Archives - Page 2

To think the city, vitality and limits of the urban plan
No. 03 (1996)

To opt for the Urban Plan, for the Project of City, understood as a long-term process with the ability to define and specify specific interventions, whose objectives should be framed by the transformation and use of space (Urban and Territorial) in a democratic and popular key, is the commitment that becomes manifest through the theoretical and practical action of professionals, university professors and researchers that begin to meet around this small cultural realm that we call “Ciudades”.

Today we propose to “think the city2 and, for that, we say that there is nothing better than to bet on our quintessential tool, that is, Urban Planning. With that we don’t want to say that our choice manifests in an acritical scope, where it isn’t possible to question Planning’s reach, often limited and authoritarian. We wish to move within the cultural coordinates that were impeccably described by the author Saramago on his extraordinary “Blindness”. Our take is critical, to the point of renouncing, if that is the conclusion to be reached, to this tool that today we keep claiming as the most throughout proceeding to Project the City.

We establish, therefore, that the hypothesis is that the most throughout theories and thoughts on the city have been and will continue to be developed from the practice of Urban Planning. May it serve as an example, and thus its presence on this number of “Ciudades”, the theoretical postulates that identify the works, theoretical and practical, of G. Campos Venuti, to whom we dedicate some pages of this magazine for its extremely deserved investment as Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Valladolid. We must read, attentively and thoroughly, his pronouncement.
Teaching Urbanism. An European perspective
No. 02 (1995)

The chosen topic for the second fascicle of Ciudades, the teaching of urbanism on the Schools of Architecture, has an evident relevance presently. On the one hand the introduction of new study plans on the universities of the European Union, more or less oriented to their common guidelines, increases the feeling of transition and the recent factors of disciplinal crisis. On the other hand the badly articulated proliferation of postgraduate programs on urbanism and land planning, born from private interests or the isolated action of some universities, asks the question of what is the knowledge on urbanism that must take place in the Schools.

The natural consequence should rest on a broad consideration, as it manifests on every article of this magazine, and yet the debate isn’t been intense, something that increases even more the value of the different opinions that are developed here. In this introduction we underscore then relevant aspects both in the three opinion pieces by three Spanish professors as well as the four monographs by four foreign professors, each referred to their own country.
Urban ideology, 25 years later
No. 01 (1993)

Twenty-five years ago a text by the young architect Fernando Ramón was published under the title Misery of the urban ideology: Those we knew it found themselves inexorably prompted towards reflection. The booklet, of small format and a reduced number of pages, was clearly structured and an enjoyable read. Its topic was the ideological critique, as the evident reference to the classical text of Marx (that was lost in following editions) suggested. But the book was also much more: it was the recovery of the act of touching base with the most notable texts of European urbanism (a curious paradox: that a critique served to recover that which was critiqued), that since the republican years, with an aflame García Mercadal, Torres Balbás or so many others, had been utterly obscured. And it was also, in the years of the worst university crisis of the franquism, one more incentive for the rebirth of the leftist culture in the interior of the country. How to be, then, insensitive to its messages? A whole wide generation of urbanist was formed under its shadow, and for many of us it was the first text of urbanism that spoke to us. It was new air.

What remains today of that drive? The echo of that voice sounds far away when, perhaps, it becomes necessary for it to be louder. Everything has changed and many beliefs have cracked, and urbanists, still searching (it has been so many decades!) for a place and cultural respectability struggle around some basic unanimities today; a hand of silence silences ideologies and certain approaches constitute the legitimate common and undisputed tradition of urban planning. Everyone, more or less, accepts unreservedly the same or similar (virtually identical) thesis on mobility, conservation, densities, place, urban form… To re-read now that ’68 book turns out to be, therefore, wounding. It has become an uncomfortable guest in libraries. Maybe just that repelling effect should suffice to throw it back into centre stage.

In this context, and with such an intention, calling for that awkwardness that we hope proves fertile, we present the new magazine for urban critic under the name Ciudades that the reader has in their hands. Its periodicity, annual. Its line, open. Its goal, to insert a backbone to the urban debate, upset the embers that, perhaps, burn under the ashes. In this first number, organized around the discussion on urban ideology, seven articles of professionals and researchers of the urban factor are reunited; and it includes as well a fragment of the book formerly mentioned as well as a text written by its author in which, calmly, he remembers the circumstances around its drafting. I would respectfully wish to offer this first number of Ciudades as an acknowledgement to this author that since then has been true to himself as no one else has, and who has, directly or through his publications and works, urged us towards an unfaltering rationality.