Barcelona, a role model
I am currently in Barcelona, attending a conference on Place Branding. Today is the Grand Prix, so the place is teeming with people from everywhere. It’s an amazing city that has built its international reputation largely on the back of huge events, starting with the Olympics in 1992. Before 1992 the city received 2 million visitors (mostly local) per year, whereas today it receives 9 million visitors per year from around the world. But it is also a fantastic example of the need to think big about the future and to use the opportunities brought about by those big events.
I am especially interested by how they use Camp Nou, the football stadium that is home to FC Barcelona, as a tourist attraction in its own right. It is one of the stops on the circular tourist bus routes (along with the famous Sagrada Familia, designed by Gaudi and still being built over 120 years later), and it has stadium tours (11 Euros a pop), a football museum (6 Euros), restaurants and a 2000 square metre megastore selling FC Barcelona merchandise. Elsewhere in the city the Olympic stadium and facilities is also a tourist attraction, with an Olympic Museum.
It really inspires me to think what we in Cape Town can do with our new stadium in the future, as long as we can fight off one tiresome legal challenge after another by people posing as environmentalists but who really just don’t want a football stadium in their neighbourhood.
Barcelonins have really embraced their future and they have welcomed the changes that they have gone through since the 1980s. They are now reaping the rewards by being seen as a creative, innovative city; a city of design, art and architecture that is a must for people all over the world to see. We in Cape Town really must learn as much as we can from Barcelona, so that we too can recreate our city as a Creative Capital.