About Albert Forns

Journalist and writer

Towards a city without cars

Photo: Vicente Zambrano

Photo: Vicente Zambrano

Climate change and air pollution have driven the world’s great cities towards a change in paradigm. After a century of cars ruling the streets, the largest metropolises are starting to restrict their use. This revolution, which has already begun in Paris and London, seeks to put the focus on pedestrians once again, and to make cities more liveable, with less asphalt and more green spaces for citizens.

Amsterdam or Copenhagen, the great bicycle paradises, can also teach us a thing or two about the transition towards a sustainable city that prioritizes public transport, bicycles and pedestrians, as well as local commerce.

Barcelona is also moving towards this model of pacified neighbourhoods with the use of superblocks, the expansion of the bike lane network and new investment in public transport, such as metro lines 9 and 10 or the tramway on Avinguda Diagonal. But how can we reduce the millions of cars that circulate through the city each day? Is raising awareness enough, or do we need more aggressive measures? In view of the indirect deaths and the problems caused by the exhaust from motor vehicles, should we limit its use with prohibitions, just like we did with tobacco?

We’re sorry, drivers, it isn’t just a green fantasy or an ecologist utopia: the world’s great capitals are already working to take cars off their streets. In Paris, mayor Anne Hidalgo wants to make the city that gives name to the latest great climate agreement into the first post-car metropolis in history. To do so, she’ll ban diesel cars from circulating in 2024 (since they’re four times more polluting than other motor vehicles) and she’s studying a ban on all other polluting cars by 2030, meaning only electric cars will be allowed to circulate. In order to pacify the city centre, the French capital is working on a very important infrastructure investment with some sixty new metro stations. Just in time for the 2024 Olympic Games, this will improve one of the world’s greatest public transportation networks even more. The socialist government has also expanded the network of bicycle lanes and is trying out its first driverless automatic busses.

Photo: Vicente Zambrano

The roads along the Seine in Paris were once used by up to 40,000 vehicles a day. Now that they’re reserved for pedestrians, they’ve become some of Paris’ most popular areas.
Photo: François Guillot / AFP / Getty images

What’s the reason behind all these changes? “The unparalleled challenge of air pollution requires unprecedented action”, declares Mayor Hidalgo, noting the 6,500 Parisians who die each year from pollution. The mayor of Paris is sure that with less cars, the city will be more liveable, and in her green dream the thousands of parking spaces that currently exist will become bike lanes, café terraces and playgrounds. The proof of this increase in liveability are the new promenades on the banks of the Seine: they were once used by up to 40,000 vehicles a day, but now that they’re exclusively for pedestrians, they’ve become one of Paris’ most popular areas.

What other capitals are limiting automobiles? There’s London, which since 2008 has charged a fee for polluting vehicles that circulate in the city, similar to the Ecopass used in Milan. The result has been a reduction in the number of cars in the City, but mayor Sadiq Khan would like to go even further and will encourage new housing and offices to be built without parking garages. In Barcelona, recent attempts to reduce the amount of underground parking has had to face the criticism of the opposition and the real estate agents’ guild, which considers the move “insane”.

The future of automobiles in the city is already the focus of most debates on urban planning. Last October, scores of architects, mobility experts and public transportation activists gathered together at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in an Urban Thinkers Campus (UTC) promoted by the Barcelona City Council and the World Urban Campaign (UN-HABITAT), and organized by the Iberoamerican Federation of Urban Planners (FIU). At the gathering, generically entitled “Transition to liveable cities. The Post-Car City”, participants discussed ways of moving toward cities that are “more liveable, sustainable, healthy and safe with the implementation of new models of urban mobility”, according to the words that kicked off the event. At the inauguration, Lluís Brau, FIU president, stated that the future of urban life involves “containing the private vehicle” and pacifying streets, reducing the role of cars. “Mobility is a right”, stated the Barcelona City Council’s Secretary of Mobility, Mercedes Vidal, “but the budget has never treated it as such. Health and education are funded structurally, and the same should happen in this case. This has generated a serious underfunding of public transportation, which will prove very expensive in terms of public health and habitability.”

 

A global problem: from dream to nightmare

As noted by the urban planner Jose María Ezquiaga, dean of the Architect’s Association of Madrid, the problem with cars is “global”, since the same transportation issues facing Europe also affect big cities in Asia or Latin America. Ezquiaga reminded listeners that, historically, the paradigm of the city was the European model, like Barcelona, based on “compact, continuous and dense” metropolises that allow for mixed use of housing and commerce and optimal mobility, whether by public transportation or on foot. However, with the expansion of the car the opposite model, embodied by Los Angeles, triumphed. “The city expands, flooding the surrounding areas with neighbourhoods made up of individual houses with yards, which can only be accessed by cars”, Ezquiaga explained. It’s the idealized image of the American dream.

Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images

The expansion of the automobile has put the historical model of the compact, continuous and dense European city seriously into doubt. It has lost terrain to the opposite model, the sprawling city embodied by Los Angeles. In the picture, a typical American family from the ‘60s prepares to go on holiday, with their car parked in front of their home.
Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images

“The suburban model has caused people to move farther and farther away from their place of employment”, noted Ezquiaga: this has driven the creation of vast dormitory towns with very low density, where basic services –hospitals, schools, stores– are always far away, and everything involves travel by car. Still, cars aren’t the solution, because at rush hour there are so many vehicles that traffic jams become a part of daily life. “The American dream”, declares Ezquiaga, “is really a nightmare.”

It may seem far away, but this American dream –or nightmare– isn’t so distant. In Spain, the growth of housing developments and dormitory towns populated by single-family homes was the standard from 1994-2009. In Madrid, the population growth of recent years hasn’t taken place downtown but on the outskirts, where the built-up area has doubled. The number of cars circulating has also doubled. “We’ve been building a sort of archipelago, with neighbourhoods and shopping malls that are self-sustaining cells, surrounded by large parking areas. They spring up in the middle of nowhere, which means that the only option is to get there by private vehicle”, states Ezquiaga. This new, sprawling city involves total automobile dependency, and when it becomes overcrowded collapse is inevitable.

A hundred years conquering minds

But if cars are causing mobility problems all around the world, why do we keep using them? Dozens of experts asked the same at one of the activities at the Urban Thinkers’ Campus, a round table entitled “Disputing the cultural hegemony of cars”. “Automobiles are a powerful cultural symbol”, began architect David Bravo, promoter of the “Adéu al cotxe!” (Farewell to cars!) cycle at the Sala Beckett. He’s sure of it, and he insists that our dependency on cars is induced, the result of a social engineering process “without precedent in history, that can only be compared to the expansion of Christianity.” At first, it seems like an exaggeration, but Bravo suggests we look at the way things were a hundred years ago, when society functioned without automobiles. “The car is the element that has changed cities the most and the most rapidly since Neolithic times”, declares the architect from Barcelona, noting the omnipresent character of those four wheels, present in our imaginations from childhood: “what do children play with? With cars!”

Experts note that the expansion of the automobile was the result of a global campaign. It started with the New Deal in the US, when the automobile was seen as an easier way of fleeing the city. But the race to promote the purchase and use of cars wasn’t tied to a single political camp: social democracy was just as active in doing so as was the Eastern Block, Hitler promoting the Volkswagen Beetle or Franco promoting the Seat 600.

Photo: MGM / Pathé / Album

The automobile industry has associated the car with essential values like freedom or personal independence, and regimes and governments of all stripes have promoted its use. Above, a scene from the film Thelma & Louise (1991) by Ridley Scott, where a Ford Thunderbird is the key to freedom for the protagonists, played by Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis.
Photo: MGM / Pathé / Album

The automobile industry has associated the car with essential values like freedom and personal independence. On television, we’re constantly told that by buying a car, we’re buying freedom. The cinema has also played its part: in the film Thelma & Louise, for example, a Ford Thunderbird is the key to freedom for the two protagonists, and in Casablanca, set in the middle of the Second World War, the only moment of joy attained by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman is when they run off in a convertible. “Later on, in the ‘80s, we reach a climax with series like Knight Rider, where the car itself is the hero”, notes Bravo. However, it’s much more difficult to find examples of the opposite. “Only the movie Falling Down shows the most common experience of the people that drive to work each day: getting trapped in a traffic jam.”

This global love affair with the car isn’t a coincidence, say mobility experts, because the automobile lobby is one of the most important advertisers on the planet, and has been bombarding us with its messages for decades. “There are car advertisements all over the place: in films, on television or in newspapers, but also on public transportation, which should be the competition; we see all-terrain vehicles advertised on the metro or on bus shelters”, states Bravo. “This year [2017], they even plopped a car in the middle of Sants train station, the cathedral of public transportation in Catalonia!” added Ricard Riol, president of the association for the Promotion of Public Transportation.

Those attending the gathering at UPF were also reminded that the automobile industry hasn’t always played clean. In the 1940s, before becoming the mecca of automobiles and a model copied around the world, Los Angeles had an impressive tram network, which the automobile lobby bought up and dismantled to force citizens to turn to private transportation. There has also been a great deal of regularity over the years, with extremely interesting antique advertisements and advertising campaigns ridiculing pedestrians and exiling them to the sidewalk. “In Latin America, cars are still symbols of status and wealth”, noted the urban designer from São Paulo, “and therefore, being a pedestrian means admitting career failure.”

Solutions, but at what cost?

Ricard Riol felt that the debate should focus on the means at our disposal to generate a profound social change. “Nobody debates the fact that traffic is killing and choking us”, he stated. “The problem is when the solutions require changes in behaviour. People want solutions, but they don’t accept changes.” Still, the numbers speak for themselves: there are too many cars on our streets, and they’re given preference. In Madrid, 61% of streets are asphalted, even though they aren’t even used for 38% of trips. The same happens in Barcelona: just one of every four trips is in a private vehicle, but cars still dominate our streets and public spaces.

How can we fight cars’ winning image? One option involves making public transport “sexy”. Geographer Francesc Muñoz offers the example of the tram, which has a very positive reputation among Barcelonians in terms of perception, aesthetics and sustainability. Another way of fighting the automobile is by associating it with the pollution it causes. How? By following the example of the anti-tobacco laws. Although it now seems faraway, tobacco smoke was once just as omnipresent as the smoke from cars: people smoked in universities, hospitals, on planes and in restaurants, and it was impossible to imagine a world without smoke. Films also played a key role in promoting the image of smoking, and the values of glamour and independence associated with the cigarette were never questioned. But the determination shown by public administrations in protecting citizens’ health eventually defeated the tobacco companies. According to the experts present at the gathering at UPF, the similarities are evident because, as noted by Anne Hidalgo, the car is also a global health problem.

But doesn’t the electric car solve these pollution problems? “With the electric car, the sector makes an attempt at greenwashing, to convince us that everything’s changing so that everything can stay the same”, notes David Bravo. At the round table where these opinions were expressed, there was a general consensus on this change of image: green vehicles only “shift the blame”, meaning that instead of pumping exhaust out of their tailpipes and polluting the city, they help to pump smoke out of the power plants where the energy is produced. Plus, a city full of cars, be they electric or not, is a city of traffic jams where pedestrians are forced to play second fiddle.

Although some of the analyses and predictions made at the thinkers’ campus on the city may seem radical and apocalyptic, the defenders of a car-free city aren’t against automobiles in general. Most of the experts agreed that “cars are a problem when they’re under-used”, meaning when they are mostly empty, just like the million vehicles that cross Barcelona on a daily basis with an average occupancy of 1.14 individuals per car. “If we could get occupancy rates of 2.5 individuals, we wouldn’t be having this debate”, clarified Pau Noy, a deputy managing director at Barcelona Metropolitan Transport (TMB). Noy insists that the car won’t ever disappear entirely, because there will always be logistical necessities or individuals with special needs. The goal, according to these experts, is to take away its privileged position.

Photo: Vicente Zambrano

The Tram has a very positive reputation among citizens in terms of perception, aesthetics and sustainability. Making public transportation attractive, as happened with the tram, is one of the best ways of combatting the traditionally positive image of the car.
Photo: Vicente Zambrano

Barcelona can be decongested

Urban designers insist that there are no miracle solutions for mobility in cities, and that the best recipe has been around for centuries: promoting public transportation and restricting the use of private vehicles. The problem is that in Barcelona, just the opposite has happened. “As the city got more and more congested, we increased the road capacity”, stated Pau Noy. Classic examples of the application of this policy are the progressive creation of the Ronda del Mig and the creation of the Ronda del Literal and Ronda de Dalt in 1992, roads designed for private vehicles that were developed without making a similar investment in public transportation. The economic recession has made the situation even more difficult, with budget cutbacks that affected services and prevented the renewal and growth of the public transportation fleet. The problem is that it takes political bravery to take on sustainable mobility, because any politician who tries to take cars out of our streets is sure to lose plenty of votes.

But is a car-free Barcelona technically possible? Pau Noy has multiple studies by TMB that show that it is, since with an appropriate investment public transportation could cover all our mobility needs. In fact, 69% of car trips currently happen between places with alternatives, like metro or tram. TMB calculates that metro frequencies could be doubled with the use of automatic trains, and the capacity of regional train lines could be increased with larger trains and taking advantage of the under-used high-speed train tunnel. Joining the Llobregat and Besòs tram lines via Avinguda Diagonal would multiply the current offering by three, and with the expansion of the network of bike lanes –which by 2019 will be over 300 km long– bicycle use could increase fivefold, eventually covering 10% of all trips.

What would the benefits of all this be? “First of all, there would be a reduction in accidents, and pollution levels would drop to zero”, explains Pau Noy. Another clear consequence of having emptier streets would be that the public space open to citizens would increase fivefold. Not only would plenty of lanes be reclaimed on plenty of roads, the space dedicated to parking would also be reduced. And no, we’re not talking science fiction: “in Europe –excluding Spain– there are already plenty of cities without emissions”, notes Noy. It’s all an issue of political willpower. It’s also a matter of time, according to the experts, as the end of oil and the effects of climate change will force us to change our way of life sooner than we think.

New technologies could play a key role in the evolution of mobility. For example, there are more and more carsharing platforms with possibilities for growth. In addition, some are optimistic about the development of self-driving cars, which would circulate without a driver and could transport several people at once, as something halfway between a taxi and a bus. Mobile apps could also improve travel. Rikesh Shah, the head of commercial innovation at Transport for London, explains the benefits of sharing all sorts of information on public transportation in real time, such as the state of metro or bus lines, the exact arrival time of a train at a station or the status of accidents or maintenance work. Thanks to this effort in open data, over 600 independent applications have been created to provide information to 40% of users on the status of service, with programs that automatically propose route changes whenever problems arise.

In Barcelona, the application of the new T-Mobilitat public transportation pass, planned for 2019, could be a good opportunity to move towards multimodal transportation and bring about a change in citizens’ mentality. “T-Mobilitat could promote best practice in many different ways”, notes architect David Bravo. “The pass could offer a discount to people who use Bicing, people that recycle at the Punt Verd or that buy at local markets.” New technologies could also improve Bicing: at the symposium, it was noted that the use of bicycles could be encouraged, and they could be more effectively distributed throughout the city by offering compensation to users of less-popular routes, such as those between the beach and the steepest neighbourhoods.

Photo: Vicente Zambrano

The growth in Barcelona’s network of bike lanes, which will surpass 300 kilometres in 2019, will make it possible for transport by bicycle to increase fivefold, eventually making up 10% of all trips.
Photo: Vicente Zambrano

The bicycle as a metaphor

As a matter of fact, the bicycle has led the transformation of many cities across Europe, often with climates much more difficult than ours. “In Nordic countries it often snows, and below-zero temperatures are common; nevertheless, 40% of people bike to work every day” explains Mark Wagenbuur, founder of the blog BicycleDutch.nl. According to this Dutch expert, bicycle use is a matter of habit and culture. “But habits and culture can change.”

One example of this is the city of Amsterdam, one of the cyclists’ paradises of the North. “Now, bicycles are so essential that the first minister pedals to the palace to inform the king when a new government is formed, but 50 years ago things were very different” notes Wagenbuur. With the boom in prosperity of the ‘50s, cars began to conquer space and minds in the Netherlands, and the pressure they put on cities led to the destruction of entire medieval neighbourhoods and converted public squares into enormous parking lots. “But eventually, people got sick of their heritage being destroyed”, he remembers, with squatters who stood up to the destruction of historic buildings and families that drove the Stop de Kindermoord [Stop the Child Slaughter] movement. Through protests and civil disobedience, this movement demanded the pacification of automobile traffic, which killed 400 children just in 1971. Finally, the state began to change its priorities and the first exclusively pedestrian city centres were born.

Copenhagen, the other great cyclist capital, underwent a similar process. In the ‘70s, only 10% of trips were made by bicycle and cars were everywhere. However, a continuing policy of investment brought about a change, and bicycles now account for 41% of trips. Plus, new cycling infrastructure continues to be built. Now, four-lane bicycle superhighways are being promoted (because there are so many bicycles that there are jams at rush hour), as are up to 16 new bridges just for two wheels. In fact, in the Danish capital debate isn’t focused on the bicycle, but on cars. Urban design is still based on the automobile, and although 55% of vehicles at rush hour are bicycles, cars still have priority on most roadways. Therefore, the need is to achieve “spatial justice” and put citizens at the centre of urban planning.

In Barcelona, the rise in bicycle use in recent years gives us reason to be optimistic. After its initial boom, Bicing celebrated its 10th anniversary as a fully consolidated institution with over 6 million users. It also kicked off this year with an ambitious change in operator that will guarantee 24-hour service, expand the number of stations and make them all mixed, so that they admit both normal and electric bicycles. In addition, the expansion of the network of bike lanes will allow everyone to have one less than 300 metres from home. “There are few investments that are as cost-effective as those having to do with bicycles, in terms of the relationship between cost and transformative power”, explains City Council member Mercedes Vidal.

In Denmark and the Netherlands, the formula for success is the coexistence of three types of lanes: fast lanes, exclusively for cars; mixed lanes, with segregated roadways, and neighbourhood streets where cars circulate slowly and cyclists and pedestrians always have priority. The resulting design is a grid city with multiple layers of pacified traffic, or the very model that has caused so much controversy in Barcelona: the superblock.

Photo: Vicente Zambrano

With the development of superblocks like this one in El Poblenou, the City Council wants to reduce the total area of public space reserved for wheeled transit from today’s 50% to an eventual 30%.
Photo: Vicente Zambrano

Citizens, at the centre

“With the development of superblocks, we hope to reduce the public space dedicated to wheeled transport from 50% to 30%”, explains Ton Salvadó, architect and director of Urban Model for the City Council. It’s the same old recipe: increasing quality of life in the neighbourhoods by pacifying traffic, converting many of our current roadways into local or neighbourhood streets. “The city is stretched to the limit” notes Salvadó. “In the metropolitan area, 3500 premature deaths are recorded each year as a result of pollution, 11,000 a year are wounded in accidents, and there are many other health problems related to being sedentary, noise pollution and a lack of green space.”

In order to understand the potential of this project, we only need to look at our existing superblocks, Gràcia and El Born, two of the neighbourhoods most highly valued by the real estate and tourism market. Salvadó insists that once the process is completed, hundreds of roadways and streets will have become spaces for neighbours, with playgrounds and green areas. The plan is to reduce the number of cars and for those that remain not to park on the surface. “We want the street to be seen as an extension of domestic life, as a comfortable space”, concludes the architect.

This isn’t a local debate, but a global issue. The 20th century belonged to cars; do we want the 21st to belong to pedestrians?

Joan Fontcuberta. Welcome to the post-photographic era

Photo: Pere Virgili

Joan Fontcuberta.
Photo: Pere Virgili

In this day and age, images have become dangerous, even furious, and require an attitude of resistance on the part of intellectuals and artists. For Joan Fontcuberta, responsible photographers should know how to use visual ecology strategies to deal with the overabundance of icons, at the same time as finding those images that are still missing.

When you enter Joan Fontcuberta’s studio, the first thing that strikes you is that there are no cameras around. When I ask him about it later, he takes one out of a drawer and points to the mobile phone. Unlike the stereotypical dirty studio of old, full of spotlights, flashes and lenses, the immaculate walls of Fontcuberta’s studio, located in the Roca Umbert factory in Granollers, epitomise the artist of the 21st century. “The studio is in my head”, he later explains. The life of Joan Fontcuberta, the most world-renowned Catalan photographer, recipient of a Barcelona City Council “Ciutat de Barcelona” prize in 2016, is one of constant travels and projects all over the world. He divides his time between preparing for new exhibitions, producing new works and reflecting on photography through reading, writing and curating. “When I travel I make notes on my mobile phone of everything I want to remember, filling up a figurative drawer of themes to research or go into in greater depth.” He also confesses that he does not keep to a schedule and never takes holidays. For him, spending the month of August writing about photographs taken by carrier pigeons during the First World War is as exciting a prospect as going on holiday to the Caribbean is for other people.

Two factors in your life have had a decisive effect on your career. The first is that you come from a family with a background in advertising.

Indeed, it was a huge learning experience. I studied advertising and at the same time worked at the Danis advertising agency. It was like attending writing school: summarising in a slogan all the information provided by the manufacturer is a very powerful exercise in rhetoric. Many writers have learned their craft as advertising copywriters. I also learned creative techniques there. When it’s your job to come up with ideas day after day, if you have methodological aids and systems to help your imagination flow, all the better. But, above all, what working at the agency taught me, both conceptually and ideologically, was the techniques of persuasion and seduction that advertising uses, and having an insider’s knowledge of them has made it much easier to deconstruct and expose them.

You say that growing up during the latter years of the Franco regime hardened your scepticism, so that you do not take information at face value.

The generation that grew up during the late Franco period lived through a set of unique historical circumstances in terms of freedom and access to information, and that leaves a mark. Out of this conditioning, I created a space for critical thinking, with work that enabled me to turn around everything I experienced during that era and to produce a lesson for the generations to come.

Do you think we are more gullible nowadays when it comes to information?

There have always been those people who ask more searching questions and those who do not, but the pitfalls still exist. Right now we’re seeing this torrent of fake news or “post-truth” on the Internet. There is a whole series of phenomena that continue to confront us with the need to shed light on what is true and what is not; for that reason, we must maintain a degree of suspicion and distrust and refrain from being credulous and having blind faith in everything we see.

Your most famous works make us distrust photography, forcing us to doubt what we are seeing before our eyes. I’m thinking specifically about Herbarium and Fauna, which depicted a series of plants and animals that you invented, and your most recent hoax, the invention of the photographer Ximo Berenguer.

The photograph emerged in the 19th century as an instrument for verifying reality: whatever was photographed was real. Nowadays, this authentication-of-reality function falls to Google and, depending on the results we find, the quantity of responses and how convincing they are, we either believe it or we don’t. However, in the same way that we can manipulate a photo, so too can Google be manipulated. What is the first thing a counterfeiter would do these days? They would enter information on the Internet so that when we look for a certain thing we would find a plausible number of results that reassure us. That is why we must maintain a sense of scepticism.

 

Your photographs also have a very literary angle: they are always accompanied by texts and always tell us a story.

I’ve always been interested in the concept of photographic positioning: where does an image belong? Photographs never appear alone; they are inserted into significant constellations. Images exist side by side with text, they coexist with a space, a specific prop, the channels through which they are disseminated. All of this moulds the function and nature of the image. The meaning of the same photograph changes depending on whether we see it in the pages of a newspaper, in an exhibition hall, in a forensic report or in someone’s wallet. In all these cases, the photograph jumps from one meaning to another, from one value to another. What has always interested me is not the image itself but the value we ascribe to it.

 

When you began your career, photography was an artistic discipline, but over the past three decades it has exploded and now everyone is constantly taking photos with their mobile phones. You have spoken of this as the post-photographic era.

Up until now, photography as we knew it was a response to the industrial revolution, the values of the 19th century and techno-scientific culture. It emerged at the same time as archives and museums, at a time when travel and colonisation were just beginning. Back then, photography was a symbolic form of appropriation: first came the photographers and then the soldiers. That is why 19th century photography is unable to respond to the problems of the 21st century. Post-photography is something else entirely, not necessarily because the technology has evolved but because it corresponds to a completely different context. Why do we need images today? We need them to tell us “I’ve arrived”, to tell us “I’m coming”, to tell us “look what I’ve seen”. Photographs have become our voice, our words.

So, with post-photography, images are language?

In fact, this linguistic conditioning of images has always existed, we just hadn’t used it until now. Images were the reserve of certain professional minorities – artists and photographers. The revolution we are seeing means that now everyone can make images without having had any training or having to invest in expensive technologies. In a very intuitive, very spontaneous way, anyone can take out their mobile phone, take a photograph and send it, imbuing the image with a certain communicative meaning.

Photo: Pere Virgili

Joan Fontcuberta.
Photo: Pere Virgili

You say that this democratisation of photography is particularly important for women.

The fact that, today, we are all Homo photographicus and can take photos without any kind of barrier means that, for the first time in history, we can manage our own image. And that is particularly important for women because, after a long tradition of men’s perspective shaping a certain sexual, erotic and objectified cliché, it provides them with the power to construct their own identity. For the first time, they don’t need to appeal to a masculine elite; instead, every woman can control and manage her own image.

With the advent of digital technology, photography is also dematerialised.

Although the digital image has the soul of photography, it has lost its substance, its matter. “Matter” is derived from the Latin mater, or mother, which means that photography has lost something of its lineage in the digital photograph. In post-photography, images become a message and therefore shatter one of the major historical functions of photographs: memory. These days, we take a photograph, send it and delete it, because once we have transmitted whatever content we wanted, there is no sense in keeping it. In the past, when images were more valuable and less common, this duty to preserve memory was inherent in photographic images, but nowadays it’s just an option. Before, creating a memory was an obsession, now it’s an option.

One of your latest projects, Trauma, uses deleted images that you obtained from the Photographic Archive of Barcelona (AFB).

For Trauma, I’m looking for defective images, images that have some kind of pathology that renders them ineligible for their primary function, which is to transmit information. The Photographic Archive of Barcelona keeps images of urban landscapes, local personalities and historical events, and they are there because they’re a source of information for scholars and historians. But what happens when these images lose their reference to reality, and all that is left are the vestiges of stains and chemical materials that do not identify the event that prompted the photograph in the first place? They become ghosts, and that is what interests me. Trauma is about what happens when memory disappears, as though the images had Alzheimer’s. Strangely enough, I created the series at a time when my father was dying of Alzheimer’s.

One of the paradoxes described in La furia de las imágenes. Notas sobre la postfotografía (The Fury of the Images. Notes on Postphotography) (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2016) is that the democratisation of access to photography has led to saturation. We are surrounded by images; they are absolutely everywhere. In your essays, you speak of “iconic pollution”.

The current overproduction is causing an immersion that is almost stifling. That is why I think images have become dangerous, even furious, and that they require an attitude of resistance on the part of intellectuals and artists. This resistance could be expressed in two ways. First, using visual ecology strategies, which means only taking essential images. We need to avoid contributing to this pollution by reusing previous images, provided that they give meaning to what we want to express, without necessarily having to repeat them, without being redundant. There is therefore a need to manage this abundance. Second, we also need to reflect on the images that are still missing. The fact that there are so many images should make us question those that do not exist, those that have been rendered invisible, have been censored or have not even been taken. That is the ultimate challenge for the responsible photographer. What images are we currently missing? The overabundance of photographs is also a form of censorship, because it prevents us from finding what we need. Traditional censorship consisted of banning an image; now, censorship involves giving you an image and ten million more so that the one you are looking for is obscured.

During the tercentenary of the fall of Barcelona during the Spanish War of Succession, you inaugurated the mural El món neix en cada petó (The world begins with every kiss) in Plaça d’Isidre Nonell in Ciutat Vella, a participatory photomosaic made up of 4,000 images provided by Barcelonians.

The mural of the kiss is an example of this idea of managing overabundance. From thousands and thousands of photos already in existence, I looked to make something bigger. In this type of participatory project, rather than making the music, the artist has to act as the orchestra conductor, managing the energy of the collective and organising the images in order to imbue them with a specific meaning. The kiss mosaic commemorates the historical events of 1714 from a different perspective by creating a tabula rasa and looking forward, rather than searching for dramatic or tragic aspects of the past. We looked not for gunshots but for kisses.

How do you feel about it having become such a popular public space? The kiss mural has even been featured in adverts.

What happened is fascinating; I’m very happy to have contributed to giving the city an icon, a place where people will remember their experiences if they participated with a photo, but that also serves as a backdrop for photographs, kisses, selfies… Some English tourist guide even asked me for photos of the photomosaic because it was one of the top ten places to visit in Barcelona, after the Sagrada Família and Camp Nou. Barcelona has given me a lot, and I’m glad to have been able to give something back to the best of my abilities.

Public spaces in cities are full of sculptures and works of art, but strangely there are very few artistic photographs on the streets. By contrast, commercial photography seems to be everywhere.

It’s true, there are very few public works by photographers or artistic images in the public space. There is lots of commercial photography on the streets, but it’s not a form of photography that makes people think; it just makes them buy things. In Canada, a place I visit often because my partner is from Quebec, they use the one per cent rule, whereby one per cent of the cost of any public development can be allocated to the commissioning of a piece of contemporary art. So, for example, when constructing schools and hospitals it is completely normal for a piece of work to be commissioned from photographers.

For a long time in Barcelona, if you saw anyone sporting a camera round their neck, they were usually a tourist. Although now everyone has a camera, tourist photographs have continued to multiply, to the point that, according to Flickr and Instagram rankings, Barcelona is one of the most photographed cities in the world.

Tourist photography is a genre, but in the midst of this post-photography craze we no longer tend to photograph the clichéd monument or part of the city; instead, we capture ourselves visiting them. The selfie and the selfie stick take precedence as proof that we are here. In contrast to Roland Barthes’ “ça a été”, or “that has been”, inherent to photography, these days we say “I was there”. We’ve gone from a document to registering ourselves in a place and time.

Is the selfie the perfect metaphor for this post-photographic era?

It’s one of the most visible signs, yes. But the selfie is not a unique phenomenon; it’s multifaceted because there are so many types of selfie, ranging from celebrations, documentary, erotic, rites of passage, and so on. But, for me, what is important to point out about the selfie is that it’s not a fashion but rather a category of images that will remain established, just as wedding photographs and passport photographs have.

What do photographic social networks, like Instagram and Snapchat, tell us about our times?

In the past, photographs were for private consumption: they were for us and us alone; at most, we showed them to a small circle of people. Today, in comparison, the aim of images is to build social consensus, to become an element of communication. They are images that are made to be shown to a generic group of recipients. These days, privacy does not exist, it has gone to a better place. Almost everything is public and everything is shared. As for Snapchat, it seems to be a good example for understanding the difference between photography and post-photography. Snapchat is the great metaphor for a photograph that is taken, completes its task — to transmit certain information — and then automatically disappears. Just like the messages in Mission: Impossible: “this message will self-destruct in ten seconds”.

As a society, are we addicted to photographs?

We grew up during an age when images were few and far between, and now that we use them almost like second nature it might seem that we are overusing them. But would we say that we have become addicted to words? If we compare our era with bygone times, when people were illiterate, would we say that now that we know how to write we have become addicted to writing? Everything depends on how we make use both of writing and of images. Widespread use is not harmful in and of itself.

In defence of the entrepreneurial state

Mariana Mazzucato, Professor in the Economics of Innovation at University College London, has carved out a significant niche for herself in academic circles by debunking the big ideological myths surrounding private enterprise. In April, she was a guest speaker at the CCCB’s lecture series on the impact of information technologies on the economy and on democracy.

Photo: Albert Armengol

Photo: Albert Armengol

When we think of technological innovation, we conjure up an image of entrepreneurs locked away in garages, investing all their savings and expending all their creativity on a ground-breaking idea that will change the world and make them millionaires. In the era of storytelling, the story of innovation sold to us by the media, corporations and a certain political class has always been entwined with the virtues of entrepreneurship and the private sector, whose creative force is reined in by the state dinosaur and its cumbersome bureaucracy. We’ve often read things like “governments have always been incapable of taking the right decisions” (The Economist), an argument that inevitably ends up demanding that state involvement be limited to the absolute basics: setting out the rules of the game and leaving the field open for the ground-breakers and pioneers to run around in.

The thing that is overlooked by this mythology of entrepreneurs and garages – the garage that was the birthplace of HP, the Google garage, Steve Jobs’s garage – is that the success of companies like Apple would not have been possible without some big-time public funding behind it. From the Internet to GPS, from touchscreens to recent innovations like Siri’s voice recognition, all the technologies that have led to the iPhone, iPad and smartphones are the result of decades of state investment in innovation. Of course, the company has been clever enough to integrate them into a state-of-the-art architecture, but it is still very much part of the paradigm that no biography of Steve Jobs devotes a single line to the “little” bit of public help that allowed Apple to make a US $26 billion profit in 2011. These profits, although they are indebted to technologies developed by the CIA and the US Army, bring no returns to the tax-payer. On the contrary, what the company has really invested in is designing a sophisticated system of fiscal engineering that has allowed it to avoid paying taxes on the hundreds of thousands of devices it has sold in Europe.

But how can we challenge this narrative that glorifies the company and demonises the state? The David who is standing up to Goliath in this great discursive battle is Mariana Mazzucato. Born in Italy but brought up in Princeton, New Jersey, this Professor in the Economy of Innovation at University College London has made a name for herself in academic circles, debunking the big ideological myths about private entrepreneurship (indeed, her research on the public roots of Apple’s success is just one of her well-known case studies). Her highly acclaimed The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, book of the year at the Financial Times, has become the new global bible in public policy-making on innovation. And not surprisingly, she has been invited all over the world to advise organisations such as NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and Brazil’s Ministry for Science and Innovation.

Photo: Albert Armengol

According to Mazzucato – in the photo, taken during a conference at the CCCB last April – the ability to take risks is what makes the State invincible in the face of business angels and start-ups.
Photo: Albert Armengol

Mariana Mazzucato was in Barcelona at the end of April, invited by the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) and the Barcelona Initiative for Technological Sovereignty (BITS), for a lecture series organised by Evgeny Morozov on the impact of information technology on economics and democracy.

“Since the 1960s, we have been hearing a discourse that attacks the role of the state in innovation”, explained Mazzucato, who at the Mirador in the CCCB challenged the audience to try to turn the paradigm on its head, changing the vocabulary to bring about a mindset shift: “We need to move away from a state that facilitates the market to a state that is able to model and create new markets. Instead of letting the state simply level the ground for the market, why don’t we let it push it in different directions, for example by steering the economy towards green growth?” The numbers speak for themselves: economies such as the Danish one, which has been putting a gigantic effort into sustainability for years, are starting to reap the fruits in the form of million-dollar investments to export green technologies to China. “The countries that are leading the green revolution are those in which the state plays an active role in innovation”, says Mazzucato. This situation makes the Spanish context look even more tragic, where the government’s halting of renewable energy is one of those strategic errors that will go down in the annals of history. In The Entrepreneurial State she also refers to the example of the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES), which by making high-risk investments in biotechnology and clean technologies has earned record returns on these productive, as opposed to merely speculative, investments: the rate of return was 21.2% in 2010. So what is the recipe for success? Daring to offer counter-cyclical credit and putting it into strategic industries where the uncertainty scares off investment from multinationals and risk capital.

Indeed, according to Mazzucato, it is this ability to take risks that makes the state unstoppable in the face of business angels and startups. For decades, the state has demonstrated that it is the only player in the system that has this unmatched capacity for expenditure, even in industries in which a cost-benefit analysis would advise against investing. “Even during a boom, most companies and banks prefer to finance low-risk incremental innovations and wait for the state to find success in the more radical areas”, she explains. And there are numerous examples of this: the massive investments that drove the latest biomedical and pharmaceutical revolution were not made by risk capital or garage inventors, Mazzucato insists, but by “the visible hand” of the state. “In 2012 alone, during the financial crisis, the United States spent US $32 billion on the biotech and pharmaceutical industries”, Mazzucato told El País. Huge public investments by the US that led to what is now Silicon Valley are a perfect example for Mazzucato, because Washington isn’t exactly accused of being socialist or of advocating too much state intervention in the economy.

According to Mazzucato, what the United States has traditionally done is to have a long-term view – which direction will the economy take?, where do we want it to go? – and to focus investments in a way that creates a symbiotic relationship with the private sector, not as an enemy or a competitor. “The state must be a partner to the private sector, and often the most courageous partner, the one that is willing to take on the risks that companies don’t want to take”, she points out. That said, once the investment brings returns, Mazzucato argues that the rules of the game have to change to prevent a socialisation of risk while profits always end up in private hands. This is especially true in a scenario that for decades has never seen GDP growth cascade down to actual wages.

Rethinking capitalism doesn’t mean asking for the moon. It’s just about fairness, says Mariana Mazzucato. This Italian economist ended her talk with a reference to the Apollo space programme: why don’t we develop great visionary projects like we did in the 1960s, like taking on the challenge of putting man on the moon? Back then, the state was able to design a colossal research project that brought together the work of different disciplines to achieve the impossible. Why don’t we launch an Apollo programme against climate change or against social inequality?