On Wednesday, June 21st, the second session of the work seminars will be held around the work "Pasqual Maragall: thought and action" (RBA: Barcelona, ??2017). It will be again from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at the Palau Macaya, Paseo de San Juan 108. This second day will be debated from the chapters "Public policies and citizenship" by Quim Brugué and "La política és la gent" by Joan Fuster-Sobrepere, with the counterparts of Raquel Gallego and Mariona Ferrer. Anyone interested in attending can write to info@catalunyaeuropa.net.
Jaume Claret is doing the chronicle of these seminars. When finished, we will publish it whole. From the first day, we will launch a brief summary of Claret, as a tasting and to encourage us to participate in the second session:
The session last Wednesday began with "The city of Pasqual Maragall" by the geographer and urban planner Oriol Nel·lo, in open conversation with the historian and journalist Marc Andreu. The latter highlighted the legacy of the Olympic mayor: "Maragall installed a software in the city that is still valid and present and, in part, claimed. Only by formatting again, the footprint could be erased. " For the current technical adviser in the district of Sant Martí, the impact is inseparable from the singularity of Maragall. Closing his first speech, he warned how this necessary recognition should not hide mistakes or conceal weaknesses of a model that, twenty-five years after the Games, must be rethought.
Nel·lo described the complexity of the character as a non-strange but heterodox feature. Hence the concern to recover the most seminal texts, from parallel lives between character and city. For Maragall, the city is both a hope, a social construct and an articulating element of the territory. Here it will achieve its greatest success (the Barcelona model) and, at the same time, its main failure (the abolition of the Corporation). In the words of the UAB professor: "Without the strategic and redistributive nature of the metropolitan Corporation, Maragall is like a Rius and Taulet that could not have unified the Barcelona Plan." Recovering the metropolitan government is still a pending issue to prevent the economic powers from destroying the city. Hence the need, shared by both Nel·lo and Andreu, of reading Maragall, with the will to learn how to overcome it.
The second part of the seminar pinned on "The" Catalan action "by Pasqual Maragall. His author, Jaume Bellmunt, disagreed with the current reductionist versions of Catalanism that give their historical richness and diversity amortized. For the historian and analyst, if at some time it is necessary to reconstruct the country, Maragall's thinking will prove valid. Validity that, once again, arises from his heterodoxy, from the accumulation of generational and personal influences, and from his own experience and knowledge. All in all, he justifies talking about "Catalan action," as a singular distillery that aspires to "maximum freedom possible in the framework of our interdependencies."
The contribution of Jordi Amat, acting as a counterpart, deepened the revaluation of the intellectual dimension of Maragall, describing it as a "knowledge-minded politician and anti-dagmatism as an essential feature". Far from categories and categorization reductionists, the 127th president of the Generalitat had the will to intervene in Catalan to create a new political culture, to participate in Spanish politics to build a plural Spain and to project itself to Europe as a country common Therefore, when he speaks of "constitutional loyalty and federal trust", "nouns rather than adjectives are more important". Against this ambition, an insurmountable wall will be imposed as an ideological and triumphant closure to the State that will make it impossible especially because, as remembered by Bellmunt, "there is not enough country for a democracy of conflict, with two ecosystems unable to interact." At the moment, however, it seems unfeasible to complete a formatting process that It had been possible in Barcelona once.
