Uncivil cities
In 2005, I was a witness as a Barcelona resident of a
worrying emphasis on ‘incivility’ as a problem. All of a sudden, things that
were part of daily life in urban public space, especially in a Mediterranean
capital, such as street drinking, skating, prostitution or game-playing, took
centre stage and became the object of a deafening policy and media debate.
Those things, that we may have seen as annoying but normal, or even been the
‘perpetrators’ of, very quickly became a public problem and portrayed as a
clear sign of the decay of Western civilisation. Almost overnight, graffiti and
homelessness became punishable offenses, among many other, varied things. Something
had changed in the Barcelona of ‘amigos para siempre will you always be my
friend’.[1]
Soon after this happened, a copy of Urban Studies’ double
issue on ‘(In)civility and the city’ fell in my hands, giving context to the
events I had just lived. Incivility was becoming a global issue and different
bodies in different countries were looking for tools to pursue a law and order
approach to city life. These efforts received different names in different
places, but were essentially all part of a global process to turn deviant
behaviours into offences and thus turn them into a police matter.
The Barcelona case, however, seemed to have its own dynamic
–the role played by the annual neighbourhood festivities, seen by some media as
bacchanalia of incivility, or the government crisis the Socialist government at
the time was going through, as well as an evident conservative turn experienced
by the generation that had lived and been protagonists of the transition to
democracy, who now demanded that their ‘right’ to enjoy a clean and
non-degraded public space, to rest and to be tranquil and to not be ‘disturbed in
the exercise of the freedom of circulation.
I became curious in the interplay between local and global
dynamics, and the reason of this ‘defining up’ of deviancy. The international
literature gave me clues that resonated with the Barcelona experience, but only
in broad terms. The ins-and-outs of the Barcelona case did not match those
described in the international literature. Trying to make sense of ‘asynchronic
synchrony’ was the main driver behind the paper, written with the hope to get
international authors to question some of their assumptions or generalisations,
as well as to encourage other to explore similar local processes and contribute
them to our scientific field.
Using a combination of urban studies literature, public
policy process and transfer theory and media discourse analysis, the paper
retraces the policy process of what was called the Civility Ordinance of
Barcelona, finally passed on 1 January 2006, in an attempt to contribute a
detailed account of the local determinant factors. These are put in light not
only of similar processes elsewhere, specially the UK, but also in broader
debates on the local security agendas in the 90s and 00s. By presenting a
mainly empirical picture, the paper aspires to inform other comparative studies
on the role of security and deviancy in urban environments, and on the
political role of cities under globalisation.
Now that several years have passed since these schemes were
implemented in different countries and cities, and so we can begin to evaluate
their impact –and probably validate Bannister and Kearns’ hypothesis, quoted in
the paper, that the emphasis on tolerance and respect through civility results
in an erosion of tolerance and respect-, and in a time when urban anxieties are
centered on the crisis and radicalisation processes, understanding the problems
of the civility approach can act as a timely warning sign.
Gemma Galdon-Clavell.
Barcelona, May 2015
[1] One of the landmark songs of the Olympic
Games of 1992, symbolising tolerance, friendship and openness.
