Word: civics
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...such grand gestures should come as no surprise. The Barcelonese exude a near-fanatical pride in their ancient city, 2000-year long series of civic re-inventions. Understanding--let alone appreciating-this puzzling letimotif in the history of the newly resplendent city-by-the-sea would demand the intellectual ardor of a cabala scholar...
...civic style, if one can so compress it, was more than just a Spanish mutation of Art Nouveau, which the Catalans called modernisme. It was obsessed with the meaning of local nationality and the eternal pressure of the past. It was full of myth, decoration, narrative, metaphor: a speaking architecture, overrich for some purist tastes but of interest to anyone today who wants to see how social and historical meanings are embodied in new building...
...Eixample is vast and hard on the feet. Here in Domenech's choral theater, it is baptism by total immersion. The "new Barcelona" may not, in the end, produce any buildings that rival those of the late 19th century. But the fact of bringing the old ones back to civic life, in all their splendor, would be achievement enough for any city administration, Games or no Games...
...Liberalism would be less depressing if it had a more attainable end," Kaus writes, "a goal short of money equality." So he wants liberal Democrats to embrace an aim that he calls civic equality. If government can't bring everyone into the middle class, let it expand the areas of life in which everyone, regardless of income, receives the same treatment. National health care, improved public schools, universal national service and government financing of nearly all election campaigns, which would freeze out special- interest money -- these are the unobjectionable components of Kaus' enlarged public sphere...
Martinez' essay includes what may be the book's most telling observation on multicultualism in a section on the L.A. Festival, a recent civic celebration which glorified the racial and ethnic make-up of the city in a slightly Disneyesque fashion. He writes...