The exhibition that I have the honor of curating for the CCCB, Suburbia. The construction of the American dream has its origin in a couple of questions that have been haunting me all my life, and I am not exaggerating: “Why do Americans live in large single-family homes, surrounded by an immaculate lawn, possible swimming pool in the back yard? , and a couple of cars in the garage?” And also, consequently, “why have American cities developed in such a radically opposite way to ours, deploying a periphery of residential neighborhoods and hardly any life in the center?”
These questions began to seem particularly pertinent to me as the center of Barcelona, ??my city, began to empty like a donut to transform into a huge Boutique Hotel. More and more families are pursuing their version of the dream in the housing estates, which are flourishing in the metropolitan area and beyond, to start a new life in which they will depend on the car for almost everything. According to a recent report by the Institut Metròpoli, 70,000 Barcelona residents will migrate to the outskirts in the next five years, the majority, they say, to improve their housing. In tune with this mutant reality, the exhibition will trace the history of so-called dispersed urbanism in the United States – that is, that sea of ??residential neighborhoods known as Suburbia –, through an impressive number of its infinite representations in pop culture (in the cinema, in literature, in art, on television, in advertising…), to end by analyzing the phenomenon itself based on its impact on our own territory, the last stage of a journey for which I have counted with the invaluable help of the urban geography expert Francesc Muñoz, recognized, among many other virtues, for his concept of urbanization.
If in the United States the process of suburbanization could start at the beginning of the 19th century, made possible by the mobility revolution – steam ferries, the railway –, which allowed the first commuters (daily commuters) to come and go from the center of the city to its houses on the periphery, and expanded at the beginning of the following century with the arrival of the automobile; in our country this process did not occur until much later. Someone said, I don’t remember now if it was Herbert Hoover or Franklin D. Roosevelt, something like, “Let’s send the movies, and then everything else!” (Anyway, Hollywood was always the factory of dreams).
Well, the dream of a house in the suburbs has been the latest to arrive. In the American pavilion of the 1955 Fira de Mostres, with the Montjuïc Palace looming in the background, you could see a prefabricated house with its adjacent garage, but as architect Julio Garnica, an expert on the subject, told me, in the years The following ones no longer brought it: the Catalan motorized fleet was then still very insufficient to dream of an American-style life. The Seat 600, which arrived a few years later, was arguably our Ford T, the first mass-produced car that heralded the arrival of Suburbia.
In fact, beyond the tradition of “la caseta i l’hortet”, the first great wave of dispersed urbanism occurred here in the sixties of the last century, with those towers that, for now, only generated traffic weekend, although the sales pitches were the same ones that had triumphed in the United States more than a century ago: “A country retreat a stone’s throw from the city.” It was not until later, with the eighties explosion of the semi-detached house – the country’s most economical and cramped version of the suburban house – when our particular process of suburbanization really began, always “with the advantages of the countryside, and the comforts of the city.” ”. Since then, the suburban fabric, which also includes shopping centers, multiplex cinemas, fast food restaurants and franchise conglomerates, has not stopped expanding throughout our geography, still behind the French peri-urban area and the Italian città diffusa, but in frank and very visible progression.
The exhibition at the CCCB will highlight the contradictions of this model, successfully exported around the world, which continues to be “the best place to see children grow up” even though it is a clearly unsustainable way of life. based on continuous travel by car, among other aspects such as energy waste. In any case, the single-family home, with its private garden, has not lost any of its capacity to seduce, and even less so after the pandemic. And it is possible that it is precisely this ambivalence, between utopia and dystopia, that makes Suburbia so magnetic for the artistic gaze. Even in the most critical approaches, even the darkest, most sinister and decadent, Suburbia always ends up emerging as a fascinating landscape.
Perhaps also due to its condition of non-place, so impersonal that it could be anywhere in America, and the rest of the world, Suburbia constitutes an immediately recognizable mental landscape, shared by all, which, within the framework of this exhibition, can become a space for reflection to think about the city we want to live.
