Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity is a study of the emergence and development of the cultural image of the Iberian peninsula’s foremost modern city.

The four decades between the two Universal Exhibitions of 1888 and 1929 were formative in the creation of modern Barcelona. Architecture and art blossomed in the work of Antoni Gaudi­ and many others. At the same time, social unrest tore the city apart. Topics such as art nouveau and anarchism have attracted the attention of numerous historians. Yet the crucial role of science, technology and medicine in the cultural makeup of the city has been largely ignored. The ten articles of this book recover the richness and complexity of the scientific culture of end of the century Barcelona. The authors explore a broad range of topics: zoological gardens, natural history museums, amusement parks, new medical specialities, the scientific practices of anarchists and spiritists, the medical geography of the urban underworld, early mass media, domestic electricity and astronomical observatories. They pay attention to the agenda of the bourgeois elites but also to hitherto neglected actors: users of electric technologies and radio amateurs, patients in clinics and dispensaries, collectors and visitors of museums, working class audiences of public talks and female mediums. Science, technology and medicine served to exert social control but also to voice social critique. Barcelona: An urban history of science and modernity (1888-1929) shows that the city around 1900 was both a creator and facilitator of knowledge but also a space substantially transformed by the appropriation of this knowledge by its unruly citizens.

Thinking Barcelona studies the ideologies that redefined Barcelona during the 1980s and helped the city adapt to a new economy of tourism, culture, and services. Looking specifically at the lead-up to the 1992 Olympic Games and the urban renewal geared toward establishing Barcelona as a happy combination of European cosmopolitanism and Mediterranean rootedness, Edgar Illas situates Barcelona as a key example of contemporary urban rebranding after the fall of communism and the establishment of the neoliberal “end of history.” Looking at a host of materials associated with the games as well as contemporary architectural and literary works, he offers a compelling look at postmodern globalization as it manifests itself through urban regeneration.

Rosemary Wakeman's original survey text comprehensively explores modern European urban history from 1815 to the present day. It provides a journey to cities and towns across the continent, in search of the patterns of development that have shaped the urban landscape as indelibly European. The focus is on the built environment, the social and cultural transformations that mark the patterns of continuity and change, and the transition to modern urban society. Including over 60 images that serve to illuminate the analysis, the book examines whether there is a European city, and if so, what are its characteristics? Wakeman offers an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates concepts from cultural and postcolonial studies, as well as urban geography, and provides full coverage of urban society not only in western Europe, but also in eastern and southern Europe, using various cities and city types to inform the discussion. The book provides detailed coverage of the often-neglected urbanization post-1945 which allows us to more clearly understand the modernizing arc Europe has followed over the last two centuries.

This book explores how modernity, the urban, and the sacred overlap in fundamental ways in contemporary Spain. Urban spaces have traditionally been seen as the original sites of modernity, history, progress, and a Weberian systematic disenchantment of the world, while the sacred has been linked to the natural, the rural, mythical past origins, and exemption from historical change. This collection problematizes such clear-cut distinctions as overlaps between the modern urban and the sacred in Spanish culture are explored throughout the volume. Placed in the periphery of Europe, Spain has had a complex relationship with the concept of modernity and commonly understood processes of modernization and secularization, thus offering a unique case-study of the interaction between the modern and the sacred in the city.

The food markets of Barcelona host thousands of customers daily, from tourists eager to sample fresh fruits and grilled seafood to neighborhood cooks in search of high-quality ingredients. While other countries experienced major shifts away from the public-market model in the twentieth century, Barcelona's food markets remained fundamental to the city's identity, economy, and culture. Montserrat Miller's Feeding Barcelona, 1714-1975 examines the causes behind the extraordinary vibrancy and tenacity of the Barcelonan market system. Miller argues that recurrent revolutionary uprisings in Barcelona, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, forced ongoing collaboration between the public and private sectors to ensure adequate and effective food distribution. Municipal support permitted small-scale food sellers in Barcelona to survive in a period more commonly characterized by increasing capitalization in food retail, while the importance of food markets to Barcelona's social networks enhanced vendors' ability to recognize and adapt to changing customer demands. In addition, a high number of stalls owned by women contributed both to the financial well-being of vendor families and to the sociability patterns that placed neighborhood food markets at the center of daily life in the city. The shared commitment of vendors, shoppers, and government officials to a market model of food sales created the lasting and unique market system that persists in Barcelona to this day. Drawing from extensive archival research and numerous interviews with individuals at all levels of the market system, Feeding Barcelona, 1714-1975 is the first detailed history of the historical and social influences that create urban food markets.

During the 1980s, the urban youth movement known as la movida transformed the Spanish cultural landscape, particularly in the country's capital, Madrid. After a four-decade long dictatorship, artists and thinkers sought to make the most of their newly found freedoms. The vibrancy, optimism and aesthetic heterogeneity of the period are best captured in contemporary ephemera - in the fanzines and magazines that provided movida participants with an immediate and largely unmediated outlet for their creative experiments. Among them, monthly arts magazine La Luna de Madrid is arguably the most iconic, and its preoccupation with urban space, identity, and postmodernity suggests that la movida was indeed more than 'just a teardrop in the rain', as some of its critics have suggested.