Barcelona pouring concrete

BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 11 (UPI) -- This year, 2.30 out of every 6 euros -- a total of $243 million -- from the Office of the Major of Barcelona's budget will be dedicated to Forum 2004, a "mega project" cum exhibition situated on the coast to the north east of Barcelona, which is an extension of the infrastructure set up 10 years ago for the 1992 Olympic Games.

The final expenses of the development are expected amply to exceed that amount, and will be financed with public funding (37 percent), the commercial operation of the premises (30 percent) and the sale of advertisement rights. Companies like Telefónica, BBVA, Enresa, Iberdrola, Warner and Renault have showed some interest in participating in the project.

The main investments will be a Convention Center ($88.5 million) that was awarded to a French company Générale Location, which will construct and manage the structure. According to its developers, it will be the biggest convention center in Southern Europe, with space for 15,000 people. Other structures include the Edificio Forum ($62.4 million), designed Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron (who are Tate Gallery's creators); a port ($104.1 million), with capacity for a thousand moorings; a water-treatment plant ($118 million); and an extension of the littoral highway, which will encircle the city following the coast and the mouth of the Besós river, and will connect the main exhibition area with the Olympic Village, new artificial beaches, the Diagonal Avenue (a main thoroughfare that crosses the city), the new port and an area of reclaimed land. The project will be interlinked with another one, Diagonal Mar, whose services of hotels, offices and a convention center will be used as the Forum's headquarters.

Incredibly enough, the project was born out of a mistake. In 1996, the 10th anniversary of the city's Olympic nomination, former Major Pasqual Maragall announced that Barcelona would present its candidature for the Universal Exhibition that ought to go off in 2004. It was a faux pas. The international agency that arranges that kind of events (the Bureau of International Exhibition, which is an intergovernmental organization) did not have anything programmed for 2004, and, anyway, the agenda was already decided until 2010, when the Expo will be held in Moscow.

But Barcelona -- a city that has been shaped by great international events such as the Universal Expos that took place in 1888 and 1929, and the Olympic Games -- did not fail to seek to spend the money anyway. Barcelona has traditionally used such events to revitalize decaying parts of the city infrastructure. Immediately, though, management difficulties born out of the project's vague origins and the tripartite promotion -- shared by the Office of the Major, the autonomic government and the central government -- emerged. A succession of resignations and mistakes followed.

Fleeing from its detractors' accusations -- who considered it merely as a town-planning project -- Forum 2004 introduced a social component, and was programmed as a "meeting among different cultures." A meeting that would occur in flashy new premises. During five months, three themed exhibitions (on language, history of the universal myths and ways of live), conferences, debates and an art festival focused on that social leit motiv will take place aiming to attract five million visitors from everywhere.

"This aspires to be a newly coined assembly," according to Maj. Joan Clos. It will have three axes: a dialogue among cultures, peace conditions and feasibility, he explained in a presentation. It will show that Barcelona is a welcoming land. Big words, but it is yet to be known who will participate and in what way.

According to an expert involved in the design of the plan, there are certain challenges that should be met in order to avoid making Forum 2004 an empty exercise as an exhibition: there should be a coherent and practical debate about phenomena such as immigration, town-planning and "the profound mutations that our society is going through"; the debate "should be an exercise of reflection for action" in a multicultural society; and Forum 2004 should become a process, not a punctual event, with international and local scope.

The challenges are not far away, while the diggers are busy at Poblenou, a former industrial district that became available as a result of the closure of many old textile factories and gas works, and the massive changes the city underwent as it prepared to host the Games. The coastal strip was zoned for new tourist and residential functions, including the creation of the Olympic Village and a series of artificial beaches.

Not far away from the new building sites, there is one of the most dangerous districts in Spain, La Mina, a fringe, isolated neighborhood, in which 20 percent of the population (of 14,000 people) belongs to the Romany ethnic group. The area went through a sort of awakening in 2000, when the European Union announced the investment of $1.63 million in 33 micro-projects (in education and job creation, among other sectors), aimed at regenerating it. Another European project, Urban, has earmarked $10.95 million for a $62.50 million redeveloping project. The goal is to help reduce the potential conflict that will be generated by wealth and poverty in very close proximity.

According to Barcelona Field Studies Center, a think tank, "the shortage of available land within the city suggests these may be the last grand urban projects for perhaps the next fifty years... Barcelona may be beginning to show lag-time between its dazzling, international image and socio-economic change. Furthermore, development-saturation is creating problems of increasingly difficult accessibility within the city."

The think tank says that "conflict with residents of La Mina will be difficult to suppress in the short term and the city's sewage works, on the doorsteps of Diagonal Mar, is not a particularly enticing prospect for those looking to enjoy the fresh air or new beaches." Other problems include an excess supply of already existing shops and supermarkets for the new shopping malls and a shortage of new tenants for the 10,000 new apartments being constructed in the vicinity.