Around Madrid: the continuing influence of historical urban development plans on today’s periphery

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the peripheral development that has occurred in Madrid over the last 16 years (2000–2016), a period split by the economic crash that occurred in 2008. The paper argues that the relationship between economic development and infrastructure corridors witnessed in this peripheral development is intrinsically connected to the nineteenth and twentieth-century plans for urban growth. While these corridors have some similarities to the Strip model for an automobile city discussed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown in their seminal book Learning from Las Vegas, the Madrid peripheries enjoy a long genealogy that complicates any easy link to the Strip, particularly around issues of economic speculation, typology and image-making or imagining, which will be introduced using the work of Michael Neuman and others. The research design adopted examines the treatment of the periphery in a number of historical plans, particularly their attitudes towards infrastructure and economic development, in order to establish connections between those historical plans and the city’s planned and (partially) realized peripheral development today.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘The first formulation of the “Ciudad Lineal” is from 1882 … In 1892 the project of the Ciudad Lineal is published showing the horseshoe shape around Madrid … By 1911, 680 houses had been built and there were around four thousand people resident; in 1906 the first 18 kilometres of track were built for the tram line’ (López de Lucio et al. 2004, 43–36). Boileau (1959) describes the events along this timeline in more detail, and is more critical of Soria’s conceptual as well as practical shortcomings.

2. Government data show that in 2012 the distribution of motorized trips by zone (millions of trips/per day) indicate that in the inner part area of the city (the area inside of the M-30) most trips were made by public transport (0.75 million trips/ per day) instead of by private car (0.23 trips/per day). However, the data change in the peripheral areas (outside the M-30) where the tendency shows that most trips were made by private car (1.08 million trips/per day) instead of public transport (0.90 million trips per day). Plan de Movilidad Urbana Sostenible de la Ciudad de Madrid Resumen Diagnostico p.14 available at the web portal of Madrid City Council http://www.madrid.es/UnidadesDescentralizadas/UDCMovilidadTransportes/MOVILIDAD/PMUS_Madrid_2/PMUS%20Madrid/Diagn%C3%B3stico%20Ejecutivo.%20PMUS%20Madrid.%2014%20feb%202014.pdf [accessed 16/09/2017].

3. As these authors note, the detailed picture is more complex. ‘Oddly enough … Spanish citizen annual growth rates indicate that their metropolitan area figures have been increasing more rapidly after 1 January 2008 (from an annual 0.38% to a 0.60%)’ (2016, 210).

4. Note that some of the plans during the periods of 1900–1939 were never implemented. For a more comprehensive overview see Neuman (2010) and Díaz and Araujo (2017).

5. Note that the word Ensanche in Spanish means to widen, and refers to the process of the extensions of the older areas of Spanish cities normally in the second half of the nineteenth century. Usually the built form of these Ensanches is based on a block (called manzana in Spanish), and with radial routes crossing the grid.

6. Paseo in Spanish means promenade.

7. Neuman does not reference Marc Augé’s work on non-place, (1992) Non-Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie do la supermodernité, Paris: Editions du Seuil) (English translation (1995) Non-Places: An Introduction to Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso) so his use of the term ‘non-place’ should be taken in a broader, colloquial sense rather than in Augé’s more loaded terms.

8. ‘The 1997 general plan was conceived of as a remedy for a city believed to be in decline. It contained vast number of provisions, but most notably, the plan anticipated the construction of more than five hundred thousand housing units in the capital over twelve years-enough homes to accommodate 1.5 million residents. This included the designation of thirteen new residential districts (PAUs ) at the city’s periphery accounting for more than two hundred thousand of the anticipated new homes to be constructed. … Phase one was initiated in 1998 and included six PAUs. Four of these were developed to the north in empty formerly industrial areas, including Las Tablas (12,272 units on 361 hectares), Sanchinarro (14,000 units on 401 hectares), Montecarmelo (8,547 units on 300 hectares) and Arroyo de Fresno (2,754 units on 149 hectares). To the south was Carabanchel (12,700 units on 350 hectares), [and] Vallecas (28,058 units on 700 hectares)’ (Marcinkoski 2015, 94, 103).

9. As Thompson notes regarding London: ‘It has long been recognised that transport services played an important part among the general influences on suburban growth … a much more complicated statement about the relationship between transport and development emerges from the close analysis of railway promotions and train services in outer west London, and here it is possible to see the inter-dependence of the two, with the promotion of new lines in advanced of suburban housing both by speculative land owners and the railway company’ (Thompson [1982] 1999, 35–36).

10. The consequences of this boom had social effects that were seen later in what has become the biggest economic crisis that the country has ever faced. As Marcinkonski writes ‘The consequences of the bust are in many ways as dramatic and wide-ranging as the dimensions of what was built. More than two million jobs were lost after the collapse of the economy … As of 2010, roughly one in four unemployed Spaniards had come from construction-related industries. By 2012 the unemployment rate has reached 26 per cent’ (Marcinkoski 2015, 61). Not only did the crisis have dramatic effects in the construction industry and the country’s economy but also socially with unemployment rising, and empty housing units left from the boom period.