Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 9. No.

2, 225–248, June 2004

Urban Morphology and Place Identity in European

Cities: Built Heritage and Innovative Design

ASPA GOSPODINI
Department of Planning and Regional Development, University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece

ABSTRACT In the processes of economic and cultural globalization, European inte-

gration and the blur of national identities in Europe, place identity emerges as a central
concern of both scholars and other people. This paper examines the ways specific aspects
of urban morphology such as built heritage and the innovative design of space may
contribute to place identity in European cities. First, it develops a theoretical conjecture
that in post-modern multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies, innovative design of space
can efficiently work as a place identity generator in the same ways built heritage has been
performing in modern—culturally bounded and nation-state-oriented—European soci-
eties. This conjecture is then tested by research in the city of Bilbao. The outcome of the
research supports the argument that innovative design schemes: (1) may permit
divergent interpretations by individuals thereby fitting into the ‘diversity’ and ‘individ-
ualization’ of new modernity; (2) may synchronize different ethnic/cultural/social groups
by offering themselves as a new common terrain for experiencing and familiarizing with
new forms of space; (3) by becoming landmarks and promoting tourism/economic
development, may generate new social solidarities among inhabitants grounded on ‘civic
pride’ and economic prospects.

Introduction
In the processes of economic globalization and European integration, European
cities have been increasingly linked to forces external to their national
boundaries; they appear to function as a unified (global) network of urban
settlements in competition (see for instance, Commission of the European
Communities, 1992; Jensen-Butler et al., 1997). There are scholars such as Castells
(1993) who believe that as national states of Europe fade in their role, individual
cities emerge as a driving force in the making of the new Europe. This is also
accompanied by an increasing ‘identity crisis’ of cities rooted in two realities:

• mass migrations, legal or illegal, are increasingly transforming European cities

into heterogeneous, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies (see King, 1993,
1995; Hall, 1995; Graham, 1998);

Correspondence Address: Aspa Gospodini, Department of Planning and Regional Develop-

ment, University of Thessaly, Pedion Areos 38 334, Volos, Greece. Email:
gospod@prd.uth.gr, gospod@hol.gr

1357-4809 Print/1469-9664 Online/04/020225-24  2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/1357480042000227834
226 A. Gospodini

• the march to supra-nationality within the European Union (EU) is blurring

national identities (Castells, 1993; Gillis, 1994; Morley & Robins, 1995; Graham,
1998).

In this context, place identity is becoming an issue of growing importance for

both scholars and people. Predicting how European cities may react, Castells
(1993) believes that under such a crisis, European cities will be increasingly
oriented towards their local heritage—built heritage, cultural heritage—because
first, the weakening of national identities makes people uncertain about the
power holders of their destiny, thus pushing them into either individualistic
(neo-liberalism) or collective (neo-nationalism) withdrawal; and secondly, the
consolidation of heterogeneous populations in European cities is happening at a
period when national identities are most threatened. Similarly, Harvey (1989)
believes that the response will be an increase in xenophobia and the resurgence
of reactionary place-bound politics as people search for old certainties and
struggle to construct or retain a more stable or bounded place identity. The
protection and enhancement of built heritage appear as one such attempt to fix
the meanings of places, while enclosing and defending them.
In contrast to the above points of view associating the struggle of cities for
place identity in a globalized world with the protection and enhancement of
built heritage, some studies question the ability of built heritage to work as a
place identity generator in post-modern societies, whilst others point to new,
more effective means for reinforcing place identity. In the former studies (see
Tunbridge & Ashworth, 1996; Graham, 1998; Graham et al., 2000), the association
of place identity with built heritage is seen as a conventional and largely
unchallenged wisdom. Built heritage is considered a contested entity, and
manipulations in the production of built heritage in European cities have
rendered the conserved urban landscape an entity that is in most cases nation-
ally identified and even morphologically standardized, and thereby insufficient
to work as a means of establishing and consolidating place identity in our
post-modern, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural European urban societies. The
latter studies (see Jacobs, 1996; McNeill, 2000; McNeill & Tewdwr-Jones, 2002;
Evans, 2003; Hannigan, 2003; Beriatos & Gospodini, 2004) develop parallel
arguments converging in that the efforts of cities for place identity have turned
on innovative design of space and flagship building projects in the last decade
or so. More specifically, McNeill & Tewdwr-Jones (2002) argue that the threat-
ened nation-states at a time of economic and cultural globalization, and in
particular the era of European integration, use a diverse array of public building
projects exhibiting design innovation—from parliament buildings to cultural
flagships, to conference centres and expo sites—as a source of “rebranding
nations” (McNeill & Tewdwr-Jones, 2002, p. 742). Among recent such mega-
projects, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Reichstag Parliament in Berlin
are considered by McNeill & Tewdwr-Jones (2002) as the best examples showing
this. Regarding the issue of place identity from the point of view of the new
consumption economy of the post-modern city, Evans (2003) and Hannigan
(2003) argue that the increasing branding of commercial entertainment products
and leisure shopping has been accompanied by the city’s ‘hard branding’.
Flagship building projects—and especially cultural and entertainment build-
ings—with innovative design trends are used to develop a marketable image to
consumers; they facilitate tourists and residents to orientate themselves in the
 Built Heritage and Innovative Design 227

city’s consumption spaces; they constitute a new species of landmarks ‘hard

branding’ the city (Evans, 2003; Hannigan, 2003).
In this framework of uncertainty, it seems challenging to investigate how
particular aspects of urban morphology may contribute to place identity. As
such, built heritage and innovative design of space will be examined, and the
ways they may work as place identity generators will be analysed and juxta-
posed.

Questioning Built Heritage as a Place Identity Generator in Contemporary

European Societies
Since the late 1970s and the predominance of post-modernism and typological
approaches in design (see Krier, 1978; Rossi, 1982; Vidler, 1978; Rowe & Koetter,
1978; Colquhoun, 1981), built heritage in European cities has been a focus of
attention in the discourse of architecture, urban design and planning. Parallel to
this discourse, the EU has, as expected, been constantly supporting built heritage
by launching special programmes and financing research and projects of build-
ing restoration, urban conservation, urban renewal and revitalization.1 Reflecting
all these, built heritage has constituted a great field of design interventions in
almost all European cities.
In the last decade or so, built heritage has been emphasized further for its
great potential for promoting economic growth in cities, and particularly urban
tourism development (see Ashworth & Tunbridge, 1990; Prentice, 1993; Ash-
worth & Larkham, 1994; Morris, 1994; Herbert, 1995). In the framework of
inter-city competition and the new urban politics (see Cox, 1995; Boyle &
Rogerson, 2001), the task of urban governance has increasingly become the
creation of urban conditions (physical and economic) sufficiently attractive to
lure prospective inward investments; and the city’s image and especially built
heritage have been considered particularly critical for the city’s landscape
physiognomy, marking its differences from other cities. Evidence as to this is the
numerous urban renewal projects by which old harbour warehouses, old indus-
trial buildings, old railway stations and other kinds of underused heritage
buildings have been conserved and redesigned to accommodate new uses:
mainly culture and leisure. The predominance of cultural uses in the reuse of
heritage buildings and spaces is related to the emerging post-Fordist new urban
economies (see McNeill & While, 2001),2 among which the most flourishing is
the economy of leisure and culture (see Zukin, 1991, 1995; Bianchini, 1993; Pratt,
1997; Scott, 1997, 2000; Crewe & Beaverstock, 1998; Hall, 2000; Evans, 2001; Clark
Clark et al., 2002). As Zukin (1995, pp.1–2) writes, “with the disappearance of
local manufacturing industries and periodic crisis in government and finance,
culture is more and more the business of cities: the basis of their tourist
attractions and their unique competitive edge”. In the words of Hall (2000,
p. 640), “culture is now seen as the magic substitute for all the lost factories and
warehouses, and as a device that will create a new urban image, making the city
more attractive to mobile capital and mobile professional workers”.
Nowadays—while proceeding into more advanced phases of economic
globalization and European integration and facing an increasing transformation
of European cities into multi-ethnic and multi-cultural entities—the effectiveness
of built heritage as a means of creating landscape physiognomy and thereby
generating place identity in cities may be questioned. Parallel to the physical
228 A. Gospodini

configuration of European cities, which was in all cases created, developed and
transformed by someone for some purpose, built heritage is, according to
Graham (1998, p. 43), “that we have chosen to conserve from the past”. This
raises questions about the criteria of selection in the production of built heritage
in European cities and the effect on the present.
In many studies (see Tunbridge, 1984, 1994, 1998; Tunbridge & Ashworth,
1996; Ashworth, 1998; Graham et al., 2000), built heritage is considered a
contested entity, and much of what we see today as built heritage in European
cities is considered a product of manipulations representing a deliberate encod-
ing of symbolic meaning. Investigating how built heritage has been produced
and who is the producer of the conserved European urban landscape, Ashworth
(1998) suggests that the answer might be conceptualized through three broad
ideas concerning the exercise of power in European societies:
• the concept of political legitimation, as introduced by Habermas (1996), where
governments as well as individuals feel a need to justify their exercise of
power, or just their very existence, through an appeal to particular aspects of
the past that appear to confer that right;
• the dominant ideology thesis, as introduced in Abercrombie et al. (1982),
which argues that a governing dominant group imposes its values upon a
governed subordinate group;
• the cultural capital thesis, as introduced by Bourdieu (1977), which extends
the above two ideas by postulating the existence alongside the economic realm
of a cultural capital composed not only of the artworks and buildings of a
society, but also, more fundamentally, of standards of taste that select and
interpret them.
In the above framework, built heritage of European cities has been ‘filtered’
over a long period of time, and as a consequence, much of what exists nowadays
as conserved urban landscape is reduced in meaning. Describing the ways in
which reduction of meaning has occurred, Ashworth (1998) introduces the terms
‘eradification’ and ‘museumification’. By ‘eradification’, he means the destruc-
tion or disappearance of artefacts, spaces, buildings and elements that has
occurred either involuntarily (e.g. due to war or natural disasters) or voluntarily
(e.g. due to modernization, change of political regime or change of cultural
paradigm). By ‘museumification’, he means changes in the functional dimension
and/or formal dimension of artefacts, spaces, buildings and elements that have
occurred on purpose—in order to transform the meaning of the conserved
schemata and use them as tourism/economic resources. As typical cases of
museumification, Ashworth (1998) presents the Christian Orthodox churches in
the former USSR, the Church of Haghia Sophia in Istanbul and almost all
fortification walls and castles in European cities.
The main principles or objectives underlying the manipulation processes of
built heritage—or eradification and museumification, to use Ashworth’s (1998)
terms—seem to be (1) imprinting national identities onto the conserved urban
forms and (2) creating a distinctive urban landscape by means of built heritage.

(1) Imprinting National Identities onto the Conserved Urban Forms

According to Gillis (1994), national identity involves a widely shared memory of
common past for people who have never seen or talked to one another in the
 Built Heritage and Innovative Design 229

flesh. The sense of belonging to the same nationality depends as much on

forgetting as on remembering—the past being reconstructed as a trajectory to the
national present in order to guarantee a common future. As Woolf (1996)
suggests, a national identity is an abstract concept that sums up the collective
expression of a subjective, individual sense of belonging to a sociopolitical unit:
the nation-state. Nationalistic rhetoric assumes not only that individuals form
part of a nation (through language, blood, choice, residence or some other
criterion), but also that they identify with the territorial unit of the nation-state.
This is one reason why landscape, and especially urban landscape, is understood
as a ‘terrain’ where national identities can be created, developed and enhanced.
A second reason is that urban landscape, like a text, constitutes an ordered
assemblage of objects and, thereby, can act as a signifying system (Eco, 1986;
Duncan, 1990; Barnes & Duncan, 1992; Ashworth, 1998) or a “highly complex
discourse, a language” (Barthes, 1986, p. 92) in which a whole range of economic,
political, social and cultural issues can be encoded (Daniel, 1993). Finally, a third
reason is that a national identity is created in particular social, historical and
political contexts and, as such, is a situated and socially constructed entity: a
narrative. The power of a narrative—such as a national identity—rests on its
ability to evoke the accustomed, to appeal to “our desire to reduce the unfam-
iliar to the familiar” (Barnes & Duncan, 1992, pp. 11–12). It is exactly this ability
of built heritage that can make it a powerful narrative itself, capable of support-
ing a broader narrative: the national identity. Explaining this, Graham (1998,
p. 40) writes that landscape narratives, and especially built heritage narratives,
facilitate the development of national identities by “denoting particular places as
centres of collective cultural consciousness”.
To turn back to Ashworth’s (1998) eradification and museumification, many
European cities provide a kind of evidence for such manipulation processes by
which built heritage has been finally produced, or selected by criteria, so as to
constitute a great narrative supporting national identities, and thereby legitimiz-
ing the hegemony of nation-states and justifying and guaranteeing common
political governances over particular land territories: the territories of nation-
states (see Figure 1).3 Imprinting of national identities onto conserved urban
forms in European cities renders built heritage single-dimensioned and less
meaningful to (1) the increasingly multi-ethnic, multi-national European urban
societies and (2) the post-modern European urban societies dominated by the
ideas of diversity and individualization. In Bhadha’s (1994, p. 76) words, there is
a process of “DissemiNation”: new communities of interest are evolving by
virtue of the divergent and changing identities in post-modern and trans-na-
tional urban societies which undermine and eventually negate the ‘out of many,
one’ ideology of nationalism and nation-state.

(2) Creating ‘Distinct’ Urban Landscapes by Means of Built Heritage

As is often claimed by architects, urban designers and planners, urban conser-
vation contributes to place identity by both evoking the city’s history and
tradition (built heritage, cultural heritage) and creating distinct or unique
environmental images to visitors and inhabitants. However, following many
decades of various urban conservation practices in European cities, there are
nowadays scholars such as Ashworth (1998) and Tunbridge (1998) who believe
that urban conservation practices have not produced distinct urban landscapes
230 A. Gospodini

Figure 1. The processes destabilizing built heritage as a strong place identity generator in contempor-
ary multi-ethnic and multicultural European cities.

but rather have created morphologically standardized urban landscapes that do

not contribute to place identity. Ashworth (1998) goes as far as arguing that
there is enough evidence to state a paradox: the more urban conservation is
practised in European cities, the more morphologically homogenized cities
become. This is related to certain parameters of urban conservation that under-
mine the efforts to create distinct urban landscape and enhancing place identity
by means of built heritage. These are the following.
 Built Heritage and Innovative Design 231

• Dominant schools of thought in urban conservation. Architects, urban designers

and planners working on projects of building restoration and urban renewal
are—like all other practitioners—conscious of the dominant school(s) of
thought of the particular time period. Common educational curricula, shared
professional training and subsequent networking help establish and transmit
more or less common attitudes at international level (e.g. reflecting inter-
national design movements) or at national level (e.g. reflecting national
schools of thought—French School, Dutch School, Polish School, etc.). As a
consequence, restoration and renewal schemes of the same period often
exhibit common properties (morphological, spatial, functional) and can be
recognized by the time of their execution and/or the school of thought
dominant at that time. Even new buildings developed on sites in conserved
urban areas reflect the dominant design attitudes held at the time about how
new and traditional buildings should neighbour each other. On the basis of all
these, Ashworth (1998) argues that restoration, conservation, renewal and
revitalization schemes in European cities convey messages more about the
dominant attitudes on built heritage held at the time of their realization rather
than about the old structures themselves and/or the historic period in which
they were first developed.
• Standardized micro-scale redesign of public open spaces. It has been observed that
in conserved urban areas, the selected styles of street furniture, paving
materials, signage and greenery, etc. are usually neo-vernacular or ‘historis-
tic’—in any case, different from those in modern urban areas. However, in
historic urban areas that have been revitalized and redesigned during the
same time period, the selected styles often appear to be the same. Such
standardized micro-morphologies are described and termed by Ashworth
(1998) as ‘catalogue heritagization’.
• Advertised ‘best’ conservation policies and practices. Networks of historic cities
within the EU,4 as well as international organizations and institutions such as
Unesco, Habitat and ICCROM,5 try to disseminate ‘best’ policies and practices
on urban conservation. The transfer of policies, practices and techniques tends
to reduce rather than increase local distinctiveness and place identity. In other
words, it helps the generation of a kind of ‘world heritage’ (Ashworth, 1997).

Under all the above conditions, built heritage is getting weaker as a place
identity generator in contemporary European cities. This is so because of the
following.

• Imprinting national identities onto conserved urban forms renders built heritage
single-dimensioned and less meaningful to both (1) the increasingly multi-eth-
nic, multi-national European urban societies and (2) the increasingly multi-cul-
tural, post-modern European urban societies dominated by the ideas of
diversity and individualization (Featherstone, 1991).
• Standardized design and morphologies in urban conservation render built heritage
less effective in creating distinct urban landscape and adding to the city’s
physiognomy and, thereby, less competitive as a means to promote tourism/
economic development.
Figure 1 summarizes all the above and schematically presents the processes by
which built heritage tends to get weaker as a place identity generator in
contemporary European cities.
232 A. Gospodini

Seeking New Paths to Place Identity

Thinking of built heritage as a constructed landscape narrative somehow evok-
ing tradition and the city’s past, and reducing the unfamiliar environment to the
familiar, one might conceive of innovative design of space as its ‘opposite’, i.e.
formal and spatial schemata somehow dismissing tradition and reducing the
familiar environment to the unfamiliar. On the grounds that post-modern
European urban societies are being transformed almost into their ‘opposite’, i.e.
from nation-state-oriented and culturally bounded entities into multi-ethnic and
multi-cultural entities, can innovative design become a new post-modern path to
place identity? As already mentioned, there are studies arguing that innovative
design schemes and especially flagship cultural and entertainment buildings are
a means for rebranding nations (see McNeill, 2000; McNeill & Tewdwr-Jones,
2002) and for hard-branding cities (Evans, 2003; Hannigan, 2003).
Built heritage has long been an effective ‘tool’ working for place identity in
two ways (see also Figure 2):
• By referring to both national identity and the city’s tradition, built heritage has
been invoking something common among individuals—members of a nation-
state-oriented urban society. In this way, it has been offering a sort of ‘spatial
membership’ to almost all individuals and social groups of such a society.
• By adding to the city’s landscape physiognomy, built heritage has been
promoting economic development of cities as tourism places and/or en-
trepreneurial centres. In this way, it has been creating a sort of social solidarity
(and perhaps civic pride) among individuals, grounded in economic
prospects.
In the era of post-modern European societies, can innovative design perform as
a place identity generator in the ways in which built heritage has been perform-
ing in modern European urban societies?

Investigating the Potential of Innovative Design of Space

Innovative design of urban space would be conceived as:
• formal schemata which are in contradiction to the morphological patterns
characterizing the city’s landscape (e.g. dominant architectural elements, signs
and styles, the geometries of the street system, the urban block system, the
open space system, the skyline, etc.); and/or
• spatial configurations which shift the existing structure of urban space (e.g.
shifting the city’s centre or altering the pattern(s) of the street system, the
urban block system, the open spaces system, etc.).
The above conditions are often fulfilled by pioneer design projects marking the
passage from one dominant design paradigm to another.6 Within the contempor-
ary design paradigm, such conditions are—it is claimed—fulfilled by, for in-
stance, Frank O. Gehry’s buildings,7 and especially his Guggenheim Museum in
Bilbao, Calatrava’s projects,8 including bridges, towers, museums, exhibition
halls, airports and railway stations in many European cities, and most of all his
City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia. Interpreting these design schemes,
scholars (see Van Bruggen, 1999; Tzonis, 1999; Blanco, 2001) argue that they are
providing the city with experimental new types of public space. In Blanco’s
(2001, p. 20) words, “they create and define new cells of public space that
 Built Heritage and Innovative Design 233

Figure 2. A theoretical conjecture about the ways built heritage and innovative design may work as
place identity generators respectively in modern and post-modern European urban societies.

provide the user with new possibilities…and this makes every such design
scheme an unusual and unique element of the city” (present author’s translation).
As described by Tzonis (1999) and Calatrava (2001), a challenging task for such
design schemes is to create place identity in urban areas that have been aban-
doned, have declined or which lack a strong morphological character: a physiog-
nomy.
234 A. Gospodini

Avant-garde design schemes offering equal chances to divergent cultures. In contrast

to built heritage that is layered by more or less concrete meaning, avant-garde
design schemes, it is claimed, generate new types of public space, thereby
permitting new and divergent interpretations by individuals and social/cultural
groups. Thus, they may first fit well into the ‘diversity’ and ‘individualization’
of post-modern European societies, and secondly, they may synchronize differ-
ent ethnic/social/cultural groups by becoming a new common terrain for
experiencing and familiarizing with new urban forms. Describing the relation-
ship between people and space in the building of the Guggenheim Museum,
Bilbao, Flanagan (1998, p.113; emphasis added) writes:
The building charms and prods people with endless promises of new
surprises…Gehry has created a cultural exchange fueled by a dynamic
daily give-and-take between people and building, instead of the usual
one-way pontification, architects usually give…He lets people piece
together their own interpretation, and invites them to enjoy the pride of
composition. Viewers can feel like collaborators, or rather, conspirators
in their interpretations. And no reading is right or wrong.
In this respect, avant-garde design schemes may offer ‘spatial membership’ to all
individuals and socio-cultural groups. In other words, they may work as
monuments, according to Lefebvre’s (1991) definition. A monument has the
function of establishing membership; “monumental space” offers each member
of a society an “image of that membership” that it constitutes (Lefebvre, 1991,
p. 220).
In this context, it does not seem surprising that in the last decade, designers
such as Calatrava have often been invited by European cities hosting multi-eth-
nic and multi-cultural major events such as the Olympic Games or World Expo
to endow the city’s landscape with their multi-interpretable building schemes
and spaces.9

Avant-garde design schemes promoting urban economic development and consolidating

social solidarity. Throughout the history of urban forms, design innovations in
urban space—whether new architectural forms or urban design schemes—
appear as an outcome of the economic growth of cities and/or countries.
Marking the era of economic globalization and inter-city competition, a reverse
process seems to be taking place: innovative design can be—and is being—
consciously used as a powerful means for the economic development of cities
(Gospodini, 2002). Successful use of innovative design (and redesign) of urban
space in cities such as Barcelona, Seville and especially Bilbao, Spain, provide
evidence on the positive impact of avant-garde design schemes on urban
economic development.10
As argued by Gospodini (2002), innovative design of space appears to be a
key factor of economic development in all categories and groups of cities:
metropolitan cities, larger cities, smaller cities, cities in the core and cities in the
periphery (economic and/or geographical) of Europe. However, it becomes
particularly critical in the rather ‘disadvantaged’ group of smaller peripheral
European cities lacking indigenous resources to counter the effect of ‘marginal-
ization’ and decline within the global (unified) urban system of Europe. This is
related to an emerging new paradigm concerning the relationship between
urban morphology and urban tourism: irrespective of the particular functions
 Built Heritage and Innovative Design 235

and activities accommodated in space, innovative design of space (whether

buildings, or public open spaces) can make urban morphology in itself and of
itself a sightseeing, a tourism/economic, resource (see Gospodini, 2001).
From this point of view, avant-garde design schemes may promote—in a
similar way to built heritage—the city’s economic development and, thereby,
may generate new ‘social solidarities’ among inhabitants, grounded in economic
expectations.
Figure 2 summarizes all the above and presents a theoretical conjecture
about the ways in which built heritage and innovative design may work as place
identity generators in modern and post-modern European urban societies,
respectively.

Testing Built Heritage and Innovative Design as Place Identity Generators: The Case
Study of Bilbao
The theoretical conjecture presented in Figure 2 was tested by research. The city
of Bilbao was selected as a case study for two reasons.
• The city combines a well-preserved historical centre with important monu-
ments from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and some world-famous innova-
tive design schemes developed in the last 6 years—with the Guggenheim
Museum ranked at the top.
• Bilbao is the capital of the Basque country, Spain, a European district charac-
terized by powerful local government authorities, a relatively high degree of
administrative and financial autonomy within Spain and inhabitants with
particularly strong feelings of national identity (see McNeill, 2000). If research
in this city pointed out that innovative design of space is effectively working
as a place identity generator, then this would be even more the case in other
European cities.11
The research took place in October 2002. A questionnaire survey was addressed
to two main categories of users of urban space: (1) inhabitants; and (2) visitors.12
Within the category of inhabitants, research distinguished three subcategories:
(1) low-income people; (2) middle and upper middle classes; and (3) educated
people. In this way, research took into consideration the possibility of different
social/cultural/economic groups of inhabitants having different understandings
of place identity and its relationship to urban morphology. Similarly, within the
broad category of visitors, research also distinguished two subcategories: (1)
tourists, i.e. individuals from other parts of Spain or other countries who were
having a holiday in Bilbao for a few days; and (2) long-stay visitors, i.e.
individuals from other parts of Spain or other countries who were staying in
Bilbao for a period of a few weeks or a few months while working or studying.
In this way, the research attempted to explore whether foreign people staying in
Bilbao for a few days while on holiday have different understandings of place
identity and its relationship to urban morphology than foreign people staying in
Bilbao for a longer period while working or studying.
The aim of the survey was to reach a total of 150 interviews and, in
particular, at least 30 interviews in each subcategory so that the research, based
on a random sample, would have statistical significance (see Ebdon, 1990). A
final total of 187 interviews were carried out, 50 with inhabitants/low-income
people, 50 with inhabitants/middle and upper middle classes, 39 with inhabi-
tants/educated people, 30 with tourists and 18 with long-stay visitors. Therefore,
236 A. Gospodini

Figure 3. The City Hall: this is a 19th-century
building in eclectic style, designed in 1892 by
Joaquin Rucoba. It has outstanding interior
spaces, especially the Arab Room, where mar-
riages take place.
Figure 4. Arriaga Theatre: this is a 19th-century
building (1890) in eclectic architectural style, de-
signed by Joaquin Rucoba and Octavio de
Toledo. The building stages operas and has out-
standing interior spaces; it is claimed that the
design was inspired by Paris Opera House.

it may be said that in all subcategories except the last one the research outcome
is statistically significant.
The questionnaire provided the interviewees with a list of 10 buildings and
public open spaces. Five of them are important elements of Bilbao’s built
heritage: the City Hall (Figure 3), Arriaga Theatre (Figure 4), St Nicholas Church
and Square (Figure 5), St Anton’s Church and Bridge (Figure 6) and Plaza Nueva
(Figure 7). Five of them represent innovative design schemes developed in the
last decade: the Guggenheim Museum (Figure 8), the Metro entrances and
stations (Figure 9), Sondica Airport (Figure 10), Euskalduna Congress and
Concert Hall (Figure 11) and Campo Volantin Footbridge (Figure 12). In select-
ing the sample, the criterion was the importance of these buildings and open
spaces as presented in (1) the official tourist guide of the city of Bilbao (see
www.bilbao.net/ingles/visitantes/descubrebilbao) and (2) recent publications
focusing on innovative design and international architectural paradigms (e.g. see
Van Bruggen, 1999; Tzonis, 1999; Blanco, 2001).
Interviews were carried out in different places in Bilbao, as follows.

• For inhabitants/low-income people, interviews took place in Ribera Market, the

central covered food market of the city, offering low prices. Interviews were
in Spanish.
• For inhabitants/middle and upper middle classes, interviews took place in La Gran
Via and Ercile Pedestrian Street—shopping streets where expensive and
trendy shops are located. Interviews were in Spanish.
• For inhabitants/educated people, interviews took place in the Department of
Applied Economics, University of the Basque Country.13 The sample included
interviews with both academic staff and students. Interviews were in English
or Spanish.
• For long-stay visitors, interviews took place in the student hall of the University
of the Basque Country and in the offices of international companies in Bilbao.
Interviews were in English.
• For tourists interviews took place in front of the Guggenheim Museum, the
Museum of Bellas Artes and Hotel Conte Ducque. Interviews were in English.
 Built Heritage and Innovative Design 237

Figure 5. St Nicholas Church and Square: a
mid-18th-century church in moderate Baroque
style designed by Ignacio de Ibero y Erkizia. It
has important altarpieces and sculptures by Joan
de Mena.
Figure 6. St Anton’s Church and Bridge: this is
the oldest church in the city; it was built at the
end of the 16th century in the Gothic style.

Figure 7. Plaza Nueva is Bilbao’s oldest square. Figure 8. The Guggenheim Museum, designed
It is a public open space, square in shape, and by Frank O. Gehry.
surrounded by identical buildings in Neo-classi-
cal style designed by Antonio de Echevarria in
1849. On all sides there are colonnades with
Doric columns and 49 arches.

Figure 9. The Metro entrances and stations. All Figure 10. Sondica Airport: the main buildings
entrances of the Metro stations have an identical were designed by Santiago Calatrava.
form and were designed by Norman Foster As-
sociates.
238 A. Gospodini

Figure 11. Euskalduna Congress and Concert

Hall: this building complex accommodates Bil-
bao’s symphony orchestra and the Opera Festi-
Figure 12. Campo Volantin Footbridge: this is
val. Its form was intended to resemble a ship in
located in the centre of Bilbao close to the Gug-
a dry dock, commemorating the old Euskalduna
genheim Museum; it was designed by Santiago
Shipyards, which formerly stood on the same
Calatrava.
site. It was designed by Federico Soriano and
Dolores Palacios.

The questionnaire raised three main questions. Each question had three parts, as
follows.
(1) Which of the listed buildings and open spaces do you think create a distinct
and/or unique urban landscape in Bilbao? Which one do you consider best?
And why?
(2) Which of the listed buildings and open spaces give you a sense that space
somehow belongs to you or represents you, in the sense that you are allowed
to give your own meaning and interpretation of space? Which one do you
consider best? And why?
(3) As a citizen of Bilbao, which of the listed buildings and public open spaces are
a source of ‘civic pride’ for you and allow you personally to have greater
economic expectations from tourism in/the economic development of Bil-
bao? Which one do you consider best? And why? Of course, this question
was not addressed to visitors.
For the first part of all three questions, interviewees were allowed to make more
than one choice of building/open space from the list offered. For the second part
of all three questions, referring to ‘Which one do you consider best?’, intervie-
wees had to make only one choice among those buildings/open spaces already
selected in the first part of the question. Finally, for the third part of all three
questions, interviewees had to give a short interpretation in a few words. These
answers were analysed, codified and classified in three groups as: (1) answers
associated with the morphology of space; (2) answers associated with the sense
of space; and (3) answers associated with the meaning of space.14
Regarding the first question, the percentages of choices made by all groups
of interviewees are presented graphically in Figure 13. According to these data,
both built heritage and innovative design appear to represent important means
of creating distinct and/or unique urban landscape but innovative design tends
to prevail between the two. This is the case for all groups examined. However,
the prevalence is striking in the case of tourists while it is relatively very weak
in the case of inhabitants/low-income people. There seems to be an increasing
recognition and prevalence of innovative design while moving from low-income
inhabitants towards well-off inhabitants, educated inhabitants, long-stay visitors
and tourists.
 Built Heritage and Innovative Design 239

Figure 13. Bilbao: different categories of users of urban space selecting built heritage and/or
innovative design schemes as elements that create distinct and/or unique urban landscape in
Bilbao. Percentage of choices.

As opposed to what one might have expected, inhabitants are not thinking
of their heritage schemes as the strongest elements creating a unique local urban
morphology. On the contrary, they appear to have a similar attitude to tourists/
visitors and select innovative design schemes as more effective elements in
creating a unique urban landscape. This may be interpreted on the basis of two
phenomena. First, as argued earlier, dominant national and international schools
of thought in conservation and micro-scale redesign of traditional buildings and
open spaces have created morphologically standardized historical urban cores.
Secondly, codified forms of social behaviour (e.g. customs, ideologies) into
which people used to socialize and formulate attitudes do not function in the
post-modern era as they used to do in the past. Indeed ‘diversity’, ‘individual-
ization’ and an increased sophistication reinforce the personal basis of decisions
and attitudes (Featherstone, 1991). This orientates both inhabitants and tourists/
visitors towards new urban forms rather than standardized old morphologies.
All groups selected the Guggenheim Museum as the best among the other
choices. More precisely, the Guggenheim Museum was selected as the best by
100% of long-stay visitors, 87.5% of tourists, 66% of inhabitants/low-income
people, 68% of inhabitants/middle and upper middle classes and 79.49% of
inhabitants/educated people. Again, there is an increasing credit given to
innovative design moving from low-income inhabitants towards well-off inhab-
itants, educated inhabitants, tourists and long-stay visitors. The percentages fall
dramatically for all other buildings/open spaces of the list, ranging (1) from a
minimum of 0% to a maximum of 4.17% (corresponding to Campo Volantin
Bridge) in the case of tourists/visitors, (2) from 0% to 16% (Arriaga Theatre) in
the case of inhabitants/low-income people, (3) from 0% to 14% (Arriaga Theatre)
in the case of inhabitants/middle and upper middle classes and (4) from 0% to
10.81% (Arriaga Theatre) in the case of inhabitants/educated people.
Regarding the answers to ‘Why is this the best?’, most of them are
associated with the meaning of space in the context of Bilbao city or the
European urban network. Fewer answers were associated with the morphology
240 A. Gospodini

Figure 14. Bilbao: different categories of users of urban space selecting built heritage and innovative
design schemes as elements giving users a sense that space belongs to them or represents them.
Percentage of choices.

of space and even fewer were related to the sense of space. For tourists, the most
common answer was “It is unique in Bilbao and in Europe” for long-stay
visitors, “It changed the city” for inhabitants/low-income people, “It is famous
and thus very important for the city” and for both the middle and upper middle
classes and educated inhabitants, “It is the symbol of the city”.
All the above answers to the first question point to the innovative design of
space being recognized as a tool for the creation of landmarks in the context of
both the city as a local urban system as well as large urban networks to which
the city belongs (e.g. European urban networks). As such a tool, innovative
design appears to be credited more by tourists/visitors and educated inhabitants
than by all other groups.
Turning to the second question, which deals with the degree to which built
heritage and innovative design respectively provide spaces that people feel
attached to, or belonging to, the percentages of choices made by all groups of
interviewees are presented graphically in Figure 14.
These data strengthen the status of built heritage in comparison to innova-
tive design. However, innovative design still remains powerful. More precisely,
inhabitants and tourists/visitors appear to differ in their preferences. Tourists
and long-stay visitors seem to feel relatively more comfortable in innovative
design spaces than in built heritage spaces. By contrast, inhabitants seem to feel
more attached to spaces provided by heritage schemes than by innovative
design schemes. Among the different groups of inhabitants, the importance of
heritage schemes is relatively stronger in the case of low-income people.
These results indicate that in post-modern urban societies built heritage still
appears to be very efficient in producing representative urban space for inhabi-
tants, especially for low-income inhabitants, who usually have stronger ties with
the local tradition. In contrast to this, innovative design appears to be more
efficient in producing meaningful and friendly space for non-local cultural
groups such as tourists, foreign students and foreign professionals, etc.
As the best one, a striking 100% of long-stay visitors and 58.33% of tourists
selected the Guggenheim Museum while the percentages for all other buildings
 Built Heritage and Innovative Design 241

and open spaces in the list were very low—ranging from 0% to 12.5% and
making Plaza Nueva second (12.5%) and Campo Volantin Footbridge third
(4.17%). By contrast, choices by inhabitants created an even distribution between
historic monuments and innovative design schemes: (1) low-income people
selected Arriaga Theatre as the best (26%) with the Guggenheim Museum
second (22%) and St Anton’s Church and Bridge third (14%); (2) the middle and
upper middle classes selected Arriaga Theatre as the best (16%) with the
Guggenheim Museum second (14%) and the Metro stations third (10%); and (3)
educated people chose Plaza Nueva as the best (33.33%) with the Guggenheim
Museum second (25.64%) and Campo Volantin Footbridge third (7.7%).
Regarding the answers to the question ‘Why is this the best?’, most of the
low-income and middle and upper middle class inhabitants appear to have
selected Arriaga Theatre as the best mainly by virtue of the meaning of space in
the city’s tradition and history (56% and 63%, respectively). The most common
answers were respectively “A beautiful building in the traditional architectural
style” and “A meaningful building in the context of the city’s tradition”.
Educated people selected Plaza Nueva as the best mainly for the sense of space
(85%). The most common answer was “It is a relaxing and comfortable open
space”. Long-stay visitors selected the Guggenheim Museum as the best for the
sense of space. The most common answer was “It gives a feeling of freedom in
experiencing space”. Tourists also selected the Guggenheim Museum as the best
but in this case by virtue of the morphology of space (46%). The most common
answers can be summarized as “No space looks similar and you can give your
own interpretation”.
Therefore, by contrast to common arguments presenting built heritage and
historical centres of European cities as particularly favourite places for tourists
because they are very rich in meaning and can be interpreted again and again,
thereby allowing tourists to give their own interpretation, Bilbao supports the
opposite: tourists show a strong preference in seeking new meaning, their own
meaning, in new forms of space. On the contrary, historical spaces appear more
meaningful to inhabitants. However, still in the case of inhabitants, numerical
differences between innovative design and built heritage are not very strong,
crediting innovative design schemes almost as highly as heritage schemes in the
production of spaces which inhabitants feel attached to, belonging to or repre-
sented by. Therefore, it can be argued that innovative design may synchronize
in space inhabitants and tourists/visitors, and it can do so better than built
heritage.
Regarding the third question, the percentages of choices (see Figure 15)
were similar to those of the first question, showing a striking prevalence of
innovative design in comparison with built heritage. More precisely, the out-
come shows that inhabitants relate their city’s tourism/economic development
more to innovative design than to built heritage.
Of the choices made, the Guggenheim Museum was, by a long way, selected
as the best by all groups of inhabitants: by low-income people at 92%, by the
middle and upper middle classes at 84% and by educated people at 76.92%. For
all other buildings and spaces in the list, the percentages were very low. For
most of them, the percentage was zero. In addition, it is significant that all
groups of inhabitants gave as second the Euskalduna Congress and Concert
Hall, with percentages ranging from 6% to 12.82%, and as third the Metro
242 A. Gospodini

Figure 15. Bilbao: different categories of inhabitants selecting built heritage and/or innovative design
schemes as elements that make them feel ‘civic pride’ and have greater economic expectations from
tourism/economic development of Bilbao. Percentage of choices.

stations, with percentages ranging from 2% to 5.13%. Therefore, the first three in
the hierarchy were all innovative design schemes.
Turning to the question ‘Why is this the best?’, most answers of different
groups of interviewees appointing the Guggenheim Museum as the best were
associated mainly with the meaning of space in the context of Bilbao city and/or
the European urban network. The most common answers were: (1) for low-in-
come people, “It brings tourism and money to the city” (2) for the middle and
upper middle classes, “It is an international paradigm promoting tourism/econ-
omic development; and (3) for educated people, “It is the most touristic place”.
In the light of these results, it can be argued that in post-modern societies,
innovative design schemes—like built heritage in the past—can generate new
social solidarities among inhabitants grounded in ‘civic pride’ and common
economic prospects.

Conclusions: Design Policies and Strategies in the Context of Place Identity

The results of the questionnaire in Bilbao appear to confirm the theoretical
conjecture, presented in Figure 2, about the ways in which built heritage and
innovative design may work as place identity generators. In post-modern,
multi-ethnic and multi-cultural urban societies, innovative design of space can
work efficiently as a place identity generator in the same ways in which built
heritage has been performing highly in modern—culturally bounded and na-
tion-state-oriented—European societies. There is also some evidence that in
contemporary European societies, built heritage tends to get weaker while
innovative design of space emerges as an effective new means of place identity
by (1) adding or creating distinct urban landscape, (2) synchronizing spatially all
 Built Heritage and Innovative Design 243

the different social/cultural/economic groups; and (3) generating new social

solidarities among inhabitants related to their common and/or individual econ-
omic future.
To test whether the results in Bilbao have been strongly affected by the
presence of the Guggenheim Museum in the city, the effectiveness of innovative
design as a place identity generator was tested again by an analogous question-
naire survey in the city of Thessaloniki, Greece (see Hatziantoniou, 2003). Unlike
Bilbao, Thessaloniki has no world-famous innovative design schemes like the
Guggenheim Museum; the city missed a great chance to develop such building
schemes during the preparation period for ‘Cultural Capital of Europe 1997’. For
the purposes of the research, the questionnaire included two subcategories of
buildings and public open spaces within the category of innovative design: (1)
recently developed public buildings exhibiting new international design trends;
and (2) the winning entries of international design competitions that took place
during the city’s preparation for 1997 but which were never realized.15 The
results of the questionnaire survey in Thessaloniki appear to reinforce those in
Bilbao. The choices made by all groups16 of interviewees indicate that both built
heritage schemes and innovative design schemes do work as place identity
generators. As such, built heritage appears to prevail in the case of inhabitants
while innovative design prevails in the case of tourists/visitors.
In the light of these results in Bilbao and Thessaloniki, the association of
place identity and urban tourism development mainly with the preservation and
enhancement of the city’s built heritage seems a conventional wisdom. In the
post-modern era, tourists and visitors seem equally, or even more, interested in
seeking their own new experiences in the city’s innovative architectural and
urban forms than in what has been selected to be preserved and exhibited as
built heritage.
In the global–local interplay, urban sociologists often assume that whereas
the economy is increasingly becoming global, cities and local communities can
address the forces of globalization by defending their local culture and heritage.
The results in Bilbao show the opposite. Inhabitants appear to be ‘indigenizing’
global cultural flows—and in this case, global design trends. This trend, accord-
ing to McNeill (2000), can be interpreted in relation to the identity crisis of cities
and nation-states and the strengthening of regionalism within the EU. He argues
that for the Basques the Guggenheim Museum acts as a totem, a spatial fix of the
preferred new Basque identity—⬙a statement that the Basque identity is at home
in the contemporary world rather than being mired in pre-modern ethnic
bloodshed” (McNeill, 2000, p. 10). In the context of the global (unified) urban
system of Europe, all such flagship design projects—what he calls the ‘McGug-
genization’ process—that have been recently developed in many large cities in
the periphery (geographical and/or economic) of Europe, such as Barcelona,
Lisbon, Cardiff and Edinburgh, and are intended to create new urban landscape
and new service sector economies, can tell us much about the desired regional
identities and how the reterritorialization of Europe is being played out (Mc-
Neill, 2000).
Regarding the outcome of the research in the context of European inte-
gration, it may be suggested that design policies and strategies—drawn by local
governments, central governments and the EU—supporting innovative architec-
tural and urban design would facilitate the process of integration in the Eu-
ropean cities into a global (unified) urban network and would do this in three
ways.
244 A. Gospodini

• In terms of urban landscape and morphology, such policies and strategies

would contribute to an iconography of integration, since innovative design
schemes may add to the internationalization of local urban landscapes while
at the same time they—as place identity generators—may complement and
not replace local, regional and national identities. In other words, they may
produce ‘glocalized’ urban landscapes (Beriatos & Gospodini, 2004) or land-
scapes that Massey (1999) and Jacobs (1996) describe as a combination of ‘a
mixture through history’ and ‘a focus of a wider geography’, i.e. a landscape
that simultaneously expresses both the specificity of place as well as the links
with the world beyond.
• In terms of new urban economies, such policies and strategies would contrib-
ute to the convergence of local urban economies since innovative design
schemes may add to the competitive edge of cities and promote economic—es-
pecially tourism—development (see Gospodini, 2001, 2002).
• In relation to contemporary European urban societies, such policies and
strategies would contribute to social cohesion and the consolidation of multi-
ethnic and multi-cultural societies since innovative design schemes can syn-
chronize in space different social/cultural/economic groups and generate new
social solidarities through space.

Notes
1. Among all EU programmes concerning built heritage, the most important ones in terms of
investment are the programmes launched by General Directorate X: (1) Pilot Projects (1983–95),
aiming at introducing new techniques in the conservation of monuments; (2) Flagship Projects
(1983–91), aiming at the conservation of major historical monuments; (3) Raphael (1997–2000),
aiming at the enhancement of built heritage, the creation of networks among cities for
trans-national cooperation and the promotion of innovative actions and techniques; (4) Cultural
Capital of Europe (1984–), aiming at enhancing the variety of cultural and built heritage that
European cities exhibit; and (5) Culture (2000–04), aiming at the creation of ‘laboratories’ for the
management of cultural and built heritage. Besides these large programmes, there are also
smaller programmes for built heritage (e.g. Urban Pilot Projects, CIED, URBAN, Euromed
Heritage) that are integrated within different major EU actions and programs such as Com-
munity Support Frameworks, Leader, Interrreg, Innovative Actions and others.
2. As ‘new urban economies’, McNeill & While (2001) present a fourfold typology: agglomeration
economies, informational and knowledge-rich economies, technopoles and urban leisure econ-
omies.
3. Examples are presented and described in detail in Tunbridge (1998), Graham (1998), Ashworth
(1998) and Graham et al. (2000).
4. For instance, the European League of Historic Cities, the Walled Towns Friendship Circle and
Quarters en Crise.
5. International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property.
6. For instance, regarding the second half of the 20th century, the passage from the modern
movement to post-modernism in the late 1970s, and from post-modernism to deconstruction in
the early 1990s.
7. Among major design schemes by Frank O. Gehry, one should note the Frederick R. Wiesman
Museum, Minneapolis, USA (1990), the American Centre, Paris (1994), the Nationale-Nederlande
office building, Prague (1996) and, especially, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1998),
and the new Guggenheim Museum, New York (2000–).
8. Among major avant-garde design schemes by Santiago Calatrava, one may refer to Sondica
Airport, Bilbao (1991), the Opera House, Tenerife (1991), the Bach de Roca bridge, Barcelona
(1984–87), Satolas Airport’s railway station, Lyon (1989–94), the Montjuic telecommunications
tower, Barcelona (1989–92), the Campo Volantin bridge, Bilbao (1990–97), the Alamillo bridge,
Cartuja, Seville (1987–92), Trinity Footbridge, Manchester (1993–95), Oriente Railway Station,
Lisbon (1993–98) and the Kuwait Exhibition Pavilion, Seville, World Expo (1991–92). Among his
most recent major works, one should note first, the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia (1991–),
 Built Heritage and Innovative Design 245

including the Hemispheric building accommodating the planetarium and cinema (1991) and the
Museum of Arts and Sciences (1991), and secondly, the Art Museum, Milwaukee, USA
(1994–2000).
9. For instance, Calatrava’s projects for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, for World Expo 1992 in
Seville and, recently, for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. In the case of Athens, Calatrava was
invited by the Organizing Committee of the 2004 Olympic Games to redesign the main Olympic
Stadium in the area of Marroussi as well as the surrounding public open spaces.
10. For instance, in the case of Bilbao, following the opening of the Guggenheim Museum, there has
been a substantial tourism increase supporting the city’s economic growth. This increase is
considered by Plaza (1999; 2000a, b) a direct effect of the Guggenheim Museum. According to
data drawn from the Basque Government’s Statistical Authority, the comparison between a time
period before the opening of the Guggenheim Museum (January 1994–September 1997) and a
time period after the opening of the Guggenheim Museum (October 1997–July 1999) shows that
the percentage of foreign travellers has increased by a significant 44.6% whereas the percentage
of overnight stays has also increased by a significant 30.8%. Of course, one cannot estimate how
long the positive effect of the Guggenheim Museum on tourism will last. As argued elsewhere
(see Lengkeek, 1995; Gospodini, 2001), all kinds of ‘counter-structures’, when incorporated into
established reality, lose their specific meaning and, then, the quest of tourists for counter-struc-
tures goes on in a search for new horizons (Lengkeek, 1995). In the case of innovative design of
space in particular, when avant-garde trends are established as common design practices, they
lose their pioneering character and, therefore, cannot work anymore as counter-structures to the
familiar morphologies (Gospodini, 2001).
11. Such a result might also indicate a trend concerning not only European cities but all post-indus-
trial, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural cities in developed countries such as, for instance, cities in
the USA. However, in order to argue this, further research is required, investigating the
relationships among national identity, place identity and built heritage.
12. The structure of the questionnaire survey (i.e. the questions addressed to the interviewers, the
categories of interviewed people) was discussed with Professor Taner Oc, University of Notting-
ham, UK, during the AESOP 2002 International Congress, 10–15 July, Volos, Greece. The author
would like to thank him for his very instructive comments and advice.
13. The author would like to thank Professor Beatrice Plaza, who has greatly contributed to this
research in various ways: translating the questionnaire into Spanish, providing me with students
to carry out interviews in Spanish and also conducting interviews in the Department of Applied
Economics, University of the Basque Country, Bilbao.
14. Codification was done according to the discipline of the architectural and/or urban design
artifact the answers referred to, i.e. the formal discipline or the spatial discipline or meaning.
15. Among the latter were Toyo Ito’s large-scale redesign of the city’s waterfront redevelopment,
Coop Himmelbau’s design scheme of urban sea transportation for the fifth pier, Enric Miralles’s
design scheme of urban sea transportation for the sixth pier and Reem Koolhas’s design scheme
of urban sea transportation for the seventh pier. Although the strategic plan of Thessaloniki set
up in 1994 to prepare the city as ‘Cultural Capital of Europe 1997’ had included these projects,
they were finally dropped, mainly due to the incapability of the city’s authorities to develop
them well in advance of the events of ‘Cultural Capital of Europe 1997’.
16. The categories of interviewees were the same as in Bilbao: inhabitants/low-income people,
inhabitants/middle and upper middle classes, inhabitants/educated people, tourists (foreign
people on short holidays) and long-stay visitors (foreign people working or studying in the city
for a few months or a year).

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