Designing Madrid, 1985–1997

Designing Madrid, 1985–1997

Malcolm Alan Compitello,

University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA




The Plan General de Ordenación Urbano de Madrid (PGOUM) of 1985 is a crucial watershed in the planning processes that substantially altered Madrid’s built environment during a particularly important moment in the city’s urban development. An examination of the PGOUM’s role in transforming Madrid’s urban environment offers one particular example of the urbanization of capital and the urbanization of consciousness’s effects on the urban process. This essay is particularly interested in how the tension between spatial production and consumption played out during a period in which consumption-based strategies of urban growth and design began to supplant the last stand for a radical modernist-based use of urban planning as a way to transform the urban order and achieve a level of social justice. The concept of selling place, so well explained by scholars from [Harvey, 1989, Harvey, 1990, Harvey, 1996, Harvey, 2000, Harvey, 2001, Logan and Molotch, 1987 and Kearns and Philo] and [Zukin, 1989], to name just a few who have worked on this topic, provides a useful shorthand for examining how recent more flexible forms of capitalist accumulation stress urban regions and how cities react with ever more consumption-based solutions which only exacerbate urban problems and push the issue of social justice—"whose city is it?" to borrow a term from [Harvey, 1996]—to the back burner.

In Madrid, a consumption-based urban boosterism approach to the planning process was inexorably hegemonic but vigorously resisted in certain sectors. Examining how graphic design figured into urban planning battles offers an interesting example of the synergies between capital, the production and consumption of space and cultural creation. The argument made in this essay follows Harvey’s various explanations of these relationships closely. In The Urban Experience, Harvey observes that it is in the urban context that "firmer connections between the rules of capitalist accumulation and the ferment of social, political and cultural forms can be identified. By so doing, I reiterate that the urban is not a thing but a process and that the process is a particular exemplar of capitalist accumulation in real space and time" ([Harvey, 1989], p. 247). It is the continual symbiotic transferences between milieu and product that shapes our perception and experience of the urban. Unraveling the evolving relationships between capital, urban consciousness and cultural production and commodification goes a long way to clarifying the dynamics of cultural change in Madrid during the period that I address.

The PGOUM is the product of a heady political moment of transformation and difficult economic times. The victory of the Spanish Socialist Party, or PSOE, in municipal elections held in 1979, gave it control of Spain’s major cities and was a springboard for the elections of 1982, that swept the PSOE into national power with an absolute majority it would hold for almost a decade. The economic realities did not match the political euphoria of the moment. Spain, like other countries around the world, remained deeply affected by the most recent crisis in capitalist accumulation. [Extzarreta,, 1991] provides a wealth of information on this issue.

This situation made it difficult for the city’s government to address the inequities it had promised to right in its electoral campaign. The economic prognosis for little growth informed the way the PSOE’s urban planners addressed the planning process, including the resolution of the problems it inherited from the Franco dictatorship’s laissez faire approach to planning. During the long dictatorship, planning was scrutinized closely in accord with an anti-democratic political agenda that was basically unchanged throughout the decades. At the same time, the dictatorship turned a blind eye to the way that private investors wreaked havoc on the city’s built environment, while lining their pockets handsomely. De [De Teran, 1999] is the most comprehensive source of information on this subject.

In spite of these obstacles, from the time it took office until the PGOUM took effect in 1985, the socialist government in Madrid undertook an intensive effort to fit the plan for the city into the political and economic realities of the moment. The moving force behind the planning process was Eduardo Mangada, city council member responsible for Urban Affairs at the time the plan was being revised. In his introduction to Critieros y objetivos para revisar el Plan General en el municipio de Madrid ([Mangada, 1981]), Mangada addresses in broad strokes the bases for the planning process and the steps to be taken to rectify the situation that the PSOE inherited. 1 These are spelled out in a series of 11 objectives and 8 criteria for revising the plan.

[Mangada, 1989] explains that the PGOUM sought to work a fundamental change on how planning affected the built environment. He also reiterates that the plan responds to crucial issues confronting a specific place at a given moment in time. The economic issues spelled out above were principal among them, as was the fact that from the mid-1970s on Madrid had begun to lose population. The plan Mangada and his colleagues developed was clearly motivated by the desire to be inclusive both in process and in scope. It was based on bottom-up decision-making and solicited input from all sectors of the city’s population. Its goal was social justice and making the city inhabitable for all segments of the population. Preserving the urban core from decay, guaranteeing adequate government subsidized housing, and reformulating urban access by emphasizing public and limiting private transportation are all prominent features of this proposed transformation. The first of the objectives listed in the Criterios y objetivos, 2 sums up the issue best "Luchar contra la segregación social de la ciudad impidiendo la expulsión de las capas populares de las áreas centrales y del municipio de Madrid, confirmando el carácter popular de los barrios que secualamente lo han sido" (X).

In fact it was exactly the kind of political planning process one would expect from a political party, which, at the time the plan was written, actively promoted its position of defending social justice. It is significant in this regard that the Avance del plan, published in [Recuperar Madrid, 1982], is titled Recuperar Madrid. The verb recuperar [to recuperate] captures eloquently the sense of restoring the rule of law to the city and its built environment after decades of governmental and private sector abuse during the dictatorship. It also resonates with the idea of restoring a sense of wholeness to the built environment and those who inhabit it.

De [De Teran, 1999] believes that Italian city planning had a crucial impact on the planners who devised Madrid’s radical 1985 plan. Nevertheless the influence of Lefebvre’s work on cities is palpable, if unstated. Chapter eight of the Avance, "Propuestas para recuperar Madrid, " begins with a section titled "Garantizar el ‘derecho de la ciudad’," plucked directly from Lefebvre’s Le droit à la ville ([Lefebvre, 1968]) translated into Spanish in 1982 as El derecho a la ciudad ([Lefebvre, 1982]) Planning was to be used politically to assure the rights to the city for all. In this way, the PGOUM must be seen as an attempt to reverse the unfettered urban growth that had such deleterious consequences for Madrid’s built environment during the dictatorship. It also meant to attenuate the processes of flexible accumulation that, by the time the plan was in process, had begun to overtake planning around the world, and would remake Madrid according to a different model.

Given the serious problems that Madrid faced, a decision was made to privilege urban projects over larger planning issues. This has led some to criticize the plan’s "sutured" nature, a phrase used by the noted architect Rafael Moneo to refer to the results of the plan, and a characterization which still caused Mangada to bristle during the interview Urbanismo published with him in 1989 ([Mangada, 1989]: p 26). Ensuing from this approach was an emphasis on the city center and a relative lack of attention to the idea of Madrid as an urban region. Negotiations of issues of scale were much less important in 1985 in Madrid than they would become a decade later, when competing exigencies of European Union, regional, national and local planning would lead to significant issues of rescaling (see [Marston, 2000] for an excellent overview of the literature on scale).

Urgent problems required quick solutions so that the spatial inequalities that characterized life in Madrid could be ameliorated and the city could provide a more equitable distribution of resources for residents. Putting a stop to the speculative urbanism that was destroying the city center was well intentioned and, in effect, it did much to change the image of Madrid and improve the lives of those who lived there—Figure 1, from the appropriately titled Recuperar Madrid, vividly portrays the kind of destruction of the urban patrimony that the PGOUM wanted to arrest. Many times buildings that in more enlightened urban areas were saved and restored were replaced with ones completely out of keeping with the sense of place into which they were inserted.


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Fig. 1. Destruction of urban patrimony



Nevertheless, the approach to refiguring Madrid that the PSOE adopted, out of necessity opened the door for later city governments (that did not share the socialist planners’ desire to use planning as a tool for achieving social justice), to use design over planning to effect a different kind of change in the city and the urban region, one predicated not on social justice but on urban boosterism and selling place., 3

The project approach fixed in place the contributions of the high profile architects who were hired by government agencies and the private sector to take on the projects, lending validity to the results, but in some ways compromising the process. Among the most visible of these is the remodeling of the Atocha station by Rafael Moneo, the lynchpin of efforts to redesign Madrid’s southern regions that had been badly neglected during the dictatorship. Two other high profile examples are the redesign of the Puerta de Toledo area by Navarro Baldeweg, and the residential housing along the M-30 beltway by Saénz de Oiza.

De [De Teran, 1999] harbors a deep skepticism of the completely morphological approach to solving Madrid’s problems that he attributes to the PGOUM. Many critical geographers working from an entirely different political posture from de Terán—whose criticism of the PSOE’s morphological approach comes from a distrust of the PSOE’s leftist politics—have also pointed out that morphological approaches tend to privilege the produced built environment rather than the process as the ultimate measure of the value of planning. This did turn out to be a deleterious and unintended side effect of the PSOE’s leftist planning. The emphasis on slick outward appearances did not always coincide with the planners’ diagnosis of the city’s problems or the solutions they proposed.

In effect, there seems to be an internal contradiction at the heart of the workings of the PSOE in Madrid, with the planners occupying the radical left wing most aligned with issues of social justice while sectors of the municipal government embraced the more centrist positions that characterized the PSOE’s posture at the national level. When we begin to look at the economics of party politics, we can see just how large the internal rift was. Materialist historians have pointed out that the PSOE’s solution to fixing the crisis in capitalist accumulation that had gripped the Spanish economy since the late 1970s was to embrace the economic policies of neoliberalism rather than advance a more radical economic agenda. To jump start the economy, the PSOE, once it swept to national power in 1982, opted for an economic strategy based on privatization and internationalization. Middle class families saw their opportunities for home ownership dwindle with the privatization of the housing industry. Workers found their jobs eliminated when Spanish owners sold out to foreign concerns for quick and high profits. Many of these same companies ceased operations once they had extracted their own profits, leaving the Spanish workers jobless (see [Extzarreta,, 1991] on the PSOE’s neoliberal turn and González [González Ordovás, 2000] on the housing problem).

Even before the PGOUM was published, it was being outflanked by the major thrust of a new centrist agenda for the PSOE. The planners on the left spoke the language of social justice while those controlling the purse strings and controlling the national agenda for the party increasingly spoke the language of flexible accumulation. Indeed, as [Pradera, 1992] points out, it was really the Socialists’ economic excesses and scandals that eventually contributed to the erosion of its electoral base. Many of the major parts of the plan were almost stillborn. Difficult economic times exacerbated the situation, and inadequate funding made substantial investments, such as public transportation on which the plan hinged, impossible.

Private vehicles and their use became a major issue. The PSOE wanted to reduce dependence on cars and limit their access to parts of the city center. As time wore on, subsequent rightist administrations promoted a vision of the city tied to affluent northern and eastern suburbs, which continue to expand rapidly and whose residents are less interested in public transportation than they are in quick access to the center of the city by private vehicle. Housing was also an issue. The government began to invest less and less in public housing and private developers were reticent to embrace a plan for housing that preached social justice instead of the miracle of the market place.

The myriad, subsequent planning documents at the regional and city levels are decidedly different than the first socialist PGOUM. Key among them are the [Avance, 1993], the [Revisión de la Plan General Urbano de Madrid, 1997], and the Plan Regional de Estrategia [Plan Regional de estrategia territorial, 1997]. The one exception was the Doumento preparatorio de bases [Plan Regional de estrategia territorial, 1995] for the Plan Regional de Estrategia Territorial issued while the PSOE still controlled the government of the Community of Madrid. Many of the more radical members of mayor Enrique Tierno Galván’s municipal government elected in 1979 moved to elected and appointed positions in the regional government in 1984. Chief among them was Joaquin Leguina, elected as the president of the Comunidad in 1984. He brought with him Mangada, who in his new position as Consajero de Política Territorial continued the radical practice he began in the city government, and in fact on numerous occasions he tried to fix the problems he perceived in the new directions the planning process was taking in the city of Madrid, with actions he was able to take at the regional level, beginning in this way the rescaling between urban and regional alluded to above., 4

Critics of the plan, and they were legion, accused the planners of advancing an ideological agenda. Of course they did, and of course every planning agenda is to a greater or lesser degree ideological. The political right hammered home at this issue as part of a strategy of deflecting attention from the deleterious effects of predatory capitalism in the entire process. In fact, subsequent planning documents for the city, and later the Comunidad de Madrid, take as their point of departure a sharp criticism of the shortsightedness of the PGOUM. The alternatives that are proposed are decidedly less interested in social justice and more attuned to selling place and promoting a growth-oriented vision of the city. The Avance of the revision of the 1997 plan for Madrid devotes, for example, dozens of pages to explaining why Madrid should vie to be the site for the Olympics in the new millennium, and how it would have a positive impact on the city’s image. The consumer, not the producer or the resident drives the process of planning, aligning this plan and the Madrid that it is helping to construct with the serial versions of cities of consumption that crop up all over the world.

These plans respond, in short, to a particular vision of the city that placed more and more emphasis on design, and image. Graphic design becomes a crucial element in the process of reshaping the image of Madrid, of re-presenting the city as a modern or post-modern European metropolis. It is part of an initially progressive socialist government’s project of emphasizing the absolute break with forty years of dictatorship. But it was, and still is, a powerful tool to promote a saleable image of that political change, one well in keeping with consumption-based urban strategies.

In addition to print media, books, newspapers, journals, poster advertising, commercial catalogues and products, even comic books, graphic design has grown to include the design of corporate identities for both public and private entities, even every manner of public signage from mailboxes to road signs to currency. All of these were given a new look as Spain put its dictatorial past and that dictatorship’s horrendous design legacy behind, it in a way consonant with the constitution and subsequent marketing of a new image of place. Public and private sector entities employed the services of important graphic designers to design virtually everything, in the hopes of putting into the public’s imaginary the image of a new, eminently urban, country. That many of these entities had their headquarters in Madrid made the city a design laboratory, with flashy new images appearing almost daily.

[Satué, 1997] points out that "sin duda alguna, las mayores inquietudes editoriales de semanarios y publicaciónes periódicas de los años ochenta corresponden a Madrid una ciudad que supo reencontrar el papel de su cultura urbana" (223). He cites the role of magazines like La luna de Madrid, (Figure 2) Madriz (Figure 3), Madrid me mata, El europeo, El paseante and others which employed the talents of graphic artists like Javier de Juan, (Figure 4) Ceesepe, (Figure 5) Oscar Mariné (Figure 6), "El cubrí" and Juan Antonio Sicilia in order to shape a cultural image for Madrid. The caption of one of de Juan’s covers for the trendy and edgy magazine that was the bell weather of Spanish urban culture in the 1980s, La luna de Madrid, "Vámonos que nos vamos!" says it all—a young vibrant city on the move. It provides the urban imaginary on which subsequent visions of the city were literally built. It is both the strength of the individual artists and the sheer number of publications whose design and content proliferated during this period that fed the image of a transformed city—and nation—that was charting a new path, one that was distancing itself from the immediate past and approaching European and American ideas of urban identity at a vertiginous pace.


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Fig. 2. Cover of La Luna de Madrid 6 (1984)




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Fig. 3. Cover for Madriz, 3 (1984)




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Fig. 4. Cover for La Luna de Madrid 22 (1985) by Javier de Juan




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Fig. 5. Cover for El Víbora by Ceesepe




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Fig. 6. Covers for Madrid me mata by Oscar Mariné



Readers associate with Spanish publications whose physical appearance is quite similar to important European and American ones. Moreover, by presenting side by side the work of major European and Spanish theorists, designers, photographers etc. these publications help to project Spain as essentially tied to Europe and other world centers. This strategy promotes Spain and sells its image as transformed and up-to-date. Moreover these graphic artists were designing an image of urban identity that would find its way into the work of fashion, and industrial designers who would project the image of Spain in the rest of the world. A vibrant Spain on the move; graphic artists (like film directors, fashion designers and others) were helping to, as Martínez [Martínez Bouza, 1986] phrases it, "generar ídolos y vender España" (49).

A look at the graphic design of the urban plans for Madrid in the 1980s and 1990s can provide a suggestive window on the mechanics of the process and the role of design in Madrid. The publication of the PGOUM was preceded by a series of documents, some destined for wide public distribution, some of a more technical nature. In the first category are two documents: [Conocer Madrid, 1982] ( Figure 7) provides a pocket-sized introduction to the history of the city, while Recuperar Madrid (Figure 8) is of a somewhat larger size, and as mentioned above, is the Avance for the PGOUM.


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Fig. 7. Cover for [Conocer Madrid, 1982]




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Fig. 8. Cover for Recuperar Madrid



Both have slick white covers featuring significant images, and the graphic design for the latter is impressive for the period in which is was produced. Conocer features a modern reproduction of one of the most enduring symbols in the city’s popular urban imaginary: "Don Nicanor Tocando su Tambor." These children’s toys were hand crafted of paper, wood and cardboard by artisans who sold them on street corners and in Madrid’s flea market, the Rastro, mostly during holiday periods. They are a key indication of the PSOE’s desire to demonstrate its commitment to its working class roots when projecting the image of the city it wanted to convey in these documents. Recuperar, which was the first cut at presenting to a wide audience the PSOE’s plan for Madrid, features an image of the Puerta de Alcalá constructed during the reign of Spain’s only true Enlightenment monarch, Carlos III, in the 8th century. The arch is one of the most widely produced symbols of the city. It resonates with Madrid’s connections to its Enlightenment heritage and the image of the arch appears on everything from postcards to tee shirts. That the municipal government chose as cover images for these two important and widely distributed publications on the planning process images representing the popular and the rational cannot be overlooked. They link the PSOE’s working class base and its agenda for modernization in a compelling graphic manner and underscores the relationship between modernist urban planning and the construction of a city based on equal access for all.

[Satué, 1997] points out that one of the great design innovations in Spain’s book trade was Carlos Barral’s decision to use important photographers’ striking black and white photos against a stark white background for his legendary Biblioteca Breve collection of novels at the Seix Barral publishing house. The graphic innovation of these books ended with their covers, however. The design of the body of the text was shockingly ordinary and not congruent with the avant-garde cover art. A similar malady afflicts Conocer and Recuperar, whose bland interior design contrasts with the cover design art. Conocer is all black and white done in a nondescript typeface. Recuperar does include some full-color photos and maps and its design is a step up in quality from the design of Conocer. Nevertheless, given the quality of the design work in Madrid during the same period and the stature of some of its designers, a number with significant leftist leanings like Corazón, and the fact than many important designers (Corazón, Cruz Novillo, Gil, etc.) had done a significant amount of public sector graphical work, the design of these publications is rather ordinary. This is surprising, since the PSOE used these documents to influence the urban consciousness of the city’s inhabitants about what the city was and what path its immediate future should take. The PGOUM itself is even worse (Figure 9). The cover is visually uninteresting and the body is equally uninspired. Even the collection of maps, photos and other graphics found in Recuperar is absent.


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Fig. 9. Cover for the PGOUM 1985



The cover of the [Avance, 1993] for the revised plan clearly indicates how design and planning itself had changed. It is visually interesting, with suggestive if impressionistic graphics—a far cry from the images evoking a connection with Madrid’s popular urban imaginary or its Enlightenment heritage ( Figure 10). It is also significant that the Plan General now has its own well-designed corporate identity, conspicuous on the graphic design for the cover of the Avance (Figure 11). The inside mirrors the sleek cover. Full cover photos, graphs and charts are linked through an impressive and modern layout. The result is a considerably longer document, but one that does not have any more text. This fact is significant. One could mount an argument that the slick new design of urban planning documents is simply the result of an in improved economy, which could budget much for those documents, while at the same time new design technologies helped keep prices under control. One could also point out that since design had become such a part of the urbanized consciousness of a new Madrid on the move, slick design for urban planning documents was to be expected.


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Fig. 10. Cover of the Avance de la Revisión del PGOUM, 1997




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Fig. 11. Logo for the Nuevo Plan General (NPG)



Design was becoming more and more profitable and even edgy cultural journals hewed to the market. Several examples underscore the increasingly important role of design within the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and consumption. [Olivares, 1982] is an interesting account of Lapiz, the magazine she edited, one of the first to devote significant attention to fashion and design and to make the kinds of connections that sketched above. It is significant that one of the first things done when planning Lapiz was to commission a survey to see what niche in the market for cultural journals the new publication could best occupy. La Luna de Madrid was the best of the avant-garde cultural magazines of the 1980s. It was founded by a number of young cultural rebels. Yet, in spite of its combative nature, La Luna was so successful that it could command very high rates from advertisers and won the support of distributors because it was always ready for the newsstands on time. The exigencies of the market place begin, we see, to play an increasingly important role in the dissemination of well-designed culture and culture having to do with design.

[Satué, 2000] offers an important perspective on design in the latter decades of the 20th century. The sixties were particularly important, since this period represented a period of innovation which "surgió siempre de la oposición, incluso en la "España del desarrollo," tiempo todavía ingrata para la empresa, la sociedad y la cultura"(39). It is Satué’s assessment of the social role of design since the seventies which is telling and that we must keep in mind when framing our examination, for he draws sharply the transformation of design from a tool to change society to an integral part of the selling mechanisms of a feverish flexible accumulation, that increasingly sells all forms of culture and one of that systems most important products.

El diseño entendido como una forma de cultura, ha sufrido la extraña metamorfosis de pasar de ser un arma en los años previos a la transición a ser un juguete en la actualidad, pasando de la transición a la transacción; es decir de un servicio comprometido con la revolución cultural al de su sometimiento a la industria de la cultura (38–39).

A lack of balance between content and form, a loss of engagement with social transformation and resistance to capital, the rush to commodify and sell everything is, according to Satué what characterizes recent Spanish design. That explains why the planning documents of the PSOE look the way they do and evoke the image of place rooted in the popular and the rational in the manner in which they do. It is almost as if the plans had so much to say and wanted so much to say it that the design was ancillary, that making the social changes was more important than dealing with images. It is significant that the planners, for the most part from the more radical parts of the PSOE, would lose this battle not only to the Partido Popular but also to the neo-neo-liberals in their own party. The rearguard battle in some way is signified in the design of the planning documents. No subsequent plans would look they way they did and, more importantly, none would say what they did, nor defend what they did nor resist the pull of flexible capital as they tried to do. That is a major loss. [Duncombe, 1997] and [Frank, 1997] point out that capital can now commodify anything in its defense and image, even the most iconoclastic of images and ideas, even urban planning documents where form now precedes rather than follows function. Design gets caught up in this pull and tug and what gets lost in the translation is the ability to resist.

The PGOUM was perhaps Spain’s last great attempts at rational modernist urban planning with an emphasis on social justice, an attempt to answer the question of "whose city is it?" with a resounding answer: those who live there. That it collapsed under the internal pressures of socialism’s failure to confront more flexible consumption-based visions of the urban, and of that vision’s rapid expansion under less enlightened governments, is sad. The resistance to capital once played out on the center stage of planning was replaced with slick images portraying a city of consumption and growth. Social justice disappeared like the individual artisans who produced their Don Nicanores—they were pushed to the wayside. Their disappearance is a loss deeply felt. It is a shame those "graphically challenged" urban planners lost their battle.


References
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Avance, 1993. Avance, Revisión del Plan General Urbano de Madrid. , Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Madrid (1993).

Conocer Madrid, 1982. Conocer Madrid (1982). Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Madrid.

De Teran, 1999. F. De Teran, Historia del urbanismo en España III Siglos XIX y XX. , Catedra, Madrid (1999).

Duncombe, 1997. S. Duncombe, Notes from Underground. Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. , Verso, London (1997).

Extzarreta,, 1991. Extzarreta, M (1991) (Ed) La reestructuración del Capitalismo en España. Icaria Fuhem, Barcelona.

Frank, 1997. T. Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and Rise of Hip Consumerism. , University of Chicago, Chicago (1997).

González Ordovás, 2000. M. González Ordovás, Políticas y estrategias urbanas. , Madrid, Fundamentos (2000).

Harvey, 1989. D. Harvey, The Urban Experience. , Johns Hopkins, Baltimore (1989).

Harvey, 1990. D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. , Blackwell, Cambridge, MA (1990).

Harvey, 1996. D. Harvey, Justice Nature and the Geography of Difference. , Blackwell, Cambidge, MA (1996).

Harvey, 2000. Harvey, D (2000) Spaces of Utopia. Berkeley, California.

Harvey, 2001. Harvey, D (2001) Spaces of Capital. Routledge, New York.

Kearns and Philo. Kearns, G and Philo, C (Eds) Selling Places. The City and Cultural Capital, Past and Present, Pergamon, Oxford.

Lefebvre, 1968. H. Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville. , Anthropos, Paris (1968).

Lefebvre, 1982. H. Lefebvre, El derecho a la ciudad. , Peninsula, Barcelona (1982).

Logan and Molotch, 1987. J. Logan and H. Molotch, Urban Fortunes. The Political Economy of Place. , Berkeley, California (1987).

Mangada, 1981. E. Mangada, Criterios y objetivos para revisar el Plan General en el municipio de Madrid. , Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Madrid (1981).

Mangada, 1989. E. Mangada, Entrevista. Urbanismo 7 (1989), pp. 25–38.

Mangada, 1990. E. Mangada, El diseño urbanístico de la grandes ciudades. Alfoz 73 (1990), pp. 39–44.

Marston, 2000. S. Marston, The Social Construction of Scale. Progress in Human Geography (2000), pp. 219–242. Abstract-GEOBASE | Full Text via CrossRef

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Olivares, 1982. R. Olivares, Genesis de una revista. Lapiz 1 (1982), pp. 68–73.

Plan General de Ordenación Urbana de Madrid, 1985. Plan General de Ordenación Urbana de Madrid 1985. Memoria General. Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Madrid.

Plan Regional de estrategia territorial, 1995. Plan Regional de estrategia territorial. Documento preparatorio de las bases (1995). Communidad de Madrid, Madrid.

Plan Regional de estrategia territorial, 1997. Plan Regional de estrategia territorial 1997 (1997). Comunidad de Madrid, Madrid.

Pradera, 1992. J. Pradera, Las pasiones del poder. El PSOE tras diez años de gobierno (1982–1992). Claves de la razón práctica 26 (1992), pp. 32–42.

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Satué, 2000. E. Satué, Empresa, sociedad y cultura en el siglo de los signos. In: A. Corazón et al.Signos del Siglo. 100 años de diseño gráfico en España, Ministero de Economía y Hacienda, Madrid (2000), pp. 31–43.

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Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-520-621-6104


1 The journal [Alfoz, 1990] also published a number of studies on urban issues in the city. The vigorously argued positions maintained by those writing in Alfoz—an indispensable source of information for those writing on the urban process in Madrid—attests to the timeliness of the issues. The monographic number [73, 1990] on the new plan is a vital resource as are the issues that Urbanismo dedicated to the topic 13 (1991) and Urbanismo 20 (1993)

2 Criterios was the fist six volumes issued by the Oficina Municipal del Plan in a series called Temas Urbanas.

3 [Mangada, 1990] makes clear the disdain with which the architect of the PGOUM of 1985 viewed the change in direction of urban planning once the Partido Popular took office. "En los momentos en que escribo estas reflexiones me llevan a valorar el "Avance de Revisióndel Plan de Madrid" como un documento altamente incoherente, imprudente y poco credible" (44).

4 [Mangada, 1989] makes the following comment about city-region relationships. "No estoy adelantando aquí una controversia más con el Ayuntamiento de Madrid. Creo que la función de muchas de estas áreas de entorno, de la M-30 para afuera, no son inteligibles estrictamente como necesidades municipales, sino como necesidades regionales" (32) By the time he made that statement he was in charge of planning for the regional government of Madrid still in the hands of the PSOE while the municipal government was in control of the Partido Popular.



Cities
Volume 20, Issue 6 , December 2003, Pages 403-411
Part Special Issue: Cities of Spain