, propaganda, and policies associated with the concept in order to explore both its mythic meanings and the practical implications in a variety of everyday contexts. The authors present ethnographic studies from cities in eleven countries and six continents. Each chapter highlights the universalized assumptions underlying interpretations of sustainability while elucidating the diverse and contradictory ways in which people understand, incorporate, advocate for, and reject sustainability in the course of their daily lives.