No. 01 (1993): Urban ideology, 25 years later

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.