Andrew Dowling

For Christ and Catalonia: Catholic Catalanism and nationalist revival in late Francoism

Princess of our noble Catalan land Oh Virgin of the mountain … pious Mother of this land that has always loved you, make it great and powerful 1 Over the course of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain (1939–1975), we can trace a remarkable transformation in the position of the Catholic Church in the historic territory of Catalonia. Subject to deep-rooted anti-clericalism, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the Church found itself the target of an unprecedented assault. The victory of Franco’s Nationalist forces in 1939 restored the Church, yet due to its Spanish Nationalist ideology, sought the ending of the Catalan Catholic tradition. However, over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, the Catalan Church was able to undertake a cautious reconstruction of the indigenous religious and cultural movement. This revival would begin to transform the Church’s position in Catalan society to the point where, by the mid-1960s, it was possible to assert that anti-clericalism was no more. The Church became a key element in the revival of Catalan nationalism and an important component to the opposition in late anti-Francoism.

The Leading Role of the Party: Catalan Communism and the Franco Regime, 1939–1975

Prior to the Spanish Civil War, the Catalan national movement had been regarded with deep suspicion by organized labour, and society had been torn by social and political conflict. The rise to dominance of Catalan communism and the impact this movement had on the Catalan opposition to the Franco regime enabled the over-coming of pre-war divisions. Furthermore, the defence of Catalan national identity became a key component in the left’s strategy of opposition to the dictatorship. Thus a new correlation of forces, as well as demographic change, ensured that the opposition in Catalonia was unified before any other territory in Spain. This article concerns itself with the structural changes in Catalan left political culture that determined a distinctive outcome to late Francoism.

Kifissia: Playground of the Athenians?

In ‘How Eden lost it’s garden’, Mike Davis (1996) recounts the destruction of southern California’s natural landscape in the inexorable expansion of Los Angeles — a destruction that saw mountains and the Los Angeles river both built on and water drawn by aqueduct from the San Bernadino mountains to supply an ever growing population. At first glance, the parallels to be drawn with the expansion of Athens and the place of Kifissia within the greater Athens urban fabric and processes of development therein may appear to be few. Yet, the partial parallels, albeit that they exist at a micro-scale, are nevertheless there in more ways than simply the eclipse of the natural by the man-made environment but in the very agents involved in and processes by which the latter has been created.

The Croydonisation of South London

Well over one hundred years before Iain Sinclair detected his creature of the depths, commentators had been aware, it seems, of the ‘Croydonisation of South London’. By the 1890s and with the new London County Council barely installed, the general trend of population growth in the outer rings of Britain’s major cities including London could be observed. In 1891 the implications for London already seemed clear to Low (quoted in Young and Garside, 1982: 107): ‘It will be a London of suburbs… Not one but a dozen Croydons will form a circle of detached forts around the central stronghold’ with the people of London dwelling in ‘the depths of the Home Counties’.

Closer to the Edge: Function and Form in Post-Suburban Europe

The term ‘edge city’ (Garreau, 1991) is something that academics, along with Tom Wolfe’s developer hero Charlie Croker in the opening quotation, have come to use with no little anxiety. As Soja notes ‘for much of the world, the Edge City maxim, that every American city is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles has become much more of a foreboding than a hopeful promise’ (2000: 401). Moreover, while the term ‘edge city’ takes its place in a welter of terminology deployed to help chart the complexity of modern forms of urbanisation, its precise relevance in the European setting is highly questionable (Ghent Urban Studies Team, 1999; Lambert et al., n.d.). It will come as no surprise, then, that we avoid the term ‘edge city’ or any explicit attempt to define the ‘European edge city’. And as we will see in the next chapter, no definition of an edge city in the European setting has been forthcoming from the European network of self-styled edge cities. Rather, in keeping with the diversity of experiences of urbanisation in Europe, and in keeping with the diverse empirical cases reported later in this chapter, we use the term ‘post-suburbia’ to capture a profusion of terminology relating to a nascent urban form and over which there is only partial consensus.

Espoo: California Dreaming?

Many of the most salient features and some of the emerging contradictions of, and inequalities associated with, the very rapid and very recent urbanisation that has taken place in Finland are distilled in the urban politics surrounding the growth of the municipality of Espoo which stands to the immediate west of Helsinki (Figure 7.1). Castells and Himanen (2002) have recounted the story of one apparently paradoxical progeny of Finland’s strong welfare state system — namely its coexistence with a highly internationally competitive information technology industry (Van den Berg et al., 2001). The story of the growth of Espoo, itself now one of the major concentrations of the information technology industry in Finland, reveals another paradox — namely the coexistence of localised American-style processes of urban development with a strong national welfare state framework.

Noisy-le-Grand: Grand State Vision or Noise about Nowhere?

Local government and the public sector more generally play an important role in the development of each of our case-study edge municipalities, in a way they do not in the North American setting. However, nowhere is the influence of non-local State institutions and constructions more apparent than in Noisy-le-Grand whose edge identity, or lack thereof, has been produced by its entanglement in a complicated and overlapping set of administrative arrangements.

Getafe: Capital of the Gran Sur

In contrast to Noisy-le-Grand, although a post-suburban space imposed by the central state, from an early point in this process, local institutions and more importantly significant individuals such as the local mayor have been able to construct Getafe as a distinct post-suburban place — a place with distinctive social and political concerns from which to enlarge their spaces of engagement within the wider metropolitan area. The stanza from Benedetti’s poem above is one that the mayor of Getafe himself has been fond of quoting and indicates something of the agency that has seen Getafe emerge as an invented space from the disadvantaged south to challenge Madrid.

Post-Suburban Futures

In Martin Amis’s novel the injuries inflicted by one man upon many are healed as time runs in reverse. It would be a mistake to think that turning back of time is any solution to the issues facing modern cities and their post-suburban edges. Nostalgia and a desire to retain historic city forms or return to some mythical rural idyll have provided powerful and enduring ideas shaping urban planning. Yet, one lesson to be drawn from at least some of the chapters in this book is that a fondness of the past is, of itself, insufficient to produce the ‘good city’. As we saw with the case of the Finnish municipality of Espoo, Ebenezer Howard’s garden city ideals were an integral part of a deconcentrated and decentred urban form that has been relatively problematic in this particular metropolitan and national context. There is a sense then in which the past — or a critical reconsideration of the past — is important to the future. As Sandercock (2003: 47) notes, ‘in order to imagine the future differently, we need to start with history, with a reconstruction of the stories we tell ourselves about planning’s role in the modern and post-modern city’.

In Search of a European Post-Suburban Identity

Along with the likes of public—private partnership working, transnational networking is commonly cited as one means of coping with the increasingly stringent fiscal climate in which European municipalities have had to operate over the past two decades or so. The European Commission’s funding of trans-European networks has created new sources of finance for policy development and implementation across a wide range of spheres. The practice of networking itself arguably offers important knowledge spillovers to participating local authorities and important possibilities in the development of common European identities — though significantly these broader benefits may be negated by powerful forces of inter-locality competition for private and public investment and by deeply ingrained national patterns of inter-organisational working.