A Reply to Beatriz Plaza’s ‘The Guggenheim‐Bilbao Museum Effect’
Year: 2001
Type: article
Abstract: grateful to Beatriz Plaza for her interest and subsequent reply to her previous words. The current re-reply attempts to show that, while being an interesting approach to the Guggenheim effect, Beatriz Plaza’s reply does not address the crucial points related to the museum, stated in the original article. The article questioned whether urban strategies that focus on cultural infrastructure investment and place marketing were a good mechanism for stimulating cities to recover. Beatriz Plaza’s reply is entirely based on the benefits produced by the numbers of visitors to Bilbao, but this was never a main point of the previous argument. In fact, what the article said about Glasgow is: ‘There is no doubt that this strategy has had dividends in respect of the number of visitors to the city... it is also undeniable that the image of Glasgow, both within and outside the city, has been radically reconstructed ’ (p. 118). The potential success of Bilbao as an important tourist destination was not in question there, as it was not in some of the author’s later work (see, for instance, Gómez, 1998b; 2000; González, 2000). We do not deny that the Guggenheim Museum has changed Bilbao’s former image, which was largely associated with either pollution or political violence,
Authors: Marí V. Gómez, Sara González
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1980323596