Architecture, urban planning and collective identity: Bilbao as a case study
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Article ARCHITECTURE, URBAN PLANNING AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY: BILBAO AS A CASE STUDY Miguel Angel Gonzalez-Torres1 and Aranzazu Ferna´ndez-Rivas2
The emergence of a collective identity, a complex social and psychological process, may be linked to a specific place and a particular urban layout. Architecture demarcates interior and exterior spaces that not only frame our relationships but can also generate a mirror image of the internal world. The authors examine relevant contributions from the sparse psychoanalytic literature on this subject, to support their hypothesis that changes to a city’s landscape, design, or architecture, when wholeheartedly embraced by its citizens, can serve to forge a new collective identity that helps to deal with absence, pain, and loss. They present the city of Bilbao, Spain, as a case study. This once thriving industrial city had collapsed into economic ruin, rife with social conflict, but since the 1990s, in an urban renewal, has emerged as a unique tourist destination. It has become a modern art and cultural center, symbolized by its most famous piece of contemporary architecture.
KEY WORDS: urban planning; collective identity; group processes; architecture https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-020-09265-9
The city of Bilbao, Spain, has undergone a remarkable transformation: from a dilapidated post-industrial area to an appealing destination for international tourism. The symbol of this great change is a unique building that, for some, represents the real catalyzing force behind this huge shift. As the reader may have guessed, we are referring to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao designed by Frank Gehry, which opened in 1997. Alongside it stand a collection of exceptional buildings designed by the cre`me de la cre`me of international architecture. Because this style of urban planning has been
Miguel Angel Gonzalez-Torres, M.D., Ph.D., Full Professor, Department of Neuroscience, University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, Spain. Aranzazu Ferna´ndez-Rivas, M.D., Ph.D., Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Basurto University Hospital, Bilbao, Spain. Address correspondence to Miguel Angel Gonzalez-Torres M.D., Ph.D., Psychiatry Service, Basurto University Hospital, Montevideo Avenida 18, Bilbao, Spain 48013.
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associated with a certain economic upturn for Bilbao, cities in other parts of the world have attempted to replicate it, thus far, unsuccessfully. The reaction of the inhabitants of Bilbao has been fascinating: embracing the change with apparent enthusiasm and somehow adopting this strange museum that possesses a beauty totally alien to the city’s historically conservative standards and even houses a strident collection of starkly unfamiliar contemporary art. How is it possible to explain our community’s fervor for this construction and its designer, now forever the city’s patron saint? Why do people, far from being fans of the avant-garde, subscribe en masse to be friends of the Guggenheim Museum, making it Spain’s second most publicly supported museum a
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