BCNDesign

The Barcelona City Council has recently announced that it will request the establishment of the .bcn domain for the city. Earlier this year,  the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)  voted to approve lifting restrictions on the classification of domain names, allowing for new customized Web addresses.

In 2006, ICANN approved the .cat domain, which was subsequently launched by the Catalan Regional Government (Generalitat de Catalunya) as a new domain for websites in the Catalan language. This domain therefore was not intended to represent a specific politically defined region or nation, but a cultural and linguistic group, and had therefore from the outset a strong ideological and national-linguistic component. As explained in the .cat domain charter:

The .cat TLD is intended to serve the needs of the Catalan Linguistic and Cultural Community on the Internet (the “Community”).

The Community consists of those who use the Catalan language for their online communications, and/or promote the different aspects of Catalan culture online, and/or want to specifically address their online communications to that Community.

The success of the .cat domain has encouraged numerous applications for other top level domains centered on creating an independent internet identity for linguistic and cultural communities.

Given the weight of local identity politics contained in the .cat domain, it is no surprise that the Generalitat has reacted angrily and is firmly opposed to Barcelona’s application to have its own domain. The Regional Government’s position is that .bcn will weaken the .cat domain, and will strengthen Barcelona’s approach to presenting itself as a ‘city-state’ with the rest of Catalunya as ‘part of the Barcelona metropolitan area’, rather than as being the capital of the Catalan nation.

In the words of Jordi Bosch, the Generalitat’s Secretary of Telecommunications and Information Society:

Barcelona perdrà l’oportunitat d’exercir com a capital del país i optarà de nou pel paper de ciutat estat que no beneficia el conjunt de Catalunya [...] i es donarà un concepte erroni de la resta de Catalunya com a àrea metropolitana de Barcelona.

The Generalitat has further accused the City Council of trying to carry out a branding and marketing operation at the expense of Catalan national identity.

And so it goes.

Only London and Paris beat Barcelona in the tourist seduction game, according to a recent report by Saffron, branding guru Wally Olin’s and Jacon Benbunan’s consultancy. The three cities are also ahead of the pack in constructing and maintaining a strong and attractive ‘brand’ in the minds of tourists, visitors and investors.

Paris emerges as Europe’s number one city brand, followed by London, Barcelona, Berlin and Amsterdam. The study, entitled ‘The City Brand Barometer’ and created by London-based Saffron Consultants, ranks 72 of Europe’s largest cities based on a comparison of their assets and attractions against the strength of their brands.

The study highlights

the contrasting fortunes of Barcelona and Naples – two potentially comparable cities in terms of regional significance, yet the Catalan capital has trounced its Italian rival in projecting a distinctive idea of what it stands for and who it’s appealing to. The southern Italian city is rich in good climate, history, culture and gastronomy but it has devoted little time to creating a reputation among Europe’s cities.

To rate the cities, Saffron established a series of pointers that measure what they call ‘City Assets strength’, based on the most desirable attributes. These are:

● Pride and personality
● Distinctive environment – landmark buildings, facilities, public transport
● Ambitious vision, with good leadership and buoyant economy
● Worth going out of the way to see
● Easy access and good public transport
● Conversational value – it is fun to talk about Paris but not Bradford
● Location – it is somewhere special or a centre for an interesting area

One of the most interesting aspects of the study, however, is the distinction between ‘real’ assets and brand strength. Some cities have a brand visibility that is greater than their real assets would suggest. Berlin comes out as a strong example of that, but it is also the case with Barcelona:

Berlin has a 137% Brand Utilisation rate; Stockholm 118%; Prague, Liverpool and Amsterdam 115%; Barcelona 112%; andParis 111%. For all of these cities, their brand is better than their assets would predict (even if the Assets are strong), meaning they are selling a story above and beyond an urban experience.  What does this mean? If you are a city with an over 100% Utilisation rate, it means you are successfully selling your image as well as a reality. It means that through your history and culture you have fostered an aura about you.

…or, after watching the video above, one might be tempted to swap famous titles and go for ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Barcelona’.

The video is part of an online campaign for the promotion of the book Odio Barcelona (‘I Hate Barcelona’), published by Editorial Melusina. It’s a compilation of pieces by twelve Barcelona-based authors, whose essays address aspects of the city that they dislike, in most cases related to the housing boom speculation and the negative effect of commercial interests on the fabric and spirit of the city, as well as to the growing pressure of Catalan nationalism on everyday life and urban politics.

Authors include Javier Calvo, Agustín Fernández Mallo, Philipp Engel, Robert-Juan Cantavella, Hernán Migoya, Llúcia Ramis, Matías Néspolo, Carol Paris, Oscar Gual, Lucía Lijtmaer, Javier Blánquez and Efrén Álvarez.

There can be no doubt that the extended honeymoon of the Barcelonese with their city is long over, a disenchantment that was probably sealed in the collective urban mind by José Luis Guerín’s 2001 film En Construcción, the understated but moving documentary of the construction of a new building in the inner-city neighbourhood of El Raval.

Another recent addition to the chorus of critical voices is Manuel Delgado’s book La ciudad mentirosa. Fraude y miseria del modelo Barcelona (‘The Liar City. Fraud and Misery of the Barcelona Model’), published by Catarata in 2007. This is an impassioned rant, described by the author as the cry from the heart of a disabused lover. Although the author is an academic at Barcelona University, the work is journalistic in tone (but with useful bibliography in the footnotes). It offers a fairly generic serving of urban studies and public space theories as background to a virulent critique of the evolution and implementation of the Barcelona model of urban regeneration, particularly the wholesale commercialisation of the city both as a ‘brand’ and as a building site.

Woody Allen’s film Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which was filmed here last year and premiered in the city a few days ago, has generated a lot of controversy along the road. The hot topic was the rumour that it received considerable financial support from local public institutions such as the Generalitat (Catalan regional government), the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and the Barcelona Municipality (the latter to the tune of one million euros or so). Others insisted Allen’s film had been no exception and had benefited from the usual range of institutional support offered to filmmakers in Spain.

There has been much bad feeling buzzing around Barcelona for the last few years as the locals have felt increasingly overwhelmed by the sell-out success of the Barcelona Brand, which has transformed the city almost beyond recognition, not always for the best. Many complain that they now live in a theme-park, and that the entrance ticket is beyond their means. And Allen’s film will only make things worse in that respect – Javier Bardem, the film’s male lead, commented in a recent interview that he felt sorry for the Barcelonese: ‘Where are you going to put all the people that will now flock to the city, in ever greater numbers?’ he wondered.

Woody Allen has said that the Barcelona of his film is the one seen by two young American tourists. I will happily report on exactly what kind of Barcelona that is, but I expect to see a lot of Gaudi architecture and possibly (incongruously) a bit of flamenco. More on that in a later post.

In the meantime, while the official Barcelona Brand cannot but be strengthed by the film, another branding battle is taking place around the city’s image, this time centered on a violent new computer game that uses the Catalan capital’s streets as its playground. The Wheelman, starring Vin Diesel, has a violent storyline of gang warfare, corruption and chaos. The game’s webpage explains that it is

Set in the exotic location of Barcelona, Spain. This classic European city is densely populated with traffic and pedestrians that react intelligently to your actions as you roam around realistic environments filled with massively destructible objects.

That all sounds pretty realistic to me, except for the intelligent reaction bit. And I love the idea of ‘massively destructible objects’ as an actual category of things. But as you can well imagine, the Barcelona Municipality was not pleased. Its lawyers have spent all summer trying to find a legal base to ban Midway, the game’s producer, from using Barcelona as a location.

Unfortunately the press reported yesterday that they had been unsuccessful, and the game will be released in a few weeks. Vin Diesel will be free to roam the exotic Catalan streets massively destroying every single destructible object (and individual) in his path. Montserrat Ballarin, the town Councillor in charge of the proceedings, has explained that Barcelona can’t sue Midway for tainting its image, because cities don’t actually seem to legally own their image:

No se puede reclamar a los creadores que resarzan por los daños que pueden provocar a la imagen de Barcelona, porque las ciudades no tienen recogido ese derecho“, ha explicado la concejal. [source]