Judit Carrera

Judit Carrera is a political scientist by education but is now director of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). As part of her remit, she is also in charge of the CCCB’s Education programme, head of the CCCB Archive, and director of the European Prize for Urban Public Space which awards the most thoughtful new communal spaces across the continent.

Podcast transcript

Judit Carrera: Barcelona always a bit uncomfortable with itself, you know, and I think that’s sometimes creates a maniac.

Tim Abrahams: Hello and forgive our tardiness. Superurbanism usually happens every fortnight, but we skipped one. There are two reasons for this, both associated. One, I’ve been to Barcelona to see an amazing exhibition about American suburbia at the CCCB, an institution, which I had hitherto known about, but not really engaged with: an amazing place as it turns out. Two until now, this podcast has been, shall we say, shooting from the hip. It’s spontaneous. I do it alongside my writing work for the Architectural Record and my editing and publishing work with Machine Books. It’s been a chance to make public conversations I get to have with interesting people that previously remained private. These are people who I found particularly informative, interesting, intriguing, whose work I get to see and discuss. People who I meet in the weekly round of events. When I was in Barcelona, I was fortunate enough to meet Judith Cerrera, who was director of the CCCB.

She gave me and a group of journalists a briefing about the work of the institution and a tour of the building. The CCCB is a converted orphanage that sits at a hinge point between the Barri Gòtic and the Eixample in Barcelona. Its history as we walk here, is closely associated with the evolution of Barcelona in recent years. And when Judit was speaking, I just thought, wow, this is really interesting. I’m getting an insight into a city. This is exactly the kind of thing that I need to be getting out of the podcast. Picked up the recording. Started recording. We had a little conversation afterwards. I’d like to thank all the other journalists who were involved, and Judit Carrera in particular.

Judit Carrera: The Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona was created right after the year 1992, the Olympic Games. And it was part of that political will of improving and transforming the city centre of Barcelona through urban planning and culture. So, the CCCB was born out of that energy of the transformation of the Olympic games together with the energy of the first democratic local governments that were put in place in 1979 after 40 years of dictatorship in Spain. So, the convergence of the energy of the Olympic Games with the first democratic local governments was very important to understand, some of the cultural infrastructures that were put in place at that time in Barcelona. And the common thread of all those transformations was the importance of public space, understanding that public space, it’s not only a physical material space, but it’s mainly, a space for creating community and reinforcing the common life in cities.

So, the CCCB was born out of that tradition and the tradition of thinking about cities and architecture in Barcelona. So, it was created as a cultural institution devoted to cities and public space, but not cities only as an architectural artifact nor the city of Barcelona, but basically cities as a cultural landscape, as a space of coexistence of different populations, different backgrounds, different histories, different stories to be told. And it’s a multidisciplinary cultural institution that is a result or a mirror of that long tradition of Barcelona, of thinking, architecture and public space, and also of promoting the area that cities are always physical space, but also any material space where memories, aspirations, political values or cultural values are put in place.

Tim Abrahams: Could you tell me just a little bit about how the organization through those 30 years has tried to engender and promote and further the values that it were informed Its creation?

Judit Carrera: The CCCB is a centre devoted to cities and public space to understand the complexity of city life over urban life from a different perspectives, but also it aims at becoming a public space, per se, a space that creates urbanity, a space where different people can meet and,  it creates this awareness of belonging to a community that is larger than a private space. So, the CCCB, it’s both, again, a building, a physical space, very central to the city of Barcelona. But it’s also an immaterial space that creates a culture, creates a space for free discussion through different cultural means. And that’s our mission. To have a space where the challenges of the contemporary world can be discussed freely and help understand or interpret and translate the world is a very important mission of our system.

Tim Abrahams: When you come, like I do from the UK, it seems as if the public space is one of the most successful things about Barcelona. It’s interesting because it seems like it’s so natural to this place, and yet there must have been a form of post dictatorship concern that public space needed to be fostered and engendered. Perhaps you could explain what was needed and why that focus on public space was so keen.

Judit Carrera: I think there are two aspects to take into account. One is the long tradition of Barcelona as a capital of architecture, not this long tradition of thinking. And I think that has to do with the fact of being an industrial city very strongly rooted into the territory and the geography, and the fact that there was a very important industrial movement that created a bourgeoisie that was very involved with culture, and that created a long traditional thinking architecture. We have had one of the most important architectural schools in Europe. So, this is a tradition that goes  far back to the 19th century, I think. So that the CCCB and Barcelona as a whole is a result of that tradition. And then, as you said, after 40 years of dictatorship upon that tradition, already existing public space was taught as being a tool for democratizing cities.

And as we all know, public spaces embed some of the most important political principles, it’s an important space for equality, for free speech, for plurality. That’s why cities are politically important. No, it’s not because they’re beautifully built or designed, but it’s because they bring together several of the most important values for democracy. So, after 40 years of democracy, there was a huge movement for democratizing the city and at that moment, that generation understood that public space was an efficient tool to do that. So, it was not about spectacular architecture, which is beautiful, but sometimes it is disconnected with the urban fabric, but understanding that squares, streets, sea-front, public markets, public libraries, museums, all these intersectional spaces, create a network and create something that sustains the political life of the city. And I think that both traditions, that the long-term one and that that particular moment was the one that really created a model that was praised internationally.

And what was interesting was that the Olympic games of Barcelona used public space as a priority, both in the city centre of Barcelona, but also in the peripheries in the most popular neighbourhoods. It was not only about updating the city towards the new times and making the city more beautiful, but also about giving pride to the neighbourhoods that had been abandoned for so many years and are still somehow abandoned. 

 

Tim Abrahams: So, it’s a success story, isn’t it? 

 

Judit Carrera: I think at that particular moment, Barcelona found, let’s say, a formula, of understanding that architecture and urban planning together with other policies, cultural policy, educational policy, social policy, can build a better city. And it was, I think it had to do with understanding that architecture is a powerful tool, but with some humility that it’s not imposing, necessarily understanding that it’s only one of the forces that can help transform the city. We know that the city was transformed for the better, but the cities are always alive, and you cannot be conformed with what you achieved at that particular moment. So that challenges don’t stop, and the cities are completely changing, you know, and the new challenges are being born and the context is completely different now from the eighties now. So, we have new challenges to be faced, and the scope of tourism in Barcelona, the new social composition of the city, the climate change challenges that are new and that were not here in 1992. So, we need to creatively think of another city, and that’s part of our mission too.

Tim Abrahams: You described really well the historical moment in which the CCCB was created. It was a very optimistic moment. How has that narrative changed, and where has the CCCB found itself in terms of the cultural landscape?

Judit Carrera: I think it was an optimistic moment, not only in Barcelona, but in Europe and in the world, in general. It was at the time right after the Berlin Wall had fallen. It was after the end of the apartheid regime. So, it was just the beginning of globalization; the beginning of the internet was also the time of the end of history. Democracy would be imposed a little bit everywhere. 30 years after the world is in a very much more uncertain and pessimistic moment. So, I think the CCCB is a place where you promote critical debate to understand the complexity of the world, and also give some hope in a moment of hopelessness. It’s an important role and the city and the world have completely changed in these three years. Also, in terms of local transformation of the city. The city is much more… In these 30 years, I think Barcelona has suffered two major transformations, maybe more.

But the first one is in 1994, there was no foreign-born population in Barcelona was, I think, 1% or 2% of the population were foreign born. Today the average is 30%, and in this neighbourhood it’s around 70%. So that means that schools or high schools in this neighbourhood, almost 90% of them from other parts of the world, mainly immigrants from 17 nationalities. So, it’s a much more complex situation, diverse in the good sense, but also in terms of dealing with that challenge, So that’s one of the main transformations of Barcelona in these 30 years. This is not different from other European cities, but the change in Barcelona has been very quick, and Paris, London have always been melting pots, but Barcelona, for its political and historical reasons, there was no diversity, and what is interesting about the diversity in Barcelona and in Spain, I would say in general, is that it’s not necessarily linked to its former colonies.

So, for instance, in this neighbourhood the most important community is from Pakistan or from Bangladesh. So, the challenge of building a bridge, linguistic, cultural bridge with those communities, it’s higher. 

 

And the second huge transformation is tourism, there was no tourism in 1994. No. The Olympic games had this kind of other side effect of opening up the city to international visitors. Today, Barcelona receives 30 million visitors per year, and the city is 1 million and a half. So, imagine the pressure, you know, into the urban landscape, the urban transformation, gentrification, Airbnb, you know, and these two issues are main political issues for the local debates. Let me explain the 30 million: it’s 15 million people who sleep in the city and the other 15 million are people who maybe sleep in the Costa Brava and come spend the day in Barcelona or the cruisers. So that means that they’re kind of floating population, but they’re here in a very dense city. So, it really creates a lot of pressure into the urban fabric. Something that we didn’t have at the beginning of the CCCB, the huge pressure over Barcelona is sprawling the city. So, it’s reinforcing this tendency of this pressure of the city.  

Tim Abrahams: Barcelona is a victim of its own success.

Judit Carrera: No, I think one of the interesting things about Barcelona is that the fact that it has the tradition of reinventing itself all the time, not the fact that of not being a capital, of not having the certainty of having the power with itself, has traditionally helped it to reinvent and rethink and question itself. Know that the Czech has created historically a lot of dynamism because there was a very strong bourgeoisie, a very strong civil society that was pushing forward now with the crisis of industry and, the crisis of bourgeoisie the political problems between Barcelona and Madrid, it’s another moment. But Barcelona is always a bit uncomfortable with itself, you know? And I think that sometimes creates a maniac. Because it creates a lot of moments of enthusiasm and moments of, wow, we’re opening doors and doing things that no one has done before, and we’re a free city. We have not let the weight of the past of the empire, of the bigness and the monarchy, but at the same time, sometimes we’re feeling depressed and no one likes us. 

 

Tim Abrahams: How are you feeling at the moment? 

 

Judit Carrera: I’m always on the, usually on the high thing, but it’s been complicated the last past few years, because, but I think despite of the political conflict in within Spain, I think that the deeper question is the crisis of the industrial moment. The fact that there’s no industry anymore. So, it’s how the city has to reinvent itself upon a post-industrial moment. And tourism is a kind of a momentous industry. You know, it’s a moment. It creates…it’s an extractivist thing, you know, that it gives you a lot of things in the moment, but it might destroy the objects of production.

I think that the prospects of climate change in Mediterranean cities is very real. The prospects in Barcelona has to be 50 degrees in the summer of 2050. And if you rely on tourism, who will come? Who will come already this summer? If your only industry relies on tourism, it will have a limitation very soon. Last summer in these neighbourhoods, there was a whole month where nights were 27, 28 degrees. That means that in the summer, we offer refuge to people who don’t have access to air conditioning. That means for a vulnerable population but not only we offer water and we offer special activities during the high peaks of temperature during the day. So, there is a network of climate refuges in the summers, and yeah…

 

Tim Abrahams: You are one of them. How many of them are there? Are there like,

Judit Carrera: I don’t know how many I can check, but it’s some museums, some public libraries. Also, one interesting spot is that the former refuge of the Civil War, not the refugios subterraneos.

Tim Abrahams: The bomb shelters.

Judit Carrera: The bomb shelters, some of them have been reconverted into a climate refuge.

Tim Abrahams: Amazing.  

Judit Carrera: Yeah.

Tim Abrahams: On a more positive note, you are an optimist, where do you see the future of the institution? What are your plans for the next four years?

Judit Carrera: I think that in the current context of uncertainties and moment of denial of future, and for many different reasons, climate change also far right movements, you know, kind of the crisis of democracy, uncertainty of the technological transformations. I think that having an institution that is devoted to give answers or generate public critical public debates to give some answers of what is going on, it’s more necessary and more important than ever, than maybe three years ago that the scale and the scope of the current transformation, both for what, what they call the fourth industrial revolution, you know, and the climate change asks for spaces that are free and that have free speech, and that help find a path towards the future, and for me, it’s both kind of translating the world and helping give citizens the key to understand the world and also at the same time, give some hope. I think when I started to be at the head of, it was the first year where Vox entered regional parliament in Spain. Until then, there was no ultra-right into the

Tim Abrahams: I think there was an ultra-right.

Judit Carrera: We had the dictatorship, but for 40 years, there were some things that could not be said. There were kinds of things that were a taboo in terms of anti-immigration, anti-feminist, anti-Catalan. There were things that there was a kind of an agreement that we would respect each other in favor of peace. And now that taboo book has been broken.

Tim Abrahams: Vox broke that taboo.

Judit Carrera: Yeah. On the future of democracy, on some topics, our audiences are already convinced and informed, and we increasingly feel that we have to use culture as a way of inventing another utopia. It’s not only giving diagnosis of how bad the world is, which we already know, we all know, how can we invent another narrative? Hope can sound a bit naive, but it’s not hope, it’s like giving some tools to confront that difficult future. Art or literature or film  have the tradition of inventing new worlds. And in a moment where the idea that there’s no alternative, There is an alternative, an event, and it is also in that framework that we created a few years ago, a new program at the CCB called Mediation in which we work more hands-on for instance, we have a program with non-accompanied minors, which are one of the dark beasts of Vox.

We don’t give publicity to that because it’s a very sensitive issue. But instead of organizing 10 more lectures on the danger of the far rights, what we do is to help, [beyond the transcribers limited Spanish] how do you explain? Yeah. Restore the fractures, the social fractures, that there are no, and that provoke those political problems. So, it’s more not using culture for the middle, upper classes of Barcelona, but also enlarging the audiences and the communities that we deal with. 

 

We have created a program on critical thinking for teenagers that is very successful; the polls in Spain, for instance, say that there’s an increasing portion of youth that don’t believe in democracy anymore. We believe that culture can help, and that education doesn’t only rely on schools, no, that everyone is responsible for that. It’s one of the more moving programs that we’ve been doing. This is a kind of planting the seeds for critical thinking, for an aspiration to change the world, because it, otherwise, it’s a hopeless generation, and it’s incredible that the changes that we see, we give them contact to artists, filmmakers, writers, provoke readings, space for criticism, you know, we receive that, receive a lot of criticism by them. It’s like, okay, but it’s a way of including them.

Tim Abrahams: That’s interesting because you describe Olympics moment as a kind of, almost like a bringing together of a professional sphere. Whereas now, actually the most important thing is the immediate relationship.

Judit Carrera: It’s both, it’s both because we’re still working with intellectuals and also bringing into Barcelona, the most important voices of the world to speak together and try to find a way to understand the scope of the current transformation. So, it’s a very intellectual place and sometimes we have the risk of becoming an analytic space. So, one of our obsessions is how we can become an accessible and universal space and how to translate that complexity into an open space for everyone. We host the most difficult philosophers of the world. We work in the high sciences. We did an exhibition on quantum physics. So, we have the capacity of dealing with that complexity and at the same time trying not to only work for the same 10 or 15% of the population. We’re a public institution too. So, we feel that responsibility of being a space that has this commitment to help.

Tim Abrahams: It seemed to me that the centre for contemporary culture of Barcelona enjoyed a great deal of independence. I wondered how it fitted into the administrative and political scene of Barcelona, of Catalonia and of Spain, particularly given the antagonism that exists between Madrid and Barcelona since the boycotted 2017 Catalan independence referendum, and the arrest of leading Catalan nationalists subsequently. And also, how the institution reflects not so much the history of urbanism, which it does in the exhibition suburbia building the American dream, which I’ll be reviewing for the architectural record soon, but also the specific history of Catalonia and of Spain. How does it tell its own story?

Judit Carrera: It’s mainly the province of Barcelona, which is the intermediate administration between the city council and the region of Catalonia. It’s an administrative body, it’s like the French department more or less. And it’s very good for us because it’s not our first political space and the first row of the political arena. So, it’s more an administrative distributive space. And they’re funding us in 75% and the rest, the 25% is from the city council. So, it’s very locally oriented. and we receive some money from the region of Catalonia, project based and some money from Madrid, very little money. Then we have two other revenues. One is the co-productions. Most of our projects are co-produced with other partners, not in the case of suburbia, but usually our exhibitions, our projects are always co-produced with other partners. So that produces the cost. And also, we have private money for specific projects.

Since we’re a very contemporary institution, there’s always the shadow of the dictatorship in every single project that we do, we’re not an institution devoted to Spain specifically, but we’ve done some important projects on that period. We did a big exhibition on the Spanish transition once both in political terms and cultural terms, and all these agreements that were needed to do. Recently did an exhibition on a very interesting psychiatrist figure, Francesc Tosquelles who was a Catalan psychiatrist who flew from the Civil War, and that was in exile for many years in France. And in France, he invented a new way of dealing with mental health institutions, and the other important, when some of a permanent reflection we have every year is An Homage to George Orwell as returning The Homage to Catalonia.

So through George Orwell, we do a very interesting approach to civil war. Its international connections. The topics that he raised for total freedom of speech, totalitarianism, the next exhibition will be retrospective of the French filmmaker Agnès Varda. This is something that we co-produced with the Cinematheque in Paris. And then at the end of the year, we are opening up an exhibition on the Amazon again, as a way of talking about climate change in not necessarily very critical, but in terms of putting the value of earth and diversity at the end of the year. So that’s the two big projects that we have. 

 

Tim Abrahams: Very different. 

 

Judit Carrera: Yeah. But that’s our mission. It’s the kind of opening up, not relying on only one specific field and that also what creates some expectation in our audiences, that it’s not only always the same public or audiences.

The CCB has, since more than 20 years, the European Prize for Public Space, which is this project out of the exhibition that we did on the European city 20 years ago. We decided to create a permanent observatory of European cities and this is an architectural award that the CCCB together with other museums on architectural and urban planning in Europe, the main public planning museums in Europe. So, every two years we receive the most important, around 300, projects that have been built in European cities and an independent jury decides which are the best project that have won that competition. So the idea is to receive around 300 projects every year, and an independent jury decides that 25 finalists, and then the winning project with this idea of having a permanent observatory of European cities and to promote the knowledge between cities of solutions to public space problems.

For instance, the winning project of the last edition is a very interesting project from the Dutch city of Utrecht in Holland, where they decided to reconvert the former highways, peripheriques, I don’t know, how do you say that in English? La rondas 

 

Tim Abrahams: Ring Road.

 

Judit Carrera: The ring roads exactly into a canal but this idea of we cannot rely on cars and mobility is a huge issue also in terms of ecological approach. So, this is kind of a list of best practices, let’s say, of good urbanism and good urban planning towards that compact and then city that we’re wanting to promote in contrast to the suburb. So, this is the contract zone. We’re doing this big exhibition on the suburbs, a critical approach to that, and at the same time, we’ve been doing this project for more than 20 years, collecting good practices that provide solutions and, it can be shared between different cities. So that if, and also showing how European cities share some of the main challenges in terms of climate change, in terms of mobility, in terms of peripheral, urban sprawl, gentrification, housing. 

 

So, how to also reflect historical memory into public spaces. That’s very important in Europe, everywhere. But the question of monuments, statues, the scars of the second world war, So, what we see after when we revise these 300 projects, you are able to see what are the main challenges, common challenges of European cities. And that’s a very interesting thermometer, you know, of what’s concerning European cities. And over the years, we see the evolution. Mobility, for instance, has been a very permanent concern of European cities, but climate change has been increasingly a concern into the public agendas. 

 

So, questions related to water, to resources, to refreshing public spaces.with plants and trees, it’s increasingly a problem, and that project allows us to, it’s a starting point of a larger program of public discussions, exhibitions, traveling, exhibitions, and it’s also a way of, let’s say, building Europe through the landscape, no, through the urban public space, no, that besides all the differences between different countries, that it’s not the same, the public space in the northern countries and in the south and the east or the west. But Europe shares the same idea of what public space is and why public space is important. 

 

One of the beautiful things of this project is that in Europe you always see that there is this idea of palimpsest, another city as being a space for different layers and how you can combine, I mean, make these layers coexist and live together the mother with the engine. And that’s something that doesn’t happen in other continents where they start cities from scratch every other time. And the five finalists will be decided at the end of June. So, if projects that will be worth submitting to the price, they’re more, it’s an open call. It’s not, we have a network of experts, a network of institutions that help us capture the best projects that have been dealing with public spaces in Europe. And at the end of October, we’ll have the winning project.

Judit Carrera: And then we do one exhibition that is usually, we have two exhibitions, right? It’s the finalists, it’s more for architectural schools, and the other one is more on topics beneath enterprise, not on climate change, mobility, sea fronts, housing, peripheries. It was created in 2000. So, it will be 24 years old. 

 

[Sound of a lift]

 

This place is not only beautiful because of the views that it has, but also because it helps understand the location within the context of the city. And what I like about that space is that you see the scope of the borders of the city. It’s northwest. Telepherico and the Hotel Vela by Bofil. You can feel the density of the city. Y derecho, one of the moving things is that the former orphans of the charity house are, some of them are still alive because they were born in the 1940s or the 1950s. And they meet every Thursday in the cafeteria because it’s their home now. So, there’s still meets in the place, and we did a documentary with them some years ago to keep this memory alive in Barcelona. Not the younger generations, but the older generations still think of the CCCB as that charity house. Are you working at the charity house?

Tim Abrahams: I love that story that the centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona is still thought of as a charity house in some people’s minds. Not because culture is some form of sop to the masses, not because it’s a safe space, God forbid, but because it’s a special place where the needs of the people are catered for. The CCCB is a place of debate and contention as a cultural institution. It has no collection except, and I think this is very important, the recordings of 30 years of discussions and talks and debates that have taken place there. I remember going to Barcelona in the 1990s and it did feel as if it had merged from a different timeframe to the rest of Europe. It was with a city where history had ended, the place where political contest was over. Of course, we know this is nonsense, but it is still a city that is using all the lessons that it learned at that time to deal with new problems, public space, public discussion and public value.

And the CCCB sums this up Judit Carrera gave me a fascinating insight into this place and I’d like to wish it a happy birthday, 30 years going well. Over the next few weeks. We’ve got some great interviews coming up: Farshid Moussavi, one of my favourite architects. Simon Henley, another of my favourite architects. You may sense a theme emerging here. Also, off to the Bruges Architecture Triennial as well. See what I’ll pick up there. 

 

This will always be something of a movable feast, but hopefully you won’t always be shooting from the hip. Have some organized things in there as well. Bit of both. Anyway, get in touch. Tell me who you’d like me to speak to. Love to hear from you. Thank you so much for your support. Here’s to more in the future.

 

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