Barcelona, City of Margins

"Barcelona, City of Margins is an impressive piece of scholarship, uncovering the dialogic interaction between centre and margins, to provide new important insights into Barcelona’s urban and sociocultural history."

E. H. Friedman, Vanderbilt University:

"Sendra Ferrer sees her work as a recovery project, and the findings are illuminating and intriguing. The book is not an easy read, but it includes extremely valuable information and arguments."

Germán Labrador Méndez, Professor of Iberian Studies, Princeton University :

"Olga Sendra Ferrer's eagerly awaited book serves to understand Barcelona's urban history: it shows how democracy is about reading centres from the margins using culture as a map."

Bob Davidson, Professor of Spanish and Catalan Studies, University of Toronto :

"A superb piece of scholarship that balances theory, close visual reading, and cultural analysis, Barcelona, City of Margins makes an important and original contribution to the growing literature on one of the world’s most influential cities."

Benjamin Fraser, Professor of Iberian and Latin American Studies, University of Arizona:

"Through careful analyses of the photographic, narrative, and even poetic margins of dictatorial Barcelona, Olga Sendra Ferrer revels in the subtle murmurs echoing from a river of dissent. This book is a wonderful and panoramic chronicle of the clashes between urbanistic planning and urban everyday life that unfolded from the 1950s through the 1970s."

Susan Larson, Qualia Professor of Spanish, Texas Tech University:

"Barcelona, City of Margins looks at the radically innovative art forms of 1950s and 1960s Barcelona – the writing of Francisco Candel and the photography of Joan Colom and Colita in particular – that noisily interrupted the attempts of the Franco regime to impose a harmonious, static structure of absolute space. Olga Sendra Ferrer has written a startlingly powerful book of urban cultural criticism that lays the groundwork for us to get beyond our oftentimes limited appreciation of dissident art in the decades after the Civil War."