Alvaro Sevilla-Buitrago | Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (original) (raw)

Journal articles by Alvaro Sevilla-Buitrago

Arquitectura , 2024

Análisis de la evolución de la región madrileña y su planificación territorial en el siglo XXI.

Ciudad y Territorio, 2023

A pesar de la abundante literatura disponible sobre el fenómeno de la “informalidad”, se ha prest... more A pesar de la abundante literatura disponible sobre el fenómeno de la “informalidad”, se ha prestado una atención menor a la instrumentalización de la dimensión morfológica como dispositivo de gobierno. Este artículo explora el rol de la ideología formalista en la producción de imaginarios espaciales excluyentes a través de la noción de “fetichismo morfológico”. Con frecuencia el discurso urbanístico ha movilizado este mecanismo en la estigmatización de grupos subalternos, contribuyendo a forjar una idea arquetípica de informalidad vinculada a la pobreza. El trabajo ofrece una breve síntesis de los debates sobre informalidad y sus lagunas, elabora la categoría de fetichismo morfológico para estudiar las lógicas que delimitan lo informal como “otro” del orden socioespacial hegemónico, y explora distintas expresiones históricas y geográficas de este mecanismo, mostrando su continuidad en el tiempo.

Architectural Review, 2022

Maintaining a public space commons requires constant collective appropriation and activism, auton... more Maintaining a public space commons requires constant collective appropriation and activism, autonomous in the face of both state and market control.

Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, 2020

La noción de 'derecho a la ciudad' es hoy un eslogan popular tanto en la academia como en las pol... more La noción de 'derecho a la ciudad' es hoy un eslogan popular tanto en la academia como en las políticas institucionales y los movimientos sociales. Muchas de estas manifestaciones, sin embargo, se alejan del sentido inicial que Henri Lefebvre asignó al concepto hace más de 50 años. Su fórmula original era en sí misma esquiva y requiere una contextualización en el ciclo de trabajos desarrollados por el autor entre 1960 y mediados de los 1970s. El trabajo de Lefebvre en este período ha sido presentado rutinariamente como una crítica de la arquitectura y el urbanismo del Movimiento Moderno, triunfantes tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Sin embargo parte de las indagaciones del diseño de esta época anticipan, de forma contradictoria, las inquietudes que después encontrarán pleno desarrollo en el trabajo de Lefebvre. Este artículo comienza identificando cuatro aspectos centrales en la formulación original del derecho a la ciudad: la idea de la ciudad como 'obra' colectiva, la noción de 'vida urbana', el derecho a la 'centralidad' y el concepto de 'espacio diferencial'. Posteriormente rastrea una tradición de experiencias en torno a los CIAM que entre las décadas de 1940 y 1960 anticiparon, de forma incompleta y a menudo conflictiva, parte de estos elementos.

The notion of 'the right to the city' is today a popular slogan both within the academy and among social movements and public administrations. Many of these manifestations, however, are far removed from the initial meaning that Henri Lefebvre assigned to the concept more than fifty years ago. In fact his original formulation was itself elusive. A contextualization in the cycle of works written by the author between the 1960s and the mid-1970s is helpful to better grasp it. Lefebvre's contributions during this period have often been presented as a critique of Modernist architecture and urbanism, which were in full swing after the Second World War. However, certain design experiments from this period anticipated, in a contradictory fashion, some of the concerns that would later find full development in the work of Lefebvre. This article begins by identifying four central aspects in the original concept of the 'right to the city': the idea of the city as a collective 'work', the notion of 'urban life', the right to 'centrality' and the concept of 'differential space'. The second part of the article explores a tradition of CIAM-related experiences that anticipated some of these elements between the 1940s and the 1960s, even in an incomplete, often inconsistent fashion.

New Geographies, 2019

This essay uses a planning-historical perspective to reflect on the intersection of space, time a... more This essay uses a planning-historical perspective to reflect on the intersection of space, time and value struggles through the concept of 'fallowness,' suggested by the editors of ‘New Geographies’ as an overarching topic for this issue of the journal. The article traces diverse configurations of fallowing and speculation as they articulate heterogeneous geographical and temporal formations at particular historical conjunctures since the rise of capitalism. The piece closes with a brief exploration of the potentialities of fallowness for radical design, as a project that connects particular sociomaterial orders to concepts of production and social reproduction.

Planning Perspectives, 2017

Martin Wagner's contribution to planning thought and management during the Weimar Republic is wid... more Martin Wagner's contribution to planning thought and management during the Weimar Republic is widely known, but he recedes into obscurity afterwards. However, he maintained a tenacious intellectual activity in his American exile, conducting teaching-oriented research as Associate Professor of Planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design and prolonging these explorations until his passing in 1957. Working with students and other colleagues – most prominently Walter Gropius – Wagner devised comprehensive proposals for an alternative regional urbanization pattern that combined radical city-core renewal for conspicuous services and high-end residence with a massive suburbanization of middle- and working-class housing and industrial activities. This scheme exacerbated his earlier conceptions and simultaneously incorporated new inflections stemming from a critical engagement with contemporary debates in the US, which allow a better understanding of his German period and the transatlantic transfer of planning ideologies. At Harvard, Wagner reinforced the political-economic perspective of his work, following a contradictory imperative to secure the implementation of proposals by assimilating capital's spatiality in design strategies. Taking the dynamics of profit-oriented urbanization to their logical conclusion, the American Wagner envisioned a dark albeit consistent 'diagram' of the potential reach of a stark capitalist approach to territorial restructuring, prefiguring major urban shifts in subsequent decades.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2017

Gramsci’s and Foucault’s readings of power provide critical illuminations for understanding the l... more Gramsci’s and Foucault’s readings of power provide critical illuminations for understanding the linkage of state formations to urbanization and the spatial production of subjectivity. This article uses Central Park to illustrate how a combination of their insights helps to elucidate the emergence of pedagogical spaces and environmental hegemonies. I first propose a conceptual framework drawing on diverse parallels and tensions in Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere and Foucault’s investigations in the 1970s, reassessed here from the vantage point of the implicit debate with Marxism in La société punitive. Urbanization and the built environment are theorized as material apparatuses of a form of capillary power that reconfigures the relations between state, civil society and individual subjects, striving to forge common senses of space that buttress political hegemony. This analytical toolkit is then applied in a political reappraisal of Central Park, exploring the role of design in the pedagogy of subaltern spatialities and the normalization of a consensual regime of publicity. The discussion pays special attention to the park’s assemblage of liberal and disciplinary spatial techniques, its connection to broader agencies beyond core state apparatuses, and their effect on the advent of an integral state formation.

Antipode, 2015

Despite their theoretical and political potential, recent debates on enclosure usually lack an ef... more Despite their theoretical and political potential, recent debates on enclosure usually lack an effective consideration of how space is mobilized in the process of dispossession. This article connects the analysis of enclosure’s general spatial rationality to a range of illustrations of its particular formations and procedures. Enclosure is understood as one of capitalism’s ‘universal territorial equivalents’, a polymorphous technique with variegated expressions in time but also with a consistent logic that uses the spatial erosion of the commons to subsume non-commodified, self-managed social spaces. In response to the ever-changing nature of commoning, successive regimes of enclosure reshape the morphologies of deprivation and their articulation to other state and market apparatuses in order to meet shifting strategies of capital accumulation and social reproduction. Through a spatially-nuanced account of these phenomena, I outline a tentative genealogy of enclosure formations that allows tracking diverse geographies of dispossession across different scales and regulatory contexts in various historical stages of capitalist development.
Keywords: enclosure, commons, dispossession, abstract space, territorial equivalent, autonomy

The spatial processes deployed by the 15M movement in Spain include elements of social change tha... more The spatial processes deployed by the 15M movement in Spain include elements of social change that exceed the limits of conventional politics. Located at a liminal level, these processes operate in the often unnoticed realm of the micro-politics of urban everyday life and the regimes of place that regulate it, providing new criteria for understanding sociospatial and urban phenomena. This article shows how public space, its representations and the spatialities associated with them have served as a support for, have determined and, ultimately, have been reshaped and transformed by the Spanish “indignados” (outraged), in particular in the city and the metropolitan area of Madrid. Drawing on a series of theoretical approaches to the articulation of recent revolts, the deployment of a prefigurative politics and the occupation of public space, I will give an experience-based account of the spatial constitution and effects of these connections in and around Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. As a whole, the indignados’ occupations and actions provide urban theory with conceptual and practical tools to imagine alternative forms of collective commitment in the production of spaces of hope for social progress and generalized self-management.

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2015

Los procesos espaciales desencadenados por las recientes protestas urbanas en España incorporan e... more Los procesos espaciales desencadenados por las recientes protestas urbanas en España incorporan elementos de cambio social que exceden los límites de la política convencional. Situándose en un nivel liminar, estos procesos operan en la esfera inadvertida de las micropolíticas de la vida cotidiana y los regímenes de lugar que la regulan. En sus espacialidades encontramos una serie de claves de reflexión para idear nuevos criterios de comprensión de los fenómenos urbanos y socioespaciales. En este artículo mostraremos el modo en que el espacio urbano —en concreto la ciudad y el área metropolitana de Madrid— y sus representaciones han servido de soporte, han sido empleados, han condicionado y, en última instancia, han sido reconfigurados por el movimiento del 15-M. Apoyándose en una serie de contribuciones teóricas sobre la articulación entre las recientes revueltas, el despliegue de políticas prefigurativas y la ocupación del espacio público, el trabajo desarrolla una descripción de la constitución y repercusiones espaciales de los campamentos y asambleas en y alrededor de la Puerta del Sol. En conjunto, la experiencia madrileña ofrece a la teoría urbana vías para imaginar otras formas de compromiso colectivo en la producción de espacios de esperanza para el progreso social y la autogestión generalizada.

Ciudades, 2015

La actual recesión constituye una oportunidad para explorar la relación entre crisis económicas y... more La actual recesión constituye una oportunidad para explorar la relación entre crisis económicas y producción del espacio. Este artículo esboza un marco de análisis para entender el rol de los procesos de reestructuración urbana y territorial en la formación, gestión y resolución de las crisis capitalistas, y viceversa, para comprender los períodos de crisis como etapas clave en la historia de la urbanización y la evolución de las técnicas urbanísticas. En primer lugar se realiza un rápido recorrido por varios episodios históricos de crisis, mostrando
el papel estratégico de la transformación del medio construido en los mismos. Tras un breve análisis de las causas de la burbuja inmobiliaria española y su pinchazo, el trabajo sugiere que el nuevo “urbanismo de la austeridad” profundizará las prácticas abiertas por la urbanización neoliberal de las últimas décadas. Una vez estudiadas las principales características de este nuevo ciclo de destrucción creativa urbana, el artículo concluye con una serie de propuestas críticas para el desarrollo de un urbanismo alternativo basado en los principios de justicia y democracia socioespacial.

Social & Cultural Geography, 2014

The industrialization of New York and its rise to economic dominance brought about a major restru... more The industrialization of New York and its rise to economic dominance brought about a major restructuring of street life and unleashed an array of contradictory everyday urban cultures. In a still under-regulated environment, the commoning of public space became a key sociospatial capital that helped the working classes resolve their reproduction in a way the elite found disturbing and far removed from the civic order they were trying to instil. This article draws on recent theorizations of the commons/enclosure dialectic to develop a comparative analysis of the cultures of public space use vis-a-vis the practices prescribed by Central Park in its attempt to reform everyday spatialities. The park is understood here as an early episode in the project of imposing new social relations through the enclosure of public conduct—a first effort to tame the urban commons and prevent the subaltern appropriation of public space. Following a preliminary discussion of the economic and social determinants and configuration of the material cultures of public space use in Manhattan, the article studies the park’s strategies as a special type of enclosure, consisting not of the usurping of common land for private profit but of the mobilization of public space to shift behaviors from one regime of publicity to another.
Key words: Central Park, urban commons, urban enclosure, public behavior, regimes of publicity, public space use.

Empiria. Revista de Metodología de Ciencias Sociales, 2014

La historia social de la planificación espacial es un elemento clave en el proyecto de replanteam... more La historia social de la planificación espacial es un elemento clave en el proyecto de replanteamiento crítico de las políticas urbanas y territoriales. Un urbanismo comprometido con la recuperación de lo común bajo coordenadas radicalmente democráticas requiere una lectura del pasado capaz de desvelar cómo llegaron a producirse las estructuras socioespaciales contemporáneas y el papel que la planificación jugó en dicho proceso. La historia social de la planificación permite comprender la génesis sociopolítica de los discursos, técnicas y prácticas urbanísticas que empleamos en la actualidad y cuál ha sido su efecto sobre la vida cotidiana de los planificados. Este artículo analiza varios momentos conceptuales y metodológicos de ese proyecto historiográfico. Se exploran en primer lugar el concepto gramsciano de «hegemonía» y el foucaultiano de «gubernamentalidad» como herramientas que permiten comprender la articulación entre política y vida cotidiana en el marco de una historia social general. Esta matriz de trabajo se traslada a la dimensión espacial a través de los conceptos de «territorio» y «territorialidad». Por último se estudia el modo en que la planificación ha sido movilizada históricamente como técnica de regulación espacial de los procesos de reproducción social por determinados proyectos hegemónicos/gubernamentales en un contexto de lucha de territorialidades.
Palabras clave: Reproducción social, hegemonía, gubernamentalidad, vida cotidiana, territorialidad.

The social history of spatial planning is a key element in the critical reevaluation of urban and territorial policies. In order to engage planning in the recovery of the commons and the formation of more democratic environments we need to understand its role in the historical production of our present sociospatial structures. This historiographical approach provides an alternative account of the sociopolitical genesis of contemporary planning discourses, techniques and practices, describing their effects and impact on the everyday lives of planned populations. This article analyzes several conceptual and methodological moments of this research project. Firstly I suggest that we use Gramsci’s conceptualization of «hegemony« and Foucault»s «governmentality» in order to understand the articulation between politics and everyday life in the context of a general social history. This theoretical framework is then translated into spatial terms through the concepts of «territory» and «territoriality». Finally, I study how planning has been mobilized throughout history by particular hegemonic/governmental projects in order to spatially regulate the processes of social reproduction, in a context shaped by struggles of territorility.
Keywords: Social reproduction, hegemony, governmentality, everyday life, territoriality.

Revista EURE – Revista De Estudios Urbano Regionales, 2014

Los debates contemporáneos sobre el eclipse del espacio público suelen ofrecer una visión idealiz... more Los debates contemporáneos sobre el eclipse del espacio público suelen ofrecer una visión idealizada de su pasado, impidiendo una correcta reconsideración del papel que las técnicas urbanísticas han tenido en la producción y evolución del mismo. Contribuyendo al desarrollo de una historia crítica que subsane estas lagunas, Central Park se presenta aquí como un dispositivo gubernamental ideado para sustituir el régimen de uso del espacio público habitual en las calles de Manhattan a mediados del siglo XIX, por un nuevo conjunto de prácticas espaciales definidas y monitorizadas por el Estado. Tras una descripción de las formas de apropiaciones espontáneas de la calle por parte de las clases populares, se analizan los distintos niveles proyectuales en los cuales se articulaba esta estrategia de domesticación del espacio público: del propio diseño espacial y concepción de la red de lugares del parque, a la regulación normativa del uso y comportamiento de los visitantes, al ejercicio activo de vigilancia y castigo de conductas y sujetos indeseables.
Palabras clave: espacio público, conflicto social, historia urbana.

Contemporary debates on the eclipse of public space usually provide an idealized interpretation of its past, avoiding a proper consideration of the role of planning techniques in the evolution thereof. Contributing to the development of a critical history that helps correct these lacunae, this article presents New York’s Central Park as a governmental device aimed at replacing the mid-nineteenth-century public space use regime on Manhattan streets with a new set of spatial practices, defined and monitored by the State. I begin by describing the spontaneous appropriation of the streets in the period and the contradictions it generated. Then, I study the different levels of articulation of the park’s strategy, from the design of the place network itself, to the normative regulation of the visitors’ behavior and use of space, to the active surveillance and punishment of undesired conducts and subjects.
Keywords: public space, social conflict, urban history.

Papeles, 2014

La “regeneración urbana” se plantea hoy desde las instituciones como una vía para la recuperación... more La “regeneración urbana” se plantea hoy desde las instituciones como una vía para la recuperación económica que además garantiza un modelo basado en la sostenibilidad y en la integración de los aspectos sociales, económicos y ambientales. Este artículo muestra que, sin embargo, la intervención en la ciudad existente (donde la “regeneración urbana” se encuadra), vista tanto desde una perspectiva histórica como institucional, en España como en Europa, no conforma un panorama tan luminoso, sino que conlleva cambios más profundos que los exclusivamente ligados a la transformación física y que son especialmente problemáticos en lo que se refiere a la desposesión urbana de las clases más bajas. Este artículo trata de abrir un debate crítico en torno a esta cuestión y proponer cuáles pueden ser las bases para plantear otra forma posible de regenerar la ciudad.

Scripta Nova, 2013

El progresivo adelgazamiento del Estado del Bienestar y la privatización de bienes y servicios pú... more El progresivo adelgazamiento del Estado del Bienestar y la privatización de bienes y servicios públicos han propiciado la aparición de discursos que reclaman la recuperación de los comunes y su autogestión colectiva. En ese contexto las tierras y derechos comunales de la Inglaterra pre-capitalista han dejado de ser un asunto académico, reapareciendo intensamente en los imaginarios socioespaciales del activismo global. Aunque esa reapropiación del pasado parece legítima, dichas narrativas ignoran a menudo la complejidad implícita en la gestión, planificación y evolución de los comunes históricos. Para subsanar estas lagunas estudiamos las instituciones y modos de gobierno que sustentaban el régimen comunal de la tierra en este período, enfatizando su condición de planificación autogestionada de los usos del suelo y las prácticas asociadas al mismo. Este régimen fue sustituido por las leyes de cercamiento, dando paso a una lógica de planificación centralizada e insolidaria: una lógica en la que estaba implícita no sólo la extinción del control comunal y la privatización de la tierra, sino también la desposesión de los trabajadores rurales y su progresiva proletarización.
Palabras clave: comunes, derecho comunal, planificación socioespacial, leyes de cercamiento, autogestión.

The ongoing eclipse of the Welfare State and the privatisation of public goods and services have triggered the appearance of discourses that claim the recovery of the commons and their collective self-management. In this context historical common lands and rights in pre-capitalist England are no longer a mere academic issue, as they reappear intensely in the sociospatial imaginaries of global activism. This reappropriation of the past seems legitimate, but such narratives often ignore the complexity of the management, planning and evolution of the historical commons. To fill these lacunae I study the institutions and modes of government that underpinned the communal regime in this period, emphasizing its condition of self-managed land use planning. Enclosure acts destroyed this regime, introducing a new logic of centralized, iniquitous planning: a logic which included not only the extinction of communal institutions and privatisation of land, but also the dispossession of rural labourers and their progressive proletarianisation.
Keywords: commons, common rights, sociospatial planning, enclosure acts, self-management.

Cities, 2013

This survey presents the results of a questionnaire sent to a list of key scholars and profession... more This survey presents the results of a questionnaire sent to a list of key scholars and professionals in fields related to urban processes and planning – town planning, geography, sociology, architecture and anthropology. The survey raised four simple, straightforward questions. What are the most pressing conflicts with regard to contemporary cities? What are the main fields of action for solving them? How can your discipline contribute with respect to this task? Could you mention an intervention that could serve as an example of that line of work? The response represents a plural and multidisciplinary perspective on contemporary urban issues from which a series of research and intervention perspectives emerges.
Keywords: Urban conflict, urban planning, urban geography, urban sociology, urban anthropology, social inequality

Journal of Historical Geography, 2012

Recent applications of Foucauldian categories in geography, spatial history and the history of to... more Recent applications of Foucauldian categories in geography, spatial history and the history of town planning have opened up interesting new perspectives, with respect to both the evolution of spatial knowledge and the genealogy of territorial techniques and their relation to larger socio-political projects, that would be enriched if combined with other discursive traditions. This article proposes to conceptualise English parliamentary enclosureea favourite episode for Marxist historiography, frequently read in a strictly materialist fashioneas a precedent of a new form of sociospatial governmentality, a political technology that inaugurates a strategic manipulation of territory for social change on the threshold between feudal and capitalist spatial rationalities. I analyse the sociospatial dimensions of parliamentary enclosure’s technical and legal innovations and compare them to the forms of communal self-regulation of land use customs and everyday regionalisations that preceded it. Through a systematic, replicable mechanism of reterritorialisation, enclosure acts normalised spatial regulations, blurred regional differences in the social organisation of agriculture and erased the modes of autonomous social reproduction linked to common land. Their exercise of dispossession of material resources, social capital and community representations is interpreted therefore as an inaugural logic that would pervade the emergent spatial rationality later known as planning.
Keywords: Spatial governmentality; Territoriality; Parliamentary enclosure; Commons; Planning history; Michel Foucault

Cuadernos de Investigación Urbanística, 2012

La historiografía ha presentado tradicionalmente la planificación urbana como una técnica progres... more La historiografía ha presentado tradicionalmente la planificación urbana como una técnica progresista que, nacida en el contexto de los reformismos del siglo XIX, tiene por objeto principal la mejora de la calidad de vida a través del tratamiento del espacio urbano y la ordenación del territorio. Sin embargo un estudio detallado de la articulación histórica entre planificación urbana, economía política de la producción de espacio y dinámicas de evolución y cambio de las formaciones sociales revela un escenario muy distinto. Este trabajo sintetiza los planteamientos de la tesis Urbanismo y reproducción social. La planificación territorial de la multitud. A través de una serie de estudios de caso, esta investigación presentó la planificación urbana y territorial como un dispositivo gubernamental encargado de regular espacialmente la reproducción social de las clases subalternas en beneficio de los bloques hegemónicos. Prestando especial atención al efecto de la planificación sobre la vida cotidiana y a través de una historiografía social reflexiva y crítica, se muestra cómo la multitud fue paulatinamente desposeída de recursos materiales, capitales sociales y representaciones colectivas a medida que sus prácticas cotidianas fueron reescritas, recodificadas, reterritorializadas.
Palabras clave: urbanismo, reproducción social, multitud, desposesión, historia de la planificación, filosofía de historia social, espacio social.

Historians have traditionally pictured town planning as a progressive technique. Born in the context of nineteenth-century reformist policies, its aim would have been to improve the quality of life through the regulation of urban development and the urban fabric. However a close study of the relationship between town planning, the politics of space and the dynamics of evolution and change of social formations reveals a very different scenario. This work summarizes the main findings of the PhD thesis Urbanism and social reproduction. The territorial planning of the multitude. Through a series of historical case studies, this research showed how town and regional planning evolved to become a governmental dispositif in charge of the spatial regulation of social reproduction. Paying special attention to the effect of planning over everyday life and subaltern classes, and deploying a critical, reflexive social historiography, the thesis described how the multitude was dispossessed of material resources, social capitals and collective imaginaries as its practices were spatially re-written, re-coded, re-territorialised.
Keywords: urbanism, social reproduction, multitude, dispossession, planning history, philosophy of social history, social space.

Progressive Planning, 2011

Why should a progressive planner pay attention to the Spanish 15-M movement? One of its most comp... more Why should a progressive planner pay attention to the Spanish 15-M movement? One of its most complex and interesting aspects is its spatiality. Today, just a few months after the hatching of the #spanishrevolution—a hashtag used by Twitterers to inform about the movement—the movement’s political content continues to be vague. The agenda fluctuates between a program that partially repeats old proposals put forward by the left-wing parties across the parliamentary spectrum in Spain and the ambitious but minority calls for self-government propounded by more radical groups. Perhaps the movement’s political positions will mature slowly in the future, however, the spatial practices of its camps and committees have proven to be a solid achievement, one of its more successful facets in promoting the spreading and organization of the protest. Combining social networks with temporary encampments, the 15-M movement demonstrates that activists can devise new uses of public space and new virtual political spaces through a collective, practice-oriented production of place.

Arquitectura , 2024

Análisis de la evolución de la región madrileña y su planificación territorial en el siglo XXI.

Ciudad y Territorio, 2023

Architectural Review, 2022

Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, 2020

New Geographies, 2019

Planning Perspectives, 2017

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2017

Antipode, 2015

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2015

Ciudades, 2015

Social & Cultural Geography, 2014

Empiria. Revista de Metodología de Ciencias Sociales, 2014

Revista EURE – Revista De Estudios Urbano Regionales, 2014

Papeles, 2014

Scripta Nova, 2013

Cities, 2013

Journal of Historical Geography, 2012

Cuadernos de Investigación Urbanística, 2012

Progressive Planning, 2011

La revolución urbana, 2022

Introducción y análisis del libro de Henri Lefebvre 'La revolución urbana', publicado en la nueva... more Introducción y análisis del libro de Henri Lefebvre 'La revolución urbana', publicado en la nueva edición en castellano (Alianza, 2022).

Landscapes of Housing: Design and Planning in the History of Environmental Thought, 2022

Interwar economic and social crises transformed the relationship between housing and landscape in... more Interwar economic and social crises transformed the relationship between housing and landscape in design and political agendas. Architects and planners speculated on the potential articulation of both realms to forge new settlement paradigms, using landscape and ecological criteria to reform residential urbanization patterns on a regional scale. This chapter shows how nature and home were mobilized in broader attempts to reshape metropolitan geographies, push the limits of state welfare, and restructure national economies through experimental arrangements of industry and agriculture. The theoretical explorations of Ludwig Hilberseimer, Leberecht Migge, Hans Bernhard Reichow and, especially, Martin Wagner suggest that incipient imaginations of landscape and agrarian (sub)urbanism, green infrastructures, and environmental services were already afoot between the 1920s and 1940s as a result of dramatic economic and spatial transformations in Germany and the United States. These interventions reveal increasing attention to landscape’s economic and ecological role in the transformation of settlement patterns, replacing architectural design as a privileged conceptual framework to guide urban development. However, they also announce a tendency to render both nature and home abstract, dependent variables of regional and national growth strategies, eroding the ontological, experiential bond that had initially encouraged the investigation of the housing/landscape nexus.

New Approaches to Governance and Rule in Urban Europe Since 1500, 2020

The production of community was a central goal of planning strategies during the twentieth centur... more The production of community was a central goal of planning strategies during the twentieth century. European dictatorships provide a peculiar yet illuminating episode of this longer trajectory of modern planning. Under Fascist regimes community politics became an essential aspect of the totalitarian attempt to impose a new order, and planned neighbourhoods were devised as prototypes of the national community. In these social laboratories urban design was reframed to work as an expression and a means of power. Places were invested with material and performative agency—a mode of reflexive, diffused government scattered in a network of apparatuses ingrained in everyday life, which incorporated the built environment, spatial practices and their symbolic projections as active elements in the production of political subjects. This chapter uses an oral history approach to examine the power mechanisms at play in the forging of a planned community in Madrid during the early stages of Franco’s regime. The second half of the chapter then elaborates a more general theorisation of Fascist spatial governmentality, its contradictory combination of punitive, disciplinary and liberal techniques, and their role in the enclosure of popular communities — that is, the attempt to use spatial devices to creatively destroy spontaneous manifestations of urban commons.

El Urbanismo de la Transición. El Plan General de Ordenación Urbana de Madrid de 1985, 2019

El trabajo estudia el rol de Manuel Castells en la cultura urbanística y política española durant... more El trabajo estudia el rol de Manuel Castells en la cultura urbanística y política española durante la Transición a la democracia, y en particular su relación con el Ayuntamiento de Madrid durante la redacción del Plan General de Ordenación Urbana de 1985. Se analiza la evolución política del pensamiento de Castells sobre la ciudad en los años 1970s y 1980s, su giro hacia una socialdemocracia de corte moderado tras su limitancia en el Partido Comunista durante la década de los setenta, y cómo dicho reposicionamiento afectó a su perspectiva sobre las políticas urbanas y el planeamiento.

El Urbanismo de la Transición. El Plan General de Ordenación Urbana de Madrid de 1985, 2019

El trabajo analiza la influencia de Henri Lefebvre en el Plan General de Ordenación Urbana de Mad... more El trabajo analiza la influencia de Henri Lefebvre en el Plan General de Ordenación Urbana de Madrid, 1985. Se contraponen algunos de los principales elementos de su pensamiento urbano, como 'derecho a la ciudad', 'apropiación', 'vida cotidiana', 'fiesta' o ciudad como 'obra', a los objetivos de dicho documento de planificación, que recuperaba, a veces explícitamente, algunos de ellos.

The current crisis, with its particularly severe configuration in Southern European countries, pr... more The current crisis, with its particularly severe configuration in Southern European countries, provides an opportunity to probe the interrelation of economic crunches and the production of space, and also to imagine potential paths of sociospatial emancipation from the dictates of global markets. This introductory chapter offers a preliminary interpretive framework exploring the fundamental role of urban and territorial restructuring in the formation, management and resolution of capitalist crises and, conversely, periods of crisis as key stages in the history of urbanization. I will begin by contextualizing the 2007-8 economic slump, the subsequent global recession and its uneven impact on states and cities in the longue durée of capitalist productions of space, studying the transformation of spatial configurations in previous episodes of economic stagnation. This broader perspective will then be used to analyze currently emerging formations of austerity urbanism, showing how the practices of crisis management incorporate a strategy for economic and institutional restructuring that eventually impacts on urban policy, and indeed in the production of urban space itself.

Urbanism and Dictatorship. A European Perspective, 2015

I propose to use dictatorial urbanisms as an analytical opportunity to delve into some concealed ... more I propose to use dictatorial urbanisms as an analytical opportunity to delve into some concealed features of modern urban design and planning. The chapter explores the political-spatial nexus of totalitarianism from a theoretical standpoint, focusing on the development of totalitarian planning mentalities and spatial rationalities and drawing links to other historical episodes in order to inscribe the former in a broader genealogy of urbanism. Needless to say, I don’t suggest that we use dictatorships as mere templates to understand modern productions of space. Instead, these cases provide a crude version of some fundamental drives in the operationalization of urbanism as an instrument of social regulation, showing how far the modern imagination of sociospatial orderings can go. Totalitarian urbanisms constituted a set of experiences where many dreams and aspirations of modern planning went to die. But not, as the conventional account would have it, because the former were the antithesis of the latter, but rather because they worked as the excess of a particular orientation of modern spatial governmentalities — namely, their focus on calculation, social engineering and disciplinary spatialities, and their attempt to subsume a wide range of everyday practices under institutional structuration by means of spatial mediations.
Keywords: totalitarian urbanism, European dictatorships, urban order, national-socialism, fascism, stalinism, Francoism

Brenner, N. (ed.) Implosions / Explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, 2013

Drawing on Marx’s approach to original accumulation at the dawn of capitalism, I characterize the... more Drawing on Marx’s approach to original accumulation at the dawn of capitalism, I characterize the waves of parliamentary enclosures that unfolded in England between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as an exercise of original or ex-novo extended urbanization—an initial stage in the subsumption of non-urban realms under specifically capitalist modes of uneven spatial development, involving new divisions of labor, distributional systems for raw materials and commodities, political and cultural formations and so forth. Along with the economic, technical and infrastructural changes in this period, these waves of enclosure provided an opportunity to rescale the social fabric of rural enclaves, restructuring the linkages between city and countryside along a range of different dimensions. Non-urban, non-capitalist territories were increasingly subordinated to the operational landscapes of national and international trade networks, which in turn expanded across the globe as new resources circulated through the system. Such transformations undermined the relative autonomy of preexisting, comparatively self-contained lifeworlds in the countryside. Previous rural social structures that combined use-value oriented everyday routines and a relatively bounded, discrete sphere of market-oriented practices were superseded by an intensifying, potentially totalizing form of capitalist territorial organization. This transformation was achieved through a profound, spatially-driven alteration of property relations, spatial divisions of labor and forms of social reproduction that in turn hinged upon the concerted, systematic intervention of the state. The process of original extended urbanization thus reveals the violent, yet legally mediated operations of dispossession that constitute the new urban territories of capitalism.

The bulk of this chapter is dedicated to the study of English parliamentary enclosure as a way to delve into broader questions regarding the nature and historical geographies of worldwide capitalist urbanization. Throughout this discussion, in investigating the extended landscapes of early capitalist urbanization, I also devote particular attention to the dialectic between original (ex-novo) and ongoing enclosure processes, which are conceived as two interdependent yet analytically specific moments linking past and present logics of spatial creative destruction, both within and outside of urban agglomerations. I argue that any investigation of the interplay between concentrated and extended urbanization also requires careful attention to both the ex-novo and ongoing dimensions of enclosure processes under capitalism.

What would a Central Park designed by proletarians look like? How would such a subaltern landscap... more What would a Central Park designed by proletarians look like? How would such a subaltern landscape differ from the creatures of nineteenth-century bourgeois pastoral taste that we have come to identify with urban nature? Would Manhattan’s structure and social space have been radically changed by such a historical detour?

European Urban and Regional Studies, 2018

Review of Costis Hadjimichalis, Crisis Spaces: Structures, Struggles and Solidarity in Southern E... more Review of Costis Hadjimichalis, Crisis Spaces: Structures, Struggles and Solidarity in Southern Europe (Routledge, 2018)

EURE, 2022

Review of Łukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the M... more Review of Łukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Review of STANEK, Łukasz. Henri Lefebvre on Space. Architecture, Urban Research, and the Producti... more Review of STANEK, Łukasz. Henri Lefebvre on Space. Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of
Theory. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, 392 p. [ISBN 978-0-8166-6617-1]

Reviews the work of Andy Merrifield / Reseña de los libros de Andy Merrifield: - (2002) Dialectic... more Reviews the work of Andy Merrifield / Reseña de los libros de Andy Merrifield:
- (2002) Dialectical Urbanism. Social Struggles in the Capitalist City. New York: Monthly Review Press, 224 pp.
- (2002) Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City. New York: Routledge, 224 pp.
- (2005) Guy Debord. London: Reaktion Books, 174 pp.
- (2006) Henri Lefebvre. A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 240 pp.
- (2008) The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World, New York: Walker & Company, 256 pp.
- (2011) Magical Marxism. Subversive Politics and the Imagination, London & New York: Pluto, 240 pp.

Ponencia sobre la tesis 'Urbanismo y reproducción social. La planificación territorial de la mult... more Ponencia sobre la tesis 'Urbanismo y reproducción social. La planificación territorial de la multitud', galardonada con el Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado UPM 2009/2010.

Lecture about the PhD dissertation 'Urbanism and social reproduction. The territorial planning of multitude', awarded with the 2009-10 PhD Extraordinary Prize at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.
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La historiografía ha presentado tradicionalmente la planificación urbana como una técnica progresista que, nacida en el contexto de los reformismos del siglo XIX, tiene por objeto principal la mejora de la calidad de vida a través del tratamiento del espacio urbano y la ordenación del territorio. Sin embargo un estudio histórico detallado de la articulación entre planificación urbana, economía política de la producción de espacio y dinámicas de evolución y cambio de las formaciones sociales revela un escenario muy distinto. El presente trabajo muestra el modo en que la planificación urbana y territorial se ha construido como dispositivo institucional encargado de regular las dimensiones espaciales de la reproducción social en beneficio de los bloques hegemónicos en cada momento histórico. Partiendo de un enfoque teórico multidisciplinar, que reúne aportaciones de la filosofía política, la teoría de la práctica, la historia social, la geografía humana y el pensamiento económico, la investigación lleva a cabo un periplo por episodios poco conocidos de la historia de la planificación urbana, abarcando el período comprendido entre el siglo XVII y mediados del siglo XX. Como resultado de esta indagación, la planificación aparece como el aparato responsable de transformar el territorio heredado por cada nueva hegemonía para la eliminación de las prácticas sociales que contradicen los intereses del nuevo orden en curso de formación; en su seno, la multitud es paulatinamente desposeída de sus capacidades de organización y experiencia autónomas a medida que sus prácticas cotidianas son reescritas, recodificadas, reterritorializadas.
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Historians have traditionally presented town planning as a progressive technique; born in the context of nineteenth century reformist policies, its aim would be to improve quality of life through the treatment of space. Nevertheless a close study of the relationship between town planning, political economy of the production of space and the dynamics of evolution and change of the social formations reveals a very different scenario. Our research shows the way in which town and regional planning have developed as institutional apparatuses in charge of the regulation of the spatial dimensions of social reproduction for the sake of hegemonic blocs. Drawing on a multidisciplinary theoretical framework, which assembles contributions from political philosophy, theory of practice, social history, human geography and economics, the study goes on a journey through little known moments in the history of town planning, from the XVIIth century up to the middle of the XXth century. As a result of this research, planning appears as the technique responsible for the transformation of the territory inherited by new hegemonies, looking for the disappearance of those social practices that contradict the new order in formation; in its bosom, the multitude is gradually dispossessed of its autonomous experience and organizational capacities as his daily practices are re-written, re-codified, re-territorialized.

Presentación del especial de la Revista Urban sobre el sociólogo y filósofo Henri Lefebvre (acc... more Presentación del especial de la Revista Urban sobre el sociólogo y filósofo Henri Lefebvre
(acceso libre a los contenidos del número: http://www2.aq.upm.es/Departamentos/Urbanismo/institucional/numero-ns/ns02-2011/)
Salón de Actos de la E.T.S. de Arquitectura de Madrid, 6 de octubre de 2011.
Intervienen:
- Ponente principal: Emilio Martínez Gutiérrez, director del Departamento de Sociología VI, de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
- Agustín Hernández Aja, Fernando Roch Peña, y Álvaro Sevilla Buitrago, del Departamento de Urbanística y Ordenación del Territorio de la E.T.S. de Arquitectura de Madrid.

Vídeo de presentación de la ponencia en el ciclo: Hiria eta bestelako politikak (Ciudad y otras... more Vídeo de presentación de la ponencia en el ciclo:
Hiria eta bestelako politikak (Ciudad y otras políticas), organizado por Tabakalera, Centro de Creación de Cultura Contemporánea, San Sebastián.
Lugar: San Sebastián, Cristina Enea.