A Reply to Beatriz Plaza’s ‘The Guggenheim‐Bilbao Museum Effect’

This paper argues against Beatriz Plaza’s (1999) reply to Marı ́a V. Gómez’s (1998a) article on urban regeneration strategies in Glasgow and Bilbao. The author is very 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, Go ́mez, 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, making it the new symbol of the city worldwide. It is economic revitalization, regarded as an almost automatic outcome of projects such as the Guggenheim Museum, that was called into question. It is the risky use of ‘urban flagships’ in a context of serious decline, as much as the subsequent political discourses built up around ‘success stories’ which stress that these are the key to prosperity, that were — and still are — in dispute. Apart from not addressing the main points and doubts of the former article, Beatriz Plaza’s statements are debatable for three different reasons. First, the importance she gives to what she calls ‘the uniqueness of cultural investment’ is questionable. Allegedly, this is the element on which the positive externalities of a cultural facility mainly depend (1999: 591). However, the extent to which the Guggenheim Museum is unique remains at best uncertain. In April 2001 the architect, Frank Gehry, presented his design for a new Guggenheim branch. According to Matthew DeBord (2000), ‘there will be more Bilbaos — architecturally and financially . . . If Kren’s and the Guggenheim get what they want, New York will have a Gehry museum by 2007’. So there will be another Guggenheim museum designed by Frank Gehry, the same architect, with a very similar design which will also be made of titanium according to the model which was recently exhibited in Manhattan, as Beatriz Plaza herself admitted more recently (2000). So what exactly is unique? While this is an extreme case, Amin and Malmberg (1994) point out how achieving uniqueness is becoming more and more difficult, since there are obvious limits to the