Speaker
Description
Extended abstract
Introduction and research problem
Post-industrial waterfronts are recurrent laboratories for urban change. Port restructuring, tourism, public-space renewal and culture-led development are frequently assembled into projects presented as transitions towards a more attractive, connected or knowledge-based city. Yet the language of transition can conceal continuity: a new cultural facility may alter a site while reproducing an established reliance on exceptional projects, private investment, visitor growth and internationally recognisable brands. This paper asks when the interruption of such a project becomes more than a failed transition and begins to disclose the conditions of urban transformation.
The question is examined through the proposed Hermitage Barcelona museum, announced in 2012 and ultimately abandoned by its promoters in January 2022. The project sought to place a privately financed cultural centre associated with the State Hermitage Museum on port land at the Nova Bocana, beside Barceloneta. It retained international prestige, private investment and high-level institutional support for almost a decade, yet it was never built. Its non-realisation is analytically valuable precisely because it cannot be explained by a simple absence of political support, capital or cultural ambition. The Generalitat de Catalunya endorsed the project’s cultural and international significance; the Barcelona Port Authority processed and later approved a conditional concession; private promoters assembled a corporate, financial and cultural structure; and some business, cultural and neighbourhood actors defended the museum as investment, employment and an alternative to mass tourism. At the same time, the Barcelona City Council, other neighbourhood organisations and urban specialists questioned the proposed location, mobility impacts, tourism pressure, public-space consequences and cultural rationale.
The paper asks: How did distributed authority allow the Hermitage proposal to remain institutionally possible for years while preventing it from becoming executable? What does its non-authorisation reveal about the difference between project-led urban transition and transformative planning? The central argument is that the project failed because no coalition could align the distinct and non-substitutable authorisations on which implementation depended. Municipal non-authorisation was therefore not an absence of planning. It was the binding moment at which incompatible definitions of public value, territorial competence and acceptable urban change were forced into a decision. However, interrupting a project is not in itself transformative; transformation also requires the conflicts exposed by refusal to be converted into new institutional capacities and durable planning arrangements.
Conceptual or theoretical framework
The paper develops the concept of an authorisation ecology by bringing multi-level governance and actor-centred institutionalism into dialogue with scholarship on justification and public value. Multi-level governance explains why authority is dispersed among institutions operating at different territorial scales rather than concentrated in a single sovereign decision-maker (Bache & Flinders, 2004; Hooghe & Marks, 2002). Actor-centred institutionalism and veto-player theory clarify how overlapping competences create multiple points at which collective action can be conditioned or blocked (Scharpf, 1997; Tsebelis, 2002). Yet the Hermitage controversy also demonstrates that implementation did not depend only on formal vetoes. Actors justified the project through competing orders of worth: international prestige, investment and employment, cultural originality, mobility, neighbourhood liveability, public access and environmental risk (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006).
An authorisation ecology is the relational configuration through which these different permissions and legitimacy claims must become mutually operative. It distinguishes recognition by a global cultural institution, political endorsement, access to finance, a port concession, planning conformity and civic legitimacy. These resources can reinforce one another, but none automatically supplies the others. This approach treats institutional uncertainty not as an information gap that disappears as a project matures, but as a durable product of divided mandates, asynchronous procedures and unequal accountability. It also moves beyond a binary opposition between development and resistance. The relevant question is how public contestation enters administrative procedures, is translated into assessable planning criteria, and changes what a project must prove in order to proceed.
Methods
The study uses Hermitage Barcelona as a bounded diagnostic case rather than as a representative example of all cultural megaprojects (Flyvbjerg, 2006). It adapts material from a wider doctoral investigation but reconstructs the controversy as a self-contained planning process. The research combines process tracing, documentary analysis, spatial analysis, semi-structured interviews and digital ethnography. The chronology follows the proposal from the 2012 agreement between the Generalitat and the State Hermitage through successive sites and organisational revisions, the Nova Bocana planning and concession procedures, the municipal refusal of May 2021, the exhaustion of the local administrative route in January 2022, and the later judicial afterlife.
The documentary corpus includes the 2012 agreement; the 2018 Heads of Agreement governing the prospective cultural relationship; amendments to the Nova Bocana special plan; the concession application and Port Authority decisions; municipal assessments of mobility, urban compatibility, economic viability and cultural value; corporate and financial records; electoral programmes; administrative allegations; campaign materials produced by supporters and opponents; and local, national and international press coverage. Interviews with public officials, former decision-makers and neighbourhood actors were used to reconstruct institutional reasoning and disagreements that formal records alone do not capture. A dataset of 8,902 tweets published between October 2012 and May 2021 was analysed to assess how the controversy circulated publicly; 3,702 of those tweets appeared around the municipal decision of 28 May 2021. Evidence was triangulated across sources, and formal competence was distinguished from public advocacy: an actor’s support was counted as authorising capacity only when connected to a mandate, instrument, resources and executable procedural pathway.
Results
The analysis produces four findings. First, the project’s longevity resulted from fragmented support rather than stable consensus. The Generalitat could confer diplomatic visibility and cultural endorsement but could not authorise construction. The Port Authority controlled the concession of port land but could not make that concession effective without municipal participation. Private promoters could organise investment and negotiate access to the Hermitage name and collections but could not establish planning conformity or public legitimacy. The City Council could not erase the other actors’ competences, but it bore the principal local accountability costs associated with mobility, public space and compatibility with the surrounding urban fabric. The proposal remained alive because no actor could close every route; it remained unrealised because no coalition could authorise it across all the necessary arenas.
Second, the Nova Bocana was not a neutral container awaiting a cultural use. The site condensed the institutional and political legacy of Barcelona’s waterfront redevelopment since the 1992 Olympic Games. Port Vell, Maremagnum, the Fòrum, the Hotel W and the transformation of Marina Port Vell had progressively normalised project-based redevelopment, special planning instruments, tourism-orientated uses and private concessions on strategically valuable land. They also accumulated unresolved concerns about public access, port–city accountability and the growing pressure of leisure and tourism infrastructure on Barceloneta. The Hermitage thus entered an already sedimented governance environment. Its proposed location made an international museum inseparable from wider disputes over who the waterfront was for and which urban costs could legitimately be concentrated there.
Third, civic contestation acquired force when it was translated into the project’s authorisation pathway. Opposition was neither homogeneous nor reducible to hostility towards culture. Some neighbourhood representatives supported the museum as a way to diversify tourism; others, coordinated through the Plataforma per un Port Ciutadà and related organisations, connected it to the commercialisation of port land, congestion and tourist gentrification. Their administrative allegations required public bodies to assess the proposal cumulatively rather than as an isolated building. The municipal studies commissioned in 2019 reframed cultural prestige as a planning problem: the Nova Bocana’s cul-de-sac condition, limited public-transport access, saturated activities, emergency access, flood exposure and relationship to an already pressured neighbourhood became tests of public interest (Giménez Imirizaldu & Rubert de Ventós, 2019; Intra, 2019). This translation mattered because it attached political disagreement to criteria that the municipality was institutionally required to evaluate.
Fourth, the decisive sequence exposed the difference between support and executable agreement. On 26 May 2021, the Port Authority approved the concession conditionally, initially requiring both a joint Hermitage–Liceu proposal and a specific Port–City Council agreement (Autoridad Portuaria de Barcelona, 2021). On 28 May, the municipal government declined to initiate that agreement. The local administrative challenges were rejected in January 2022, and the promoters announced their withdrawal later that month. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 subsequently transformed the Hermitage affiliation from an asset into a geopolitical liability and foreclosed a plausible revival, but it did not cause the municipal refusal or the project’s operational collapse. Preserving this chronology prevents a later external rupture from obscuring the planning conflict that had already made the project non-executable.
Discussion and conclusion
The case complicates celebratory accounts of both flagship development and project refusal. The Hermitage promised a visible transition in land use and city branding, but it largely extended an inherited waterfront repertoire: exceptional cultural architecture, private investment, visitor attraction and international recognition. The controversy became potentially transformative only when that repertoire was subjected to cumulative tests of mobility, liveability, public access and locally accountable cultural value. In this sense, non-authorisation acted as a form of planning: it interrupted the presumption that prestige and investment could stand in for territorial agreement and made the limits of the prevailing model publicly legible.
Nevertheless, a refusal does not automatically redistribute authority, improve participation or establish an alternative use. The City Council’s position was conditional and site-specific, and the controversy generated alternative proposals, but it did not by itself resolve the structural division between port and municipal governance. The paper therefore identifies three requirements for transformative practice: cross-jurisdictional public-interest assessment before concession and investment commitments become entrenched; cumulative evaluation of project impacts across mobility, housing, climate exposure and public space; and early public deliberation about purpose and alternatives, rather than consultation after a preferred project has already been assembled.
The broader contribution is to reposition unrealised projects as important planning evidence. Built projects can conceal the alignments that made them possible; unbuilt projects expose them. Analysing authorisation ecologies directs attention to the difference between institutional visibility and executable capacity and between stopping one project and transforming the rules through which urban futures are selected. Hermitage Barcelona shows that planning under institutional uncertainty is not simply the management of delay. It is the contested work of determining which forms of change can become collectively authorisable.
References
Autoridad Portuaria de Barcelona. (2021, May 26). El Port de Barcelona aprueba la concesión al Hermitage condicionada a la presentación de un proyecto conjunto con el Liceu y a un convenio Port–Ayuntamiento [Press release]. https://www.portdebarcelona.cat/es/comunicacion/noticias/acuerdos-del-consejo-de-administracion-del-mes-de-mayo
Bache, I., & Flinders, M. (Eds.). (2004). Multi-level governance. Oxford University Press.
Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (2006). On justification: Economies of worth (C. Porter, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1991)
Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five misunderstandings about case-study research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219–245. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800405284363
Giménez Imirizaldu, A., & Rubert de Ventós, M. (2019). Consideracions i reflexió oberta sobre la idoneïtat urbanística d’un nou espai cultural a la Nova Bocana del Port de Barcelona i alternatives de posició. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. https://prod.premsa.dtibcn.cat/premsa/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CONSIDERACIONES_15-12-2019.pdf
Hooghe, L., & Marks, G. (2002). Multi-level governance and European integration. Rowman & Littlefield.
Intra. (2019). Conveniència de la implantació d’una sucursal del museu Hermitage a la Nova Bocana de Barcelona, des d’una perspectiva de la mobilitat: Resum executiu. Ajuntament de Barcelona. https://prod.premsa.dtibcn.cat/premsa/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Hermitage-Barcelona-RESUM-EXECUTIU_13-01-20.pdf
Scharpf, F. W. (1997). Games real actors play: Actor-centered institutionalism in policy research. Westview Press.
Tsebelis, G. (2002). Veto players: How political institutions work. Princeton University Press.