The traditional city: behind the façade, the shape of the ground

Abstract

The starting point is a teaching experience at the ETSAG (School of Architecture, Granada), which proposed to the students the feeling walking around through the city. The paper, after outlining this experience, continues arguing on the complex nature of urban change and recommends paying more attention to the urban morphology and to the processes of evolution of particular cities, commonly neglected by urban stories that are anchored in general, national, social and economic factors. It describes the processes of commercial and tertiary specialization and the residential emptying of our historic centers, where the meaning of space-time is fading. Arterial streets, specialized for traffic, are an example of this loss. The morphological study is proposed as the basis for an encounter with memory.