By Thomas Harrington at Brownstone dot org.

Today, Barcelona is today one of the great tourist destinations of the Western world. Fifty years ago, however, it was a somewhat dusty backwater still smarting from the punishments inflicted on it by the Franco regime (1939-1975) for its citizens' stubborn refusal to abandon their attachment to the Catalan language and culture, and for having served as the nerve center of the defeated Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) eventually won by the Nationalist general.

The city's dramatic transformation is rooted in actions taken under the leadership of Mayor Pasqual Maragall in the six or so years leading to the city's hosting of the 1992 Summer Olympics. While the mayor of every Olympic venue promises that the Games will enduringly change his city for the better, this actually occurred in Maragall's Barcelona, especially in the realm of public infrastructure.

But unlike many big city mayors, Maragall understood that cities don't emerge into beauty and greatness on the basis of bricks, mortar, and ring roads alone, and that this was especially the case in a place like Barcelona where citizens had been largely stripped of their ability to express themselves in their own linguistic, symbolic, and architectural vernaculars for nearly 40 years.

This awareness led Maragall and his collaborators to undertake a vigorous campaign of culture planning, designed on one hand, to remind citizens of their shared, if long-submerged, Catalan cultural heritage, and on the other, to introduce them to emergent symbolic repertoires from foreign cultural systems long obscured by regime censorship.

At the center of this effort was the concept of the "legible city."

Maragall believed that the language of architecture and place-making were every bit, if not more powerful, than purely textual communication and hence that the shape and character of the spaces we pass through every day exercise a considerable influence on our patterns of thought, our behaviors, and even on concepts of personal and group identity.

Implied in this approach is the idea that a well-functioning city must, while never striving to impose a deterministic uniformity, nonetheless be able to transmit to its citizens a palpable sense of community and a spatial grammar that facilitates their ability to recognize themselves as sharing concepts of historical and political reality with those around them.

It is an approach that, as the head of Maragall's architectural brain trust Oriol Bohigas made clear in 1999, runs directly counter to Margaret Thatcher's idea of cities and nations as a mere grab bags of self-interested individuals.

Is there a risk in this approach? Most certainly. If, for example, the architects of such efforts are not people of balance and restraint, their top-down culture planning can easily devolve into a program of imposed partisan collectivism. And while few leveled this critique at the Barcelona city hall during Maragall's time in office, it has, I think, often been rightly hurled at the many city officials who have positioned themselves as heirs to his legacy during the last two decades.

In the final analysis, however, critiques such as these ultimately miss the mark. And that's for a simple reason. No public space is ever free of ideological content imposed, in one degree or another by coercion, by a society's economic and cultural elites.

For example, today most of us find the classic New England town green to be an elegant and calming place of beauty within our increasingly frenetic lives. This is not to say, however, that it is free of ideological directives. For example, almost all of them have a church, usually from a Protestant denomination, directly adjacent to them. Many also have memorials to those from the town or immediate area who have fallen in wars undertaken by the United States in the course of its history.

While structures such as these do not force anyone to be ...