Barcelona made in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. Investigating the relational production of urban policies (1989-1996)

GUILLERMO JAJAMOVICH; GABRIEL SILVESTRE

Colonia

Conferencia; Urban Planning in the Americas in the 20th century; 2021

Universität zu Köln

Three decades on, Barcelona still remains a powerful reference in urban policy and management whose expertise, narratives and symbols are mobilized by promoters and learners in their attempts to distil and apply ?best practices?. Latin America has been an important space where the banner of the ?Barcelona Model? has circulated and enacted as early as the 1980s and 1990s where it was argued that it could ?represent a significant market as long as there is a generous offer to transfer technology, training of human capital and modern infrastructures? (Borja, 1992: 23-24).This paper examines the establishment of these early networks in Latin America and the circulation of knowledge that took place between policy actors from Barcelona and the cities of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. Through a comparative analysis of the policy exchanges crystallized around the project for Puerto Madero waterfront renewal and Rio de Janeiro?s strategic planning, it is argued that they were not merely discreet cases of mobilisation of expert knowledge to particular policy problems. Rather, they emerged as relational products from evolving disparate networks as policy opportunities for all the parts involved, while being contested by those excluded from it. Inasmuch as waterfront renewal and strategic planning came to constitute ?best practices?, they also prefigured the articulation of what became the ?Barcelona Model?.