N116 - Oct 20
Open city. The challenges of the futureThe world changes, crises overlap and the first impact is in large cities. The Biennial of Thought discusses what they should do to face the changes.
DossierOpen city. The challenges of the future
Times of crisis are also times of danger for democracy. Fear of the future can fuel the temptation to embrace an authoritarian response. What do we need to do to make democracy come out...
Rather than thinking of the city as a doomed reality, as a certain catastrophic environmentalism does, we can see it as a yet-to-be fulfilled promise that the ecological transition can...
The COVID-19 crisis has been an anthropological shock, in other words, a dreadful experience for millions of people that will be forever etched on their memories and that will...
Ebola was the first in the succession of new diseases that tested humanity’s immune systems in the early 1990s. It was to be followed by avian influenza in 1997, and SARS in 2002. Now,...
Democracy and technology are two poles that engage in odd relationships of attraction and repulsion. The very technologies that provided minimum services while the world was on lockdown...
If the presents and futures of our everyday urban life are entwined and unravelled in digital entanglements, knowing how to listen to them is crucial. But the right to be heard also...
The Flat Earth theory and other denialist utopias are the radical expression of increasingly widespread indignation at the mental and material decay of the common world. They do not want...
The surfacing of far-right or so-called “authoritarian populist” political parties in the United States and in some parts of Europe seems to be contradictory, as they are emerging in so-...
Ultra rhetoric is a new reincarnation of sophist rhetoric. It places fake news – a technological version of classic fallacies – at the heart of its communications programme, focused on...
Vox’s electoral ups and downs indicate that its base is not as solid as it seems. This party, based on a vertical structure, limited ideological theorisation and high social network...
COVID-19 has spread faster in dense urban areas, resulting in a higher mortality rate compared to rural areas. By drawing the diagram of the virus’s behaviour and its spread in cities,...
The lockdown triggered by the pandemic has revealed the shortcomings of urban living as we knew it to us. The rural world now offers tranquillity and contact with nature that we do not...
In terms of urban design, a “plaza dura” is deemed to be a solution for the urban planning of a public space with a large surface area, generally made of granite or concrete, with hardly...
Other contents
Carme Portaceli
Carme Portaceli is to be the forthcoming director of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya [TNC, the National Theatre of Catalonia], making her the first woman to run the...
In Linde, a photographic project by Myriam Meloni and Arnau Bach, we see the Barcelona behind the ring roads. The Barcelona of the Rec Comtal irrigation...
When her friends started getting into the habit of splitting taxis to get home, for the first time she thought that she’d have to give up the night bus.
What future awaits culture in the wake of Covid-19? In the debate featured in this issue, the opinions concur in retaining that the problems facing culture go way...
Cancelling, postponing or rethinking. These are the options Barcelona’s cultural initiatives have had to decide between during the Covid-19 lockdown. Each project has...
Laura Huerga
The publisher Laura Huerga (Barcelona, 1978) is an unusual case on the Catalan literary scene. With professional beginnings far removed from the cultural world, it...
For a long time, Spanish photographers saw their creative aspirations determined by the role society assigned to them. The book Barcelona, fotógrafas, by...
The lights and shadows of the 1940s and 1950s in Barcelona, collected in Paco Villar’s latest book. From the restaurants Los Caracoles on the street Escudellers to La...
Nussbaum traces the genealogy of the cosmopolitan tradition, which is rooted in the response given by Diogenes the Cynic when asked where he was from, to which he...
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