Archives
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Urban fragmentation and residential segregation: New perspectives, ruptures and challenges in the cities of the 21st century
No. 28 (2025)In recent decades, an increase in inequality has been detected, related to post-industrial socioeconomic restructuring, the effects of globalization, the application of neoliberal policies and the decline of the welfare state. Inequality and its various spatial manifestations, including urban fragmentation and residential segregation, have today become one of the issues that attract most attention in the analysis of contemporary cities. Socio-spatial differentiation requires a multidimensional analysis, and specifically, the monograph in this issue 28 of Cities focuses on the relationships between inequality, segregation and fragmentation.
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Urbanistic approaches to (in)formal urbanisation
No. 27 (2024)This issue of the journal Ciudades aims to deconstruct the notion of informality, which has been used to designate what is unplanned or not subject to the normativity of public institutions, and which, as a consequence, has ended up constituting a homogenising and universalist conception of the ‘unplanned’. In this way, the aim is to overcome the rigid and static planned/unplanned (or formal/informal) dominant binomial, and to construct new categories that express the diversity of socio-historical, political and cultural conditions as essential parameters of the development of cities and that liberate urban analysis from reductionist schemes of thought.
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Open spaces for public use as a system: complexity and contradiction
No. 26 (2023)The focus of this issue of Ciudades is on the complexities and contradictions of open (to) public spaces, where the spirit, living or dying, of (urban) life rests, and for which it is hoped that a systemic understanding will facilitate both the analysis and the potential capacity of the whole, greater than that of the parts, to improve our living environments. The contributions presented show that in order to move towards a vital public (and free) open space, multiple commitments are needed, from governance, from technical bodies and administrations, from citizens, from those who use the spaces, and from projects, plans and strategies that do not homogenise subjects or territories.
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Paths towards a healthier city
No. 25 (2022)Cities and their citizens continue to demand an improved, that is, healthier, urban habitat. This issue of Ciudades proposes two paths to broaden the reflection on the habitability of our cities without renouncing the evolution of the sustainable paradigm: first, the capacity of cities to react and resolve situations of risk or disaster, around the idea of resilience; second, the potential that can characterise cities to generate well-being, redefining its profile from a broad and integrating view of urban health: of places, of people and also of institutions.
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Active rural environments: innovative patterns of land planning, administration, participation and governance
No. 24 (2021)This issue of the journal Ciudades brings together different research works whose common axis is their link with different transformative initiatives in the rural environment and whose main protagonists are its inhabitants. Within the variety offered by an issue as wide-ranging as rural environments, different perspectives are addressed, focusing on innovative models of planning, administration, participation and governance. This ranges from the more global, such as access to land, agrotourism, intelligent territories or peasant struggles, to the more specific, such as infrastructures, heritage or the morphological characteristics of smaller municipalities.
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Exploring the intermediate scales: practices and experiences from no-institutional territorial dimensions
No. 23 (2020)Nowadays, in the urban studies field, we experimented with a lack of effectiveness in the explanations based on consolidating paradigms for several dynamics ongoing on European territories. In this issue of Ciudades, we propose a reflection about scales as an analysis tool for planners and researchers in the contemporary city. Among them, we focus on those intermediate scales (sub-regional, inter-municipal, and district/neighborhood) as 'giusta distanza' (adequate dimensions). This scale is needed to detect (i.) trends in the transformation of the post-metropolitan territories (ii.) weaknesses in their development patterns and (iii.) new interpretative figures for phenomena that would not be visible in the analysis based on conventional scales. Therefore, different contributions will support the debate on the effectiveness –and the risks– related to the images and descriptive readings of the contemporary urban spaces based on these "meso" or intermediate dimensions, disconnected from the current institutional borders. This task is even more relevant at this moment, in which urban and regional planning deals with the governance of urbanized regions and the transformation of extended metropolitan areas.
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Medium-Sized Cities: Concepts and Views, Territorial and Urban Profiles
No. 22 (2019)The majority of the world's urban population lives and will continue to live in small and medium-sized cities, which have been gaining weight in global urban policies debates. This issue of Ciudades aims to highlight the importance of medium-sized cities, the study of their distinctive and specific conditions and processes and, above all, their contributions to the urban debate, which have been shown on many occasions to be audacious and innovative. In the current context, it is more necessary than ever to continue learning from the medium-sized cities when it comes to driving urban phenomena towards sustainability, both environmental and social, which may result in a better quality of life for all citizens.
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Urban Heritages
No. 21 (2018)Heritage is an increasingly important issue in urban life.
But from the point of view of urban heritage (the city as a specific type of heritage), which has never been a simple matter and continues to generate intense debates today, we must also incorporate today another vision, that of heritage, from different periods and characteristics.
Without them we cannot understand either the city or the urban heritage in its classic sense, because it is the set of all of them, with their system of relations –spatial, temporal, symbolic– that shapes the current urban reality.
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Regenerating the City. Conditions and limits of an integrated urban strategy
No. 20 (2017)The criticism of previous urban growth model has lead debates, publications, laws and proposals that have kept this topic between the main urban matters. A variety of contributions are making the effort to interpret contemporary urban processes and to classify the characteristics of the inherited spatial areas. Several attempts to clarify needs and degrees of interventions have been done, even pointing out the design criteria that should follow the proposed operations. Furthermore, efforts to identify areas that need to be regenerated have been made, from perspectives such as social vulnerability, building conditions or social and functional segregation.
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Urban history, urbanistic history. Europe, twentieth century
No. 19 (2016)The first great urban movements, exhibitions, congresses and competitions in Europe turn one hundred years old, something that has justified several scientific events that encourage discussions about the history of urbanism and the cities during the twentieth century. The international scope of these centennial events – the express purpose for some of them, an unintended effect as a matter of priority for others – constitutes the evidence of proof of a urbanistic discourse that, as has been noted by several authors, will traverse and transcend countries and even continents, and will conform the common historical substrate of a great number of local and national declinations of modern urban planning. Those centennial events illustrate the internationalization of the production of representations that, predating the global changes of urban space, link in a very specific manner a concrete moment of urban History (understood as history of the city and urban society), and urbanistic History (understood as history of the construction of urban space).
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The counter-reformist urbanism: administrators, developers, financiers, land owners, politicians, ideologues, professionals and snipers, against the city
No. 18 (2015)We live times where the principles that guided the so-called Reformist Urbanism is lapsing into disuse, giving way to precisely those political-administrative practices that it fought.
It can be said that we are witnessing a true Counter-reform that’s exiling the urban presuppositions born under the protection of the rationality that was being created, during the sixties, in Italy to expand later to the rest of Europe, especially Spain.
The principles of the Reformist Urbanism have been described and verified on several occasions, from the common link of the plan as a tool, for the planning of a balanced urban development, for the alternative option to the “urban model of land income” and the equality materialized on the universal access to urban services.
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Proximity, a new urban value?
No. 17 (2014)Urban values are being reformulated, following a line of argument that pursues other viewpoints of the city and with it other projects and forms. From it rises a concept, proximity, that seems to unite the different records that, from several fields, are located on this argumentative line. The “ciudades” magazine wants to delve into this debate and in doing so contribute to strengthen the urban proposal that the twenty-first century requires. For that reason it invites everyone who, form several disciplines, can help to consolidate the analysis and the academic debate about proximity as a new urban value.
The “ciudades” magazine invites everyone to consider all this from the academic research and offers a space to publish works that are developing a topic as wide and interdisciplinary as is the proximity in the city, a new urban value.
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The centre elsewhere? Urban centralities, territorial polarities
No. 16 (2013)After a long period of hatching of the research on cities, with a greater interest in renaming the urban that in giving a true account of how the urban reality happens and its conditions, as the search has found its niche on the enthusiastic outline of emerging phenomena, so it seems necessary to revise in a critical manner the classic concepts of urban science as long as they keep offering coherence to the explanations on our urbanized territories.
This number of the Ciudades magazine presents a reinterpretation of the concept of urban centrality, proposing their use on the interpretation of the current urban facts, both on the territorial or metropolitan scale as well as the local scale.
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Land planning: foundations and practice of a discipline under construction
No. 15 (2012)Ciudades 15 presents its monographic on Territorial Planning, on its varied conceptual frameworks and as it relates to its principles and criteria. Precisely as urban planning has been more heavily on the side of promoters and capital gain, on the side of the paladins of indiscriminate growth and the excellence of free trade, that is, when planning has become a mere instrumental necessity serving private interests rather than public ones, that is when the need, the absence, the impossibility or the levity of territorial planning has been felt more flagrantly.
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The recovery of historical centres
No. 14 (2011)Urban interventions applied on Historical Centres are implying the introduction on said places of certain functionalities, socio-demographic contents and ways of habitat that prompt a spatial behavior of class, which doesn’t avoid the emergence of inconsistencies that, to a certain extent, act as an enduring counterweight. The goal is to revise a whole series of casuistries, extracted from the international experience, with regard to the behavior that is taking centre stage on Historical Centres in recent years.
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Rehabilitation of peripheral neighbourhoods: Debates and challenges
No. 13 (2010)Since the 1950s and, above all, and especially in Spain, since the sixties and seventies, the European cities have witnessed the construction of a substantial part of what today constitutes their continuous urban periphery. In general, in contrast with the more recent surges, these peripheries were nurtured mainly by social housing (on the term’s broadest sense) built most of the time under the shape of collective building typologies and, often, as open urban morphologies (sets of blocks and towers) unequally equipped with urban equipment that, in many countries, have resulted on the creation of a characteristic look (and, at times, stigmatic) of these peripheries.
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Nature in the city: places and processes
No. 12 (2009)The role of “what is natural” on urban space is a matter of interest for urbanism since its beginnings. To build territories and cities in favor of nature is an oft-forgotten principle. This dossier addresses, therefore, of the physical country-city relationship, of the urban tradition of the park, of the systems of urban parks, of the planning and design of green spaces and even of the management of urban and territorial biodiversity.
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City and infrastructure
No. 11 (2008)Infrastructures on their broader sense are at the same time extremely important urban supports and sectorial objects at a different scale. This is the main them of the dossier. Urban planning often adapts to dubious impositions that are inescapable structural realities: traffic models, urban models affected by the real-estate market, supra-local sectorial policies, etc. Conversely, infrastructures of all kinds and their associated services must be properly contemplated by the urban plan: airports, seaports, telecommunication, roads, railways, historic paths, livestock trails, etc.
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Generators of new urbanity: Shopping places
No. 10 (2007)The practice of Urban Planning has tried, on each of the moments in which it has been practiced as such, adapting the methodological contents to the urban reality that is object of Organization and Control. Furthermore, this reality is what has marked the methodological steps to pursue by a field with vocation of “creating city”, of constructing “citizenship”.
Over the last decades of the last century, and on the years following the European “strives”, including the national ones, Urban Planning, being faithful to the principles that generated it as a “discipline of projecting”, faces the spatial planning of the city and the land, more preoccupied, however, about the former rather than the latter, conditioned, over all, by providing the development of specific processes of “land production”. It’s understood that its intention is to combine “land policies” with a “civic spatial planning” that generates a city for its citizens. This is, at least, the theory, the good intentions at the source.
Given the importance of this subject field, we have wanted to dedicate a number of this CIUDADES magazine to deal with these matters in the most universal way possible; that is to say, combining works that tackle European casuistries, This publication has been made, as is the norm for us, collaborating with international university institutions. On this occasion, we must recognize the Laboratory URB&COM of the Polytechnic of Milan directed by Professor Corinna Morandi, since her generous effort and its valuable contributions have made this project possible.
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The Latin American city: Beyond the grid
No. 09 (2005)The problems that affect the American City are so different from those of the European City, that they imply the necessary adoption of specific and precise positions when it comes to their study, and this is an attitude that we must understand even if, on a first approach, it may seem strange to ours methods of analysis. These studies, in a word, are more involved on social, economic and political issues, less than in others of a special type, in the “close spaces” rather than the European studies where, increasingly, the aesthetic-monumental presuppositions prevail, with which it’s expected to dismantle the historical rigors on the Urbanism field.
It seems, in this sense, as if everything was done in Europe, and everything to be done in America, as if the great urban-territorial contradictions are only conveyed on the American geographies. Everything is thought, in America, from social, economical and political points of view, even the city and the territory, while in Europe such approaches have been overcome, confident, as we are, that our “democratic level” allows us to perfect, neither change nor challenge, social constructions on the framework of “well-being” already achieved. Different positions that also show themselves, on the scientific plane.
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Recycling the city
No. 08 (2004)On the so-called age of the “developism”, back when the city was built under the unequivocal sign of the “edificability”, proceeding to an indiscriminate extension of its existent original scope, without other limitations that those imposed by the immediate estate gain, the quantification of what was built hid, substituted and, in some ways, represented the well-known and expected lack of quality of the final product, specially that which was explained by the housing-social equipment duality. The construction of the city, indeed, was more similar to a pact between all those that were interested on this process of development, measured in a quantitative light, than in expressing the “rights” and “freedoms” that could contribute towards the improvement of the living conditions of its inhabitants.
So many contradictions were generated by this way of responding to the construction of the city that there was no other recourse but to question its principles with the goal of recovering unspoken rights, never-met demands. Social movements linked with democratic citizenship organizations, as well as the added impulse of the vital development of a politic democracy by the State, opened the way, as it could not be otherwise, to a much more auspicious social attitude, channeling a process geared towards a decidedly democratic understanding of the practice of urban planning.
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Territorial Dispersion, Landscape and Constructed City: Objectives and Challenges of Urban Planning
No. 07 (2002)The knowledge field of Urbanism, academically speaking, is currently being debated between two instrumental lines of work. On the one hand, that which explores matters related to the Landscape and Territorial scope, closely linked to the recent theories on Sustainability. On the other hand, we find a specific Urban field that tries to expand and overcome, methodologically, its original nineteenth century origins. It’s in this sense that we can say that many of the issues that are currently being assumed on the Urbanism field come from the dialectic encounter with the contradictions that become manifest in the use and abuse that landscape-territorial areas suffer as they are thought to be unnecessary to be subjected or engaged with concrete urban developments.
We mustn’t forget either that from their origin, even if it was shyly at first, Urbanism wanted to be responsible and take charge not only of the Planning of proper urban spaces, of those that were more involved with the problems generated by the inner changes of the city, of its growth, expansion and development but also of the singular special fragments identified with a part of the surrounding territory. Even so, Urbanism is defined from its beginnings as a field eminently “urban”, that is to say, committed to the Planning of “built spaces” or those that are in a position to assume a main role on the extension of that which was already consolidated as urban. Urbanism assumed, above all, its role as a discipline interested in the future construction of cities, without showing special interest in the other kind of Planning that affected non-urban territories, even if it didn’t completely ignore it.
The thematic thus presented justifies the generic title give in this occasion to the Magazine, “Territorial Dispersion, Landscape and Constructed City: Objectives and Challenges of Urban Planning”, a title with which we wish to show, simultaneously, the content and an opening towards new proposals on the specific field of Land Planning of the Urban.
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The Garden City, a hundred years later
No. 06 (2000)To remember the Garden City, a hundred years after its theoretical pronouncement, doesn’t constitute a mere act of historical remembrance. Our wish, on the contrary, is to approach this ephemeris with the purpose, perhaps with the bad conscience, of showing the present relevance of Howard’s way of thinking, if by that we understand his close proximity to the current demands rather than its uncomfortable adaptation to the one which saw it being born.
Our hope is to make the case that the Garden City is, in essence, an idea that can keep answering the current urban requirements as it tried, if without the predicted success, to face those others that were planned on the tail end of the nineteenth century. This doesn’t mean that we are supporting something obsolete or that we are redoing the historic identification of Howard with the time in which he lived. We don’t intend to promote thoughts pinned to past times, nor question Howard’s condition as a historical character closely linked and committed to his time.
The city as an idea, as a form and as management in the context of a society that wants self-government, constitutes part of the thoughts that Howard professed and that we recommend should be re-read and revised in order to refocus the lost horizon of our field.
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Urban advantages and competitiviness between cities
No. 05 (1999)The new ideas that are being developed about the role that the city must fulfill in our present society, referring especially to the European city and partly to the American city, are also adopting very involved with the spatial expression of specific propagandistic aspects. These aspects serve to show, by way of the architectural project, the economic possibilities of the newly defined urban spaces. It must be understand, in that sense, that economy –which can be developed in the context of a concrete urban space—is done as long as said context results attractive, both from projected formal quality concerns as well as that which gathers, in that proposed special context, the correct environment, conditions for cultural production, possibilities for human development, quality of life, etc.
The thought process, therefore, is inserted in a spatial context where very specific conditions of class prevail in order to be able to claim the new economic activity boosted by the environment in which it takes place. The qualitative definition of the city, or rather, the image that it must show to outsiders, constitutes, in this sense, one of the clearest goals for current Urban Planning.
The University Institute for Urban research wishes to join the aforementioned debate betting, in short, for revisiting the most rigorous principles that have formed the practice of Urban Planning in the last century. It goes without saying that we are referring to the practice that has understood the city, and the territory, as geographic entities where, in order to proceed to their “urban organization”, it is required to consider the spatial scope where the basic principles of freedom and democracy are being developed, while obviating those that promote inequality and exclusion.
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Territory and heritage
No. 04 (1998)The Ninth International Conference on the Conservation of Historical Centers and Built Heritage, organized by the Ibero-American Academic Council (CAI), took place in Valladolid between the 7th and 11th of July, 1997. The importance of this meeting and the fact that its organization and coordination fell on the University Institute for Urban Research of the University of Valladolid seem to make imperative the dedication of this fourth number of Ciudades to the contents of this event.
The CAI currently brings together forty Ibero-American universities under the common goal of offering alternatives –from research and educational plans—for the conservation and intervention of built heritage. In fact, from the first conference held in Camagüey (Cuba) in 1989, to the one that took place in Puebla (Mexico) in 1996, the CAI has consolidated as an Ibero-American entity capable of uniting a growing number of universities on the consideration of the methods and tools that allow us to do a scientific and social practice that will impact on the conservation of our historical centers and, in general, on everything built that has heritage characteristics.
The University Institute for Urban Research of the University of Valladolid, in its name and that of the Ibero-American Academic Council, wants to express their appreciation to all the participants, both people and institutions and the group of collaborating agencies in the different activities of the Ninth International Conference on the Conservation of Historical Centers and Built Heritage: Valladolid City Hall, Segovia City Hall, Superior Council of Spanish Architects, Segovia’s Savings Bank and Monte de Piedad, Caja Salamanca and Soria, Provincial Council of Valladolid, Higher Technical School of Architecture of Valladolid and Iberia, official Congress carrier. The University Institute for Urban Research also wants to express their sincere appreciation of the funding institutions that made the event materially possible: the University of Valladolid, Regional Council for the Environment and Land Planning, the Education and Culture Council of the Regional Government of Castilla y León and the Autonomic Council of the Associations of Architects of Castilla y León.
