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

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.