Morphology, urban deterioration and housing price in Madrid

Abstract

Recent financial crisis has revealed the extraordinary discrepancies between the prosperity that our economy was enjoying until a few months ago and her real material ground. The real-estate universe seems to be the clearest candidate to illustrate this discrepancy with a spectacular collapse, giving finally, though with notable and inexplicable delay, the reason to those that announced the "snap of the bubble" long time ago. A prick that, till now, has not reached the dimensions predicted. This paradoxical behavior and the contradictory evolution of prices for decades, regarding the market laws that govern them in theory, are at the beginning of this research that leads to the most complex development of a theoretical frame in which social and urban dimensions acquire a determinant role. This new frame articulates the evolution of urban morphology with the forms of housing and a new approach to the "political economy" of the social space. Urban deterioration and the phenomena observed of social exclusion and dispossession of the city integrate the pathology linked to the evolution of these models in “La Almendra Central” of Madrid, used as a laboratory.