Summer in the City:
Universal Forum of Cultures - Barcelona 2004
by Steffani Jemison

Fancy a little tête-à-tête with King Juan Carlos of Spain about the political situation in Europe? How about fifteen performances to choose from daily, ranging from radical street theater to political dance to Bob Dylan, concerts? Participate in a dialogue with international experts about the future of global broadcasting, cultural diversity, and regulation? You can do it all, and a whole lot more, at the ambitious Universal Forum of Cultures in Barcelona, a summer festival intended to serve as an open space for reflection on cultural diversity, sustainable development, and conditions for peace. And the budget for this colossal cultural event? Bigger than the Gross National Product of most developing nations.

The city of Barcelona has sunk four hundred million dollars of its own money—not counting billions more from corporate sponsors, NGO partners, and ticket sales—into the grandmamma of all summer festivals, the five-month conference. Optimistically dubbed an “International Meeting of the Minds”— the summer is dotted with 49 dialogues featuring high-profile intellectuals, politicians, and public figures. It's also been called the “Cultural Olympics,” alluding to the extraordinary artistic and cultural programming at the conference (and the competing international tourist event of the summer: the Summer Olympics in Athens).

The facts and figures associated with the project are mind-boggling: over the course of the festival's 141 days, the forum will feature 1500 performances, including 400 concerts by artists like world music perennials Phil Collins and Sting and peace freaks like Bob Dylan, and heavy hitters like Norah Jones, Lenny Kravitz, Alicia Keys, and Gilberto Gil. Many of the speakers (invited to participate in one of the 49 “dialogues”) are extremely famous: Mikhael Gorbachev (participating in the Dialogues on Water), the Dalai Lama, and Iranian Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi will be making appearances, among many, many other notable intellectuals and political figures.

Sounds like a dream come true, right? Well, it is: the forum was originally the vision of a single person, Pasqual Maragall , former mayor of Barcelona and now President of the Catalan regional government. Of course, the successful execution of this event cannot be attributed to Maragall alone, but is a testament to the power of deep, comprehensive collaboration.

The city of Barcelona's investment in the project is mostly practical—equal parts urban renewal project and massive public relations campaign; the forum is undeniably extremely strategic. Conference organizers openly admit that the forum was planned as an excuse to bankroll much-needed development along the Diagonal, a central street that terminated in the Besos River, the most-polluted river in Europe. As many observers have pointed out, this isn't the first time Barcelona has pulled this kind of trick: the economic boost from the forum, organizers hope, will be comparable to the lift the city received when it hosted the Summer Olympics in 1992.

Here, inevitably, is the kicker. What if you spend 3 billion dollars on an event and nobody thinks it's worth it? With any event this size, no matter how good the intentions, there are bound to be detractors, folks who think it's not worth it, or that the money could be better spent on other things, or benefiting other people.

And there are detractors, in legions. Some Spanish community organizations think the whole thing is a real-estate scam designed to benefit wealthy developers: Barcelona's Federation of Neighborhood Associations has claimed that real estate development for the Forum has been prioritized over housing issues. Eva Fernandez, the president of the organization, told an Associated Press reporter “With just 10% of what they've invested in the forum, they could have solved housing problems for 23,000 low-income families.”

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