|
NEWS August 24th 2004
|
||
|
Barcelona: Whose Forum? Welcome to the Barcelona Forum 2004. “A new space for democratic reflection on the challenges of the 21st century”...or a corporate-sponsored spectacle heralding inner city gentrification? By Jonathan Atkinson This summer, Barcelona is home to the “Universal Forum of Cultures”, a huge public event which, according to its own website, is “a space where the citizens of the world can gather, engage in dialogue, and debate the most urgent issues of the 21st century”. Forum events are structured around three themes: cultural diversity, sustainability and conditions for peace. These are explored with “interactive learning experiences” and showcases, and through events titled Dialogues - grand public debates with keynote speakers and questions from the floor. All this may sound good, but behind the façade of grassroots participation is a carefully orchestrated event, organised by the Spanish political establishment and big corporate sponsors. The latter form a nice list of the multinational elite: from Coca Cola and Toyota to Nestle and Catalonia's biggest bank, La Caixa, as well as a range of mainstream media outlets, presumably to ensure favourable press coverage. The venue, all metal and chrome, resembles something like a cross between the Great Exhibition and the Millennium Dome - and, like the Dome, it’s not a cheap experience. Day tickets cost a steep 30 Euros (about £20). Inside it's the usual urban festival fodder - events and showcases, juggling and circus, exhibitions, games and workshops. The entertainment offers a hint of the foreign and exotic without ever being challenging or inspiring. Supporting corporations are heavily advertised throughout the site, on promotional publicity and in the surrounding localities. Stepping off at the nearest Metro station, you are met with an entire platform’s worth of flyposters, enthusing about how Toyota will save the world with electric cars. Stark Opposites Over the past year, campaigners in Barcelona have been highlighting the hypocrisy of the state- and corporate-sponsored event. The theme of “conditions for peace” becomes a sad irony given that a significant number of the sponsors or partners of the Forum are either weapons systems builders or have a share in such enterprises. Some are members of the strong military industry lobbies in Spain, have direct economic interests in post war Iraq, or supply equipment to armed services such as the US Navy. The Catalonian Bank La Caixa has got Spain’s largest share in occupied Iraq: together with 12 other banks led by JP Morgan Chase, it is a member of the bank syndicate that will create and control the Iraq Commerce Bank. Sustainability is also the precise opposite of what the Forum stands for. The venue has been built on land reclaimed from the sea, with a tremendous amount of disruption to the marine environment. A seaboard development moratorium has been broken by the Forum marina construction, and vast amounts of concrete will further disrupt the sand distribution and effect coastal erosion patterns. Partner companies also have dubious environmental records, with the prominent examples of Grup Agbar, whose main business comes from water privatisation. La Caixa have been responsible for numerous golf course developments, and Endesa’s power stations throw out 73 million tons of CO2 every year, making it the fourth most polluting company in Europe. As for cultural diversity - this is sanctioned within very narrow limits. Stereotypical and neutered portrayals of overseas cultures abound in the Forum, playing well to the tourist crowd. But meanwhile, a nearby gypsy camp was cleared for fear of putting off the same tourists, and coinciding demonstrations of “sans papiers” - migrant workers and unsanctioned refugees - were heavily repressed by police. Sponsoring companies such as Coca Cola and Nestle have been implicated in exploiting Third World countries for resources and cheap labour. But it is through the Dialogues that the hypocrisy of the Forum truly shows through. These “experiments in democracy” are staged events in which only acceptable opinions are heard, and the “expert panels” are strongly biased in favour of the status-quo. The Dialogue on ethics heard from Thomas Donaldson, ethics professor at Pennsylvania University (USA) who has in the past worked with Microsoft, Walt Disney, Motorola, AT&T, JP Morgan, IBM, Pfizer, the UN and the World Bank. An important debate such as “The Role of Corporation in the 21st Century” focused on familiar corporate responsibility issues such as good governance while maintaining economic efficiency. The event promoted the Barcelona Global Compact Center, an offshoot of the United Nations Global Compact, a much criticised agreement between the UN and some of the biggest multinational corporations to work towards voluntary corporate responsibility. At no point was the legitimacy of corporations challenged, the only questions being how to temper their existing actions and behaviours. But the clincher which discredits the Dialogues as a supposed exercise in local democracy is the financial limits to access. To sit in on a Dialogue, to have a say and be heard, you need to pay an entrance fee. A “pay-as-you-go” democracy, if you will. A Ploy for Development What I wanted to know was why the Barcelona authorities had gone to all this expense, $2.6 billion to be precise, to promote such an obvious sham of public involvement. The answer lies in the use of the Forum site after this summer. Then, the gleaming exhibitions and peace gardens will be replaced by corporate hospitality suites and reception areas. The site is due to host major trade conferences similar to Birmingham’s NEC or London’s Olympia. It’s part of a wider regeneration of the whole area on the banks of the river Besòs, comprising new parks, a cleaned-up port and beach, concert and congress halls, public walkways, a new railway station dedicated to high-speed trains, clusters of new apartment blocks, and an “e-city” with shiny office buildings dedicated to dotcoms and other forms of electronic enterprise. It is a regeneration firmly targeted at the business elite. According Jordi of 22@plan, a campaign set up by the residents of the area, “this is part of the Global City model which requires a technopark, conference centre, hotels, apartments etc. This type of global village development will create an elite within what has always been a working class area.” The Forum is in effect the public face of that development, a three month long advert that says Barcelona is open for business. According to local activists, the “caring capitalism” theme of promoting diversity and sustainability is an attempt to contrast the city with the more conservative capital and financial centre, Madrid. Hence it shouldn’t be a surprise to see such a heavy corporate sponsorship of the Forum event, since after the general public have left it will become their territory. It´s quite an irony that millions of Euros in taxpayers' money went into the gentrification of the area for the benefit of business and the wealthy, and that at the end of the process the citizens of Barcelona are asked to pay again in order to come and view the results. But then, this is just another instance of a much wider process - the privatisation of public space, the transformation of citizens into consumers, and the corporate-driven changes to our urban environment which put the interests of businesses first. Look out for the “OpenCity” project....
Recommended Links: Anti-Forum movement in Barcelona - Official Forum website - Latest actions - Activist information and social centre - Can Masdeu - a true example of sustainable development
and community inclusion Innovative multimedia site about the regeneration
of Barcelona - |