In chapter 3, I switch my focus from these ‘official’ discourses and look instead at the elaboration of alternatives during the transition to democracy, in the context of the neighborhood movement of the 1970’s. At this time, Sants was experiencing dramatic urban transformations due to deindustrialization and the transition to a third-sector economy. Many industrialists sold or moved their factories out of the city in order to participate in this new economy through a different kind of production-- the capitalistic production of urban space, also known as real-estate speculation.101 Against this threat, the neighborhood movement
99 Muntadas, J. M. (1872). “Don Juan Güell y Ferrer, considerado como industrial.” Butlletí del Ateneo Barcelonés, Barcelona. In Cabana, Francesc. Els Cotoners. Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 1993 (Fàbriques i Empresaris. Els protagonistes de la Revolució Industrial, vol. 2).
100 Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell Smith. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks, New York:
International Publishers.
101 Borja, Jordi (et all). (1972). La Gran Barcelona. Construcción, Arquitectura y Urbanismo (CAU). (The back cover of this iconic text reads: “Barcelona es una de las ciudades más rebautizadas del mundo. Ciudad de ferias y congresos. Archivo de la cortesía. Capital del deporte Español, etc. Uno de los eslogans más asociados a la ciudad es el de la gran Barcelona. De alguna manera emparentado con “the great society” del inútilmente famoso Johnson. Pero Barcelona es en realidad la Ciudad Víctima de todos los demonios de la especulación. Hay dos Barcelonas: la inventada... por la historia y la propaganda y la Barcelona ... por las oleadas de inmigrantes sin ninguna planificación previa que planteara un crecimiento armónico.
Humanización…. Estudio que publicamos es un testimonio irrefutable del hundimiento del mito del Gran
45 emerged as a force to be reckoned with in defense of the neighborhood. Here, I defend two basic premises. First, I claim that we can understand the neighborhood movement as a legacy of an older, working-class social heritage. As James Kelly points out, Barcelona’s working class was organized according to a neighborhood-based associative network.102 The spatial organization of Barcelona’s labor movement is also studied more recently by José Luis Oyón.103 During Francoism, this associative network went into a long hibernation, but with the founding of the Centre Social de Sants in 1971, the tradition was revived under a new name. We can see this in the practices of protest, assembly and self-governance promoted by the Centre, as well as the expressed goal to transform not just Sants, but its people. The identity of ‘neighbor’ would be imbued with connotations of active citizenship and a neighborhood pride reminiscent of how the working-class identity was constructed during Sant’s 19th century industrialization.
This leads to my second claim: that the concept of neighborhood in Sants is a social object historically rooted, among other things, in the history of industrialization. This is a thesis I picked up from Marc Dalmau in his work on the history of cooperativism in Sants.104 I trace the development of this neighborhood heritage discourse through the emergence of a cultural arm of the neighborhood movement in Sants dedicated to the vindication of Sants’
Catalan, working-class, and independent (from Barcelona) identity. An important actor in this task was the historic archive of Sants, as well as the urban geographers from the University of Barcelona which collaborated with this group of local historians and educators.
It is important to note that this was, above all, the recovery of a social heritage. As Jordi Roca Vernet points out in his investigation on the ‘the memory of popular sociability in Sants through spaces,’ at this time there was no initiative to recover the material heritage of this neighborhood-based associative network, such as cooperatives, ateneus, and unions.105 There was, however, a quite successful effort made to appropriate the recently vacated industrial lands in the neighborhood as community resources (the story of the Salvem Sants campaign and the rejection of the train museum is an example of this). It was in this context that the campaign for the Vapor Vell first began. Despite the lack of a heritage discourse or a centralized project, I argue that we can understand these events as a type of neighborhood
Barcelona. Y el nacimiento de la consciencia de la Ciudad Victima. Profesores universitarios expertos de toda garantía y variada condición han aportado un trabajo considerado como modélico por los especialistas más coherentes del país. Una auténtica disección de la víctima de un asesinato y de las causas del asesinato.”)
102 Kelly, James Ronald. (1984). A neighborhood approach to working class life and politics in Barcelona, 1910-1923. University of East Anglia.
103 Oyón, J.L. (2009). «The split of a working-class city: urban space, immigration and anarchism in inter-war Barcelona». Urban History, vol. 36, part 1, pp. 86-112.
104 Dalmau Torva, Marc & Miró i Acedo, Ivan. (2010). Les cooperatives obreres de Sants. Autogestió proletària en un barri de Barcelona (1870-1939). La Ciutat Invisible Edicions.
105 Roca Vernet, Jordi. (2015). La memòria de la sociabilitat popular al barri de Sants a través dels espais”.
In: Duch, Montse; Ferré, Xavier; Arnabat, Ramon (ed.), Memòria i la història de la sociabilitat popular a Catalunya, Barcelona, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat.
46 conservationism with parallels to that modeled by the concept of ecomuseum developed concurrent to this in France.106
It’s not until chapter 4 that the concept of industrial heritage finally enters the scene.
Whereas in chapters 2 and 3 I focus on understanding two very distinct historical contexts and fundamentally different ways of framing the issue of Barcelona’s industrial past, in chapter 4 we see how these various ‘perspectives’ of the Vapor Vell were brought together in a ‘clash of discourses’ surrounding the Salvem el Vapor Vell campaign of 1983-84.107 Yet again, this requires introducing a new historical context-- the appearance of the newly elected democratic parties and the restructuring of municipal governance. Here, I engage with the concept of the ‘culture of the transition’ as developed by Guillem Martínez to describe the cultural politics developed post-Franco based on a consensual, vertical discourse which has acted since the 1980’s as the only possibility of a unifying cultural paradigm for the nation.108 One element of this was the future-orientedness of the new political parties, many of which abandoned their historic values, leading many leftists to experience what Teresa Vilarós describes as a ‘withdrawal (as in drug withdrawal) of disenchantment’ after years spent under Francoism holding on to a hope of a marxist utopia to come.109 Another element was the disassembling of the neighborhood movements democratic base as the neighbors associations were deserted under the premise that they were no longer needed under a democratic system.
It is also in this context of a ‘culture of the transition’ that we can understand the arrival of the industrial heritage movement to Catalonia-- a process cultivated by the Generalitat and the Association of Industrial Engineers of Catalonia within their objective of establishing a national museum of science and technology. The study and conservation of industrial history became dominated by a proud, nationalist framework in which industrialization was interpreted as a distinctive factor of Catalan identity. On one hand, this can be understood through the framework of the historiography of nationalism, for example through the construction of national ‘imaginaries,’110 the ‘invention of traditions,’111 or, more specific to the topic of musealization, David Boswell and Jessica Evan’s volume on ‘Representing the nation: History, heritage and museums.’112 On the other hand, investigating the role of
106 Alcalde Gurt, G. and Rueda Torres, J.M. (2012). Ecomuseology and local museums in Catalonia (Spain).
Influences and coincidences during the 1975-1985 period. In, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Ecomuseums, Community Museums and Living Communities. Seixal, Portugal. September 19-21, 2012.
107 Mieg, Harald A. & Oevermann, Heike (eds.). (2015). Industrial Heritage Sites in Transformation: Clash of Discourses. New York: Routledge.
108 Martinez, Guillem (coord.). (2012). CT o la Cultura de la Transición. Crítica a 35 años de cultura española. Barcelona, Random House.
109 Vilarós, Teresa. (2018). El mono del desencanto. Una crítica cultural de la Transición española (1973-1993). Madrid, Siglo XXI.
110 Anderson, Benedict. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso.
111 Hobsbawm, Eric & Ranger, Terence. (1983). The invention of tradition. Cambridge University Press.
Also: Hobsbawm, Eric. (1990). Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, myth, reality.
112 Boswell, D., & Evans, J. (2007). Representing the nation: a reader: histories, heritage and museums.
London: Routledge.
47 engineers in the representation of science and technology through initiatives such as industrial exhibits and museums has been a topic of study in the field of history science, with important contributions regarding the Catalan case made recently by Jaume Valentines and Jaume Sastre.113
In the case of the Vapor Vell, it was neither the Generalitat, nor the engineers, nor even the neighborhood associations which first attributed a heritage value to the factory; rather, it was the “El Vapor” group of industrial archeology of Sants, representing the interests of local historians and educators from the social sciences. The introduction of industrial archeology in Catalonia at this time was promoted as an opportunity for redrawing disciplinary boundaries in the context of the concurrent Catalan curriculum reforms of the 1980’s, as well as an opportunity to expand the historiography of industrialization to include previously marginalized groups. The efforts made to conserve, study, interpret, and display the Vapor Vell at this time are representative of this approach.
To conclude, I propose a model for understanding the musealization of Barcelona’s past based on three different industrial heritage discourses adopted at the regional, municipal, and neighborhood levels of administration. Here, I engage with a collection of recent case studies published in 2019 by Stefan Berger (editor) in his volume on Constructing industrial pasts:
heritage, historical culture, and identity in regions undergoing structural economic transformation.114 I argue that my three-tiered, clash-of-discourses model responds to the same crucial questions identified in his research, namely: “Who is producing industrial heritage? For whom? And for what purpose?”115 At the same time, I agree with his conclusions that an important next step is to move to trans-perspectives in order to better understand local case studies, as well as to challenge the homogeneity of our conceptions of
‘top-down’ vs ‘bottom-up’ approaches to musealization.
1.2.5 Sources
The sources for this investigation can be categorized according to academic discipline, separated by historical era, characterized as primary or secondary, traced to particular
113 Valentines-Álvarez, Jaume. (2012). Tecnocràcia i Catalanisme tècnic a Catalunya als anys 1930. Els enginyers industrials, de l'organització del taller a la racionalització de l'estat. Barcelona, Tesis doctoral UAB.
Sastre-Juan, Jaume. (2013). Un laboratori de divulgació tecnològica: el New York Museum of Science and Industry i la política de la museïtzació de la tecnologia als Estats Units (1912-1951), PhD Dissertation, Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Sastre-Juan, Jaume & Valentines-Álvarez, Jaume. (2019). The failed Technology Museum of Catalonia: Engineers and the Politics of the musealization of technology in Barcelona (1929-1939), Nuncius: annali di storia della scienza, 34: 128-154. Valentines Álvarez, J. (2019). The Quest for the Technological Soul of the Nation: The Catalan Forge and the Display of Politics (1914–1939). In:
Canadelli, E., Beretta, M., & Ronzon, L. (Eds.). Behind the Exhibit: Displaying Science and Technology at World's Fairs and Museums in the Twentieth Century. Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, pp. 32-50.
114Berger, Stefan (ed.). (2019). Constructing industrial pasts: Heritage, historical culture, and identity in regions undergoing structural economic transformation. Berghahn Books.
115 (Ibid. p.303)
48 archives or libraries, or even linked to conversations I’ve had with various people throughout this investigation, some of whom figure within the investigation itself. Without a doubt, the biggest source of information and direction for this investigation comes from Alfons Zarzoso, my thesis director, who has guided this investigation along its often rocky and rather unconventional development. Nobody could be more enthusiastic about the results or encouraging of the investigative process.
Likewise, my colleagues and professors at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in the Centre de Historia de la Ciencia (CEHIC) as well as the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and the Societat Catalana d'Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica (SCHCT), must be credited for fundamentally inspiring the type of historical critique I set out to perform in this thesis. Prior to my involvement in this department, I studied physics and worked as a high school teacher. These years of immersion in Barcelona’s university culture and socio-political climate have been, and continue to be, transformative.116
I am also indebted to those who have met with me in order to answer questions and inform my investigation. These include: Llorens Casas, Jose Pares, Joan Roca, Jordi Fossas, Antoni Vilanova, Mercè Tatjer, Magda Fernandez, Maria Luisa Gutierrez, Horacio Capel, Marc Dalmau, Agus Giralt, Xavier Hernández, Eusebi Casanelles, Xavier Basiana, Martí Llorens, Jaume Perarnau i Llorens, and various others who in some way have played a part in the object of my study.
I am also grateful to the archivists at the District Archive of Sants-Montjuïc, the archive of the Centre Social de Sants, the Arxiu Històric de Poblenou, the Arxiu de la Ciutat de Barcelona, the archive of the Museu Nacional de la Ciència i de la Tècnica (MNACTEC), the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya, the archive of the Grup de Didàctica de les Ciències Socials at the University of Barcelona (UAB), as well as the Biblioteca de Catalunya, the Biblioteca Vapor Vell, the Biblioteca Rosa Sensat, and the various libraries of the UAB, the University of Barcelona, and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
As discussed above, this investigation takes an interdisciplinary, ‘network approach’ and borrows from a range of methodologies including urban studies, museum studies, critical heritage studies, local history, history of technology, and discourse analysis. The secondary sources previously mentioned in this section are representative of the general approach which I take. In addition, Marta de la Torre’s volume on assessing the values of cultural heritage has also provided practical references for how to proceed with this kind of analysis.117 She
116 Special thanks to my professors Jorge Molero, Agusti Nieto-Galan, Xavier Roqué, Carlos Tabernero, and Pepe Pardo, as well as colleagues Miquel, Clara, Eoin, Jaume S., Jaume V., Yona, Judit, Jaime, Mauricio, Juliana, Xavier, Ferran, Laura, Sara, Oscar, Mónica, and many others. Extra special thanks to the ‘history buddies’ who helped me feel at home during my first year in Barcelona (Aira, José, Marcèlo, Mariagrazia, Joan) as well as those who have shared a home with me during these years of study (Cristina, Eli, Berta, Nicolas, Julia, Genis, Felix, Huihuan, Nancy, Blanca, Sergi, Alfonsi, Maristella)
117 Torre, Marta de la. (2002). Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage. Research Report. The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles.
49 details a range of tools from the social sciences including constituency analysis, expert analysis (textual/iconographic/formal/semiologic), ethnography, mapping, archival research, historical narratives, etc, and these have all been valuable resources.
Finally, participating in various research projects has been an important part of this investigative process, by generating feedback and constructive engagement with other contemporary scholarship. In this regard, two initiatives stand out: first of all, the research group “GABMUSANA: Del gabinete de maravillas al museo anatómico popular: regímenes de exhibición y cultura material de la medicina” which from 2016-2018 studied the historiography of science, museography and regimes of popular display in Barcelona from the 17th-20th centuries. The second initiative is an ongoing research project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation on “MUSAUPOL: Museos, Aulas y Política:
Cultura Científica y Tecnológica en la Transición española.”118 Here, the study of the musealization of Barcelona’s industrial past is useful in illuminating the process by which the musealization of science, technology and industry contributed to the construction of cultural politics, national identities, and the legitimation of the new state.
118 Sastre, Jaume & Simon, Josep (coords.). “Museos, Aulas y Política: Cultura Científica y Tecnológica en la Transición española” [MUSAUPOL, PID2019-104897GA-I00], 2020-2022.
50 1.3 CASE STUDY: THE VAPOR VELL OF SANTS
In this section, I defend my selection of the Vapor Vell of Sants as a case study which illuminates the more generalized dynamics of industrial musealization in Barcelona. There are a number of factors which set this factory, and the campaigns for its heritagization in 1983-84, apart from the rest of Barcelona’s initiatives of industrial conservation. For one thing, it was the first. The significance of this heritage victory was not lost on the citizens of Barcelona’s Sants neighborhood which had led the campaigns. As it was written in the wake of the announcement by the Generalitat that proceeding had begun for the historic factory’s monumentalization:
“The people of Sants have every reason to rejoice, now that an important piece of our history has been recovered.
In effect, the Vapor Vell, built during the years 1844-1845, will become an important reference point in the urban development of Sants, and constitute a veritable historic center for our town. For the first time, Sants, pioneer in industrialization, will have a national monument, but what is really important is that the Vapor Vell is the first factory in Catalonia, and all of Spain, for which there are proceedings for declaration as a monument. Until now this type of classification had been reserved for churches and palaces, but with this new precedent a typology of buildings that, although not noteworthy for their artistic or architectonic qualities, can be thus classified for their historical, social, political, economic, and technological significance. Sants has become, from this moment onward, a pioneer in the recovery of industrial architectural heritage in danger of disappearance, regardless of its importance.”119 The Vapor Vell became heritage: this is the five-word summary of the story which you will find on the following pages of this thesis. It is a story about the process of transformation of a factory as it was reconstructed to take on a new identity. At the time it was viewed as
“one of the most improbable cases of heritage recovery in recent years,” and projected to
“undoubtedly” become an important point of reference for future actions. “In Sants,” it was declared triumphantly, “the fight will continue until we reach a total and satisfactory solution to the problem of the Vapor Vell, and then we will continue with Can Batlló, Serra Balet, the urban zone of the Triangle... We hope that the example of the Vapor Vell will also be useful for old industrial towns similar to ours: Sant Andreu, Sant Martí de Provençals, Sabadell, Terrassa etc.”120
Sadly, almost none of this would be the case, at least not for many years. Despite the optimism which accompanied the news of the Vapor Vell’s imminent monumentalization, this pioneering recovery of industrial architectural heritage did not set the precedent for the rest of the city’s industrial buildings. As we have already discussed in this introduction, a
119 Col.lectiu de l´Escola de Mestres de Sants Les Corts. (1985). Materials per a una Didáctica del Vapor Vell. p. 3 [Accessed: Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat Barcelona.]
120 Secretariat d’Entitats. (1984). El Vapor Vell: Victòria Popular. (Accessed in the Arxiu del Districte de Sants-Montjuïc).
51 municipal consciousness towards this issue would not be raised until the 2000s, after much of the destruction along the coastline of Poblenou had, conveniently, already been carried out. Still, the Vapor Vell became heritage, and this experience would play a formative role in the development of the cultural politics, constituencies, discourses and strategies which
51 municipal consciousness towards this issue would not be raised until the 2000s, after much of the destruction along the coastline of Poblenou had, conveniently, already been carried out. Still, the Vapor Vell became heritage, and this experience would play a formative role in the development of the cultural politics, constituencies, discourses and strategies which