Around Madrid: the Continuing Influence of Historical Urban

Development Plans on Today’s Periphery

Abstract: This article describes the peripheral development that has occurred in

Madrid over the last sixteen years (2000-2016), a period split by the economic

crash that occurred in 2008. The article argues that the relationship between

economic development and infrastructure corridors witnessed in this peripheral

development is intrinsically connected to the 19th and 20th century plans for

urban growth. While these corridors have some similarities to the Strip model

for an automobile city discussed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown in

their seminal book Learning from Las Vegas, the Madrid peripheries enjoy a long

genealogy that complicates any easy link to the Strip, particularly around issues

of economic speculation, typology and image-making or imagining, which will be

introduced using the work of Michael Neuman and others. The research design

adopted examines the treatment of the periphery in a number of historical

plans, particularly their attitudes towards infrastructure and economic

development, in order to establish connections between those historical plans

and the city’s planned and (partially) realized peripheral development today. As

well as those with an interest in Madrid, the paper is directed towards other

urbanists and scholars looking at similar phenomena in other European cities.

Keywords: Madrid, peripheral development, strip, city-plans, urban planning

Word count: (7420 without footnotes; 8170 including footnotes)

Introduction

This article focuses on the recent phase of peripheral development that has occurred in Madrid over the last sixteen years (2000-2016), a period split by the economic crash that occurred in 2008. As Michael Neuman (2010) explains, the city plans for Madrid have played a particularly important role in framing the future image of that city. From this premise, the present article will examine in detail the influence of those plans on today’s peripheral growth. Two of the main issues that emerge from this study are the particular mode of economic development promoted by successive plans and governments, and the pivotal role of a particular form of infrastructure in the development of the periphery. Neuman’s work is particularly useful in providing sustained focus on the importance of the image, understood figuratively as a projected planning vision for a better city, literally as a key ingredient in the presentation, discussion and adoption of these urban planning documents, and metaphorically in the creation of new politicized institutions associated with the development or implementation of the plans. Nevertheless, Neuman’s work has been criticized for concentrating on the role of the image at the expense of sustained typological considerations. (Vicino, T. J. 2015) For a foretelling of this critique, see Compitello (2003). To support understanding of the latter, the theories and writings of other scholars have been used in this paper, particularly the Italian architect Stefano Boeri, the Madrid based architects Juan Herreros, Jose Maria Ezquiaga, Ariadna Cantis, Andres Jaque, Ramon Prat, and the recent work of the American architect Christopher Marcinkoski.

Analysis of the plans, supplemented by fieldwork that is beyond the scope of this paper to recount in detail, demonstrates how these two main issues have played a role in the development of the city over the last two decades. More significantly, by introducing an historical example one can understand how and why the Ciudad Lineal (Linear City)1 proposed by Arturo Soria (Soria, 1911), reflects what was found in contemporary Madrid, namely a modern corridor connecting the new periphery with the centre and other peripheral locations. Soria first put forward the idea of the Ciudad Lineal at the end of the 19th century, though his design was only ever partially realized, finally being frustrated by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Carlos Sambricio notes the connection between infrastructure and periphery:

Soria is also a man interested in two issues: transport and communications. Starting from these two ideas he proposes an alternative city to the existing one, […] a city that no longer has a centre and is understood as the development of an axis or principal street, which has a main form of collective transport running through it. (Sambricio 1991, 32).

To connect these historical proposals to the contemporary situation, two recent General City Plans in particular will be introduced into the analysis: the 1985 Plan General de Ordenación Urbana de Madrid (PGOUM), discussed by Compitello (2003) as a ‘crucial watershed’ in the city’s recent planning process, and its successor, the Plan General de Ordenación Urbana de

Madrid 1997 PGOUM. Marcinkoski (2015, 103) argues that ‘Whereas the 1985 PGOUM had been considered shortsighted or unambitious, the 1997 PGOUM was emphatically the opposite [and] spurred a period of unprecedented construction throughout Madrid… the most noteworthy consequence [of which was]... the vast expanses of incomplete and unoccupied housing at the city’s periphery.’ The mis-match between housing need and provision is highlighted by Marcinkoski:

Between 1997 and 2012 Madrid’s population increased by 390,000, resulting in a demand of around 110,000-140,000 units of housing. Yet over the same period the city issued construction permits for 262,553 new homes, while another 200,000 were planned but not yet built (Marcinkoski 2015, 104)

Even though the plan promoted an ambitious extension to the existing integrated public transport infrastructure in and around Madrid, in tune with the regional and national expansion of transport infrastructure that saw Spain develop ‘the largest network of motorways and high-speed railways in Europe’ (Díaz & Araujo, 2017, 45), the realization of the peripheral development sees a kind of automobile city emerging, to be inhabited and experienced (intentionally or otherwise) through the car.2 This has generated a new linear corridor typology. However, before this new typology can be discussed in more detail, the Madrilenian city plans need to be introduced.

1- Overview of the periphery in all the city plans for Madrid

The process of looking at Madrid as an example of peripheral development is an interesting one: no other European city saw so much construction around its periphery in the years prior to the economic crash: roughly one-third of all urbanised-land in Spain was created between 1998 and 2008 alone (Marcinkoski 2015, 60. Gallardo & Martínez-Vega, 2016). The frenetic pace and ambitious scope of development right up to the moment of the crash is clear in this passage by Cantis:

Madrid, the second largest city of Europe in population and the third largest built-up urban area in the European Community, is undergoing a vertiginous process of change, in which global realities are being evolved and transformed, creating new necessities which require debate, decision and action. […] A new scene of urban changes is adding a new dimension to the city, from the large-scale infrastructural projects such as the M-30 [orbital motorway], the Metro-sur transport network, or the regulation of the riverbank Manzanares, through the future operations such as the Prolongation of La Castellana, the Campamento Project, or the work of the Prado-Recoletos axis. (Cantis 2009, 243)

However, one of the main problems of Madrid's realized residential periphery, according to the Madrilenian architect Juan Herreros (2009, 286), is its mediocrity. He writes:

[…] we have built a mediocre city around Madrid, and not exactly out of nothing. In fact, we had everything in our favour. And that residential estate could have been an extraordinary opportunity to make the city, to make it work, to promote an infrastructural concept of large scale architecture and territory that goes beyond satisfying a few services, the roots of which seem to be the only logistical support system for growth.

Moreover, although total population growth in Madrid slowed after the economic crisis (Gil-Alonso, et al, 2016),3 the peripheral building activity continued in spite of the collapse of the construction sector and of all the problems of empty residential properties there, as Christopher Marcinkoski (2015, 94) writes:

Exacerbating the difficulty of absorbing the two-million plus vacant homes across the country was that in 2012, developers began to build more houses. […] The city of Madrid announced in April 2012 that it would restart the tender process for twenty-two thousand new homes in the Berrocales PAU, southeast of the city. This new construction was undertaken despite the fact the Vallecas PAU immediately to the south was less than 50 percent occupied.

This reflection is important in terms of peripheral development in general, but in the Madrilenian context it is particularly so as the significant municipal and regional infrastructural development since the 1985 PGOUM has been supplemented with very few local services and amenities: for example, shopping is mainly concentrated in large malls where people go by car. (Prat 2008, 40). Moreover, a lot of the residential Urban Action Plans (PAUs) remain unconnected to the city centre and are not fully occupied, even ten years after completion (Marcinkoski 2015, 76-78). This has significant consequences for the residents, as just over half the people living in the periphery use their car (55%) rather than public transport (45%).

The Madrid city plans offer two insights into this current situation: one comes from an analysis of the city's development from an historical perspective, and the other regarding the particular form of peripheral urban growth (Figures 1 & 2). Starting with the deep and recent historical survey of Neuman and other scholars, this paper analyses the successive attitudes towards peripheral development on the plans from the first extension of the city in the 19 th century until today, demonstrating their connection and relationship to the peripheries that are currently seen on the ground. (Martinez Perez, 2016) While some of the ideas in these plans materialised, others did not: however, they all provide useful insights pertinent to the context of this work.4

As Michael Neuman writes when summarising these plans and the processes behind them:

Every 20 years or so since 1920 Madrid has undergone a city planning cycle in which a plan was prepared, adopted by law, and implemented by a new institution. This preparation-adoption-institutionalization sequence, the planning

institutions structures, and technical-political processes have persisted—without some exceptions—despite frequent upheavals in society. (Neuman 2010, 2)

As Neuman (2010), Gallardo M. & Martínez-Vega J. (2016) Marcinkoski, C. 2015 Gil-Alonso et al. (2016), Díaz & Araujo (2017) and others have discussed, these social upheavals, and particularly the recent changes in political power, have had an impact on the vision and implementation of this cycle. As Neuman describes more broadly: 'since 1860 there have been four major regime types in Spain, with at least two separate instances of each. They are monarchy, republican democracy, dictatorship, and constitutional monarchy.' (Neuman 2010, 8)

[Figure 1. near here]

In this article, the intentions of these plans directly from the Royal Decree or the plan text will be examined, as well as accompanying orthographic drawings, as these provide the original legislation and objective text of the plan, reading critically the causes and the treatment of the periphery in these documents. (Other plans that were drawn up during these periods, but that did not offer any specific insights for this investigation, have not been considered.)

[Figure 2. near here]

2- The continuing influence of historical plans in today’s periphery

This section will look at the following plans and their influence on today’s periphery: Plan Castro 1859; Plan Nuñez Granes 1910; La ciudad lineal Arturo Soria 1911; International Urban Competition for Madrid 1929; and the Bidagor Plan 1939-1963. If one looks at the text of the Descriptive memorandum of the draft project of the Madrid extension from the Plan Castro (Figure 3) for the extension of the city—which is called the Ensanche of Madrid5 —passed by Royal Decree on the 8th April 1857, the Minister of Public Works writes a note to the Queen saying:

My lady: The population growth that the capital of the Kingdom has experienced in the last few years, and the great improvements that should soon be proposed for it, transforming it, it can be said, above all, by the new requirements created by the advancements of the century, reclaim my lady the extension of the Capital, a subject that has been in the hands of public opinion and the municipality for a long time, without obtaining up to this date an immediate result. Madrid is one of the towns, in proportion to its neighbourhood, with less space allocated in its interior areas to boulevards, squares and other leisure activities so necessary for

movement and traffic, and also from the point of view of ornaments and public health. (Plan Castro, 1859/2006, 14)

In this case, it is clear that the population growth required improvements to be made to the city’s roads, architecture and public health, but it also highlights that there was a need for more public space, namely wider streets and public squares. It also points out that while these issues have been debated and discussed by the public and the municipal government, legislation had become a requirement in order to take the plan for the extension forward and build the Ensanche. Analysing the text further, the Minister discusses the different parts of the city at that time, and also the treatment of the periphery. In relation to the city he writes: 'Madrid is currently divided into three great sections, in reference to its urbanisation: the Interior part, the Ensanche, and the periphery.' (Plan Castro 1859/2006, 24) and describes the characteristics of these peripheries:

[…] the constructions that are built up in this third section, the periphery, comprise the actual Paseo6 de Circunvalacion and the boundary line of the municipal area, situated there where it is convenient for each owner, resulting in the most absolute anarchy, and always producing considerable damage; and it will damage the Council too, so long as it does not have an urban plan for this section that is approved legally. (Plan Castro 1859/2006, 24)

This text gives us an impression of the periphery at that time as an area built outside the limits of the city, and beyond the reach of the planning system. It is characterised here as a deregulated area (without legislation or urban plans), where construction is unconstrained, undertaken directly by the owners or inhabitants of these areas. Moreover, it appears to be viewed negativity, as it is damaging for the council, which is powerless to control its development unless it obtains an urban plan or a Royal decree.

[Figure 3. near here]

According to Neuman, this plan and its image of future expansion 'initiated the modern era in Madrid' and 'guided [its] growth to the end of that century and beyond.' (Newman 2010, 11) Sixty-one years later in 1910, a new plan was again dealing with similar issues in the periphery—rapid growth and inward migration, with the resulting increase in occupation density and the associated unsanitary conditions. This plan, called the Plan Nuñez Granés Project for the urbanisation of the periphery (Figure 4), was never executed, but it points out that in 'the periphery, […] today 50,120 people live in terrible conditions, instead of the 37,339 that lived there in 1905' (Plan Nuñez Granés Project, 1910/2006, 24).

[Figure 4. near here]

The plan clearly attempted to deal with the emerging peripheries, as Neuman notes:

Its proposal dealt with the extrarradio, the periphery outside the limits of the ensanche. The plan responded to the proliferation of housing construction in the extrarradio. […] The term extrarradio itself is vague, connoting 'something out there' without specifying what is out there and where it is. Its literal translation is the outer edge of town, the quintessential non-place. (Neuman 2010, 99)7

Another project that was only partially constructed, but which gives an interesting insight into the periphery and the growth of the city at that time, is the Ciudad Lineal (Linear City) by Arturo Soria (1911), which was introduced earlier.

What is the Linear City? […] the first neighbourhood of the Linear City would be composed with a 40 metre wide street, 5.200 metres in length from the Road of Aragon to Pinar de Chamartin, with an electric tram that runs throughout it and connects it with Madrid, proceeding from one side to Las Ventas, and from the other to Cuatro Caminos […] the inhabitants of the Linear City, and also the thousands of neighbours from Madrid that wish to spend a day in the country breathing fresh air in a leisure environment, comfortable and nice. (Soria, 1911/2006, 26)

Here some concepts are encountered that exemplify what the periphery has become today in the current thinking of the city. On the one hand, it gives people the chance to have a house out of the city centre, but it also offers the residents from the centre the opportunity to enjoy a day in the country. However, what is more important in the context of the development is the fact that it mentions the infrastructure as an essential part of the project (here, the tram), connecting not just all the parts of this new linear city and with the centre, it also looks announces a particular approach to the issue of housing as an important element of the plan. What is seen in Madrid today can only work through the infrastructure: without the connectivity this provides, these peripheral areas would not work.

In the original publicity brochure for the scheme (Figure 5) Arturo Soria writes:

The need for fresh air in the hot summer nights, the fun in the open air, the establishment of many industries next to an important consumer centre like Madrid, and the affordable life of “The Linear City” for the middle and working classes, there are abundant sources of income that would make this project one of the most lucrative, and a lot of people will take their money and invest their savings into this, as it offers them more security than the State. (1911/2006, 30)

There are two interesting aspects of this text: firstly, that the periphery starts having industrial uses (rather than being conceived simply as a dormitory town); and secondly that it offers cheap housing for the working and middle classes. But not only does it offer working and living accommodation, it provides the opportunity for residents to invest and for the contractors of

the scheme to maximise their capital.

This was the forerunner to what is seen continuing to develop in modern Spain, as most people wanted to own a house, and a house in the periphery was marketed as an investment that would maximise profit not just for the owner but also for the construction company (either public or private). It is clear today that the periphery has grown due to a speculative atmosphere similar to that discussed by Arturo Soria where infrastructure is connected to investment, creating a construction boom and providing both housing for the masses coupled with the need for economic speculation and profit. (Marcinkoski 2015, 76-78)

[Figure 5. near here]

The idea of a single-family unit emphasizes a housing typology typical of the peripheries, (Moliní & Salgado, 2012, 1087) where each house is separate from its neighbours and directly connected to centre by strong transport links (Figure 6 shows examples of single family units of Soria’s plan). Neuman (2010, 98) suggests that the influence of the plan for the Linear City is clear in today’s periphery:

Its legacy marks the Gran Sur proposal of the 1980s put forth by the regional government of Madrid. It lives on as an inspiration of the main road axis of the Gran Sur (Highway M50)… The Gran Sur replaced Soria’s single family lots with office parks and subdivisions, reflecting contemporary scales and technologies.

The Gran Sur is a modern version of Soria’s Linear City, but on a much bigger scale, authored initially by Félix Arias, director of the Oficina de Planeamiento Territorial (Regional Planning Office) in 1986. (Neuman, 2010, 78) and shows the continuing influence of the Linear City in Madrid’s modern planning, both in following a linear city approach and in using infrastructure to connect these linear axes.

[Figure 6. near here]

Further antecedents for the contemporary periphery can be identified with reference to the 1929 Concurso Urbanístico Internacional (International Urban Competition) for Madrid. In the report on the competition, a member of the jury, Don Bonatz, writes in relation to the periphery:

When we study the periphery we find that the North part of the city is ideal for housing from the Hippodrome to Fuencarral. […] the south of Madrid, the largest area, alongside the rail track, is the most appropriate area for industrial use. The towns surrounding it, Puente de Vallecas, Vallecas, Entrevias, Villaverde, Carabanchel Alto y Bajo, are the natural points for worker’s houses. The factories

should be built in the low points of the terrain, alongside the rail track and the houses in the high points. (Concurso Urbanístico Internacional. 1929/2006, 26) (Figure 7 shows a diagram of the relationships from the 1929 competition report)

[Figure 7. near here]

It is clear, regarding the three areas mentioned in the earlier plans (centre, Ensanche and periphery) there began to emerge a division of the city geographical into different parts (north and south), with the clear intention of implementing zonal planning in the periphery, with housing to the north, and industries and workers housing that support this type of tertiary use to the south. One can see the acquisition of some of the existing settlements in the south into the overall fabric of the city (Vallecas, Carabanchel etc). This is interesting as some of the PAUs developed in the 1980s and 1990s —Las Tablas, Sanchinarro, Montecarmelo and Arroyo de Fresno in the north, and to the south Carabanchel and Vallecas—were located precisely in these areas of the city that are referred in this document from 1929.8 (Figure 8 shows these areas in the 1985 Plan)

[Figure 8. near here]

The final historical city plan that is relevant to this discussion emerges from a period between 1939 and 1963 (from the end of the Spanish Civil War until the culmination of Franco’s dictatorial regime). Again, Neuman (2010) gives some useful context, not only on its name but also on the unusual economic context:

Called the Plan General de Ordenacion Urbana, it is better known as the Bidagor Plan after its author. It is the exception to the tendency of plans reacting to economic growth. It reacted to a diseconomy, the destruction of Madrid from Spain’s civil war. (Neuman 2010, 103)

In the context of today’s periphery this plan is important for what it failed to deliver and the legacy it left after Franco’s death. As well as reacting to a ‘diseconomy’, what Neuman describes as the plan’s goal of ‘decongestion via decentralization into satellite new towns’ (2010, 105) needs to be qualified. Indeed, as Díaz and Araujo (2017, 43-4) have argued, the public housing estates commissioned by the Ministry of Housing (which itself was initiated in 1957) resulted in ‘poor-quality blocks of flats, often lacking educational, health, and cultural facilities and even infrastructure such as sewerage’, rendering these peripheral developments reliant upon, or beholden to, the urban core.

From these various historical plans, realised and unrealised, the particular character and logic of Madrid’s contemporary periphery can be traced, a trajectory that will be set out in the remaining sections.

3- The role of the infrastructure in the city’s growth

As mentioned in the introduction the importance of infrastructure, at city, regional and national scales, cannot be overstated in the development of the city plans of Madrid. If Referring to Figure 9, showing the Evolution of the Structural Region inside the framework of the Reticular Order of the Territory, one can see the evolution and importance in the growth of the city and the peripheries associated with the development of infrastructure set out in the Plan of Territorial Strategy 1996. Moreover, in the first illustration (1980) identifies the airport Barajas, the orbital motorway M30, and two corridors/Strips named Corredor Henares, and Corredor Sagra. Ten years later the expansion of the periphery connecting with the railway infrastructure and the high-speed train to the cities of Seville (AVE Sevilla), Toledo and Guadalajara is evident, as are connections with the motorway M30. A further ten years on, in 2000, the extension of the metro to Barajas airport and the extension of the Motorway M45 are shown. In 2010, the high-speed train has been extended to Barcelona (AVE Barcelona) and the motorways have also expanded, incorporating the M-70. As Spanish architect Andres Jaque points out:

High speed train lines and the building of new mobility vectors for road traffic have widened the area of territorial interdependence to a radius of 90 km, putting Madrid within daily commuting reach of cities up to 200 km distant. (Jaque 2009, 245)

This emphasizes the influential role that infrastructure plays in the periphery’s extension, almost reaching city-region scale in this case. What is important here is how all the different aspects of infrastructure in these diagrams were not developed in isolation, but were integrated into, and —it will be argued—determinant of, the architectural character of the periphery. Moreover, the emergence of these infrastructure corridors or strips was arguably anticipated by Soria’s Linear City, which also foretold some of the peripheral character witnessed today.

[Figure 9. near here]

As mentioned, Arturo Soria projected an image of the city (and city growth) which clearly incorporated, indeed was predicated upon, speculative economic development. Although all the plans discussed in the previous section addressed housing need in peripheral areas, and included infrastructure to link or control the populations housed there, Soria’s plan is

significant because it was the precursor to some of the economic models that currently operate in Madrid. A mid-century review is arguably more prescient about the real legacy of Soria’s Ciudad Lineal than Neuman’s account: ‘The principal merit of the system of town building invented by Soria lies in the means it provides for opening up undeveloped land and bringing urban services to agricultural areas… For application elsewhere, Soria’s method is too simple and rigidly geometrical to meet the varied demands upon town layout which result from modern social organization and modes of transport.’ (Boileau, 1959, 237) It is precisely this colonization of agricultural areas that has been witnessed as a result of the 1985 and 1997 PGOUM: the total area of agricultural land within the Madrid urban area decreased by 8% (from 50% to 42%) between 1987 and 2000, consumed almost entirely by peripheral urban development. (Moliní & Salgado, 2012, 1085) Through this period, the public housing provision that had characterized the later years of Franco’s dictatorship—notwithstanding the poor quality of this provision and lack of general amenities noted earlier—was progressively abandoned. What Prat describes as the ‘breathtakingly ambitious, government sponsored urban expansion project’ (2008, 39) that was the peripheral development between the city’s M-30 and M-40 ring highways was undertaken at the expense of public housing. Alongside the PGOUM, government sponsorship in the form of tax breaks were offered on the purchase of housing, aimed at the middle classes to encourage them to buy second homes—newly constructed on the periphery, and thus sustain the construction boom, but also releasing housing stock in the city centre in order to allow higher-return investment developments (Roch 2004, 88: Díaz and Araujo, 2017, 44). These accompanying fiscal changes reveal planning, and the PGOUM, to be ‘a tool of dominant economic interest to assure the highest and best (most profitable) use of land and to support and maintain property values' (Neuman 2010, 94). There is a strong relationship between these moves, set out in the ‘Boyer Decree’ (1985) and what is witnessed in contemporary Madrid, as Fernando Roch writes:

This Decree promoted the expansion of the middle class suburb, the destruction of territory, the overdevelopment of infrastructure, the functional segregation that accentuated the opposition centre-periphery […] giving a great impulse to today’s dispersed models and acting as a catalyst of the real estate boom of the late eighties. (Roch 2004, 88)

This type of growth is only possible by connecting the peripheral developments both with large-scale infrastructure and economic development models witnessed in the historical plans as a means of projecting the city—and its attitude towards urban expansion— that can be seen today.

Arturo Soria’s Ciudad Lineal envisaged the role of infrastructure in the project of the plan, by incorporating a tramline at the core of the Ciudad Lineal, and between this new city and the existing metropolitan centre. Of course, this influential role of public transport infrastructure on the growth of the city was also happening at the end of the 19 th Century in other European cities such as London, where as early as 1870 a connection was made between railway infrastructure and suburbanisation.9 While this general mode of sub-urban

development occurred later in Madrid, the proposals for city development exemplified in Soria’s Ciudad Lineal are not only important because of the vital role of infrastructural connectivity provided, they also define much more particularly the architectural and urban spatial characteristics, or typology, of the city growth itself. However, as Boileau recognized as early as 1959, the tramline would cease to dominate as a mode of transport, and with its replacement, a new typology would emerge.

The railway, which was the raison d’être of the Ciudad Lineal, no longer enjoys its former popularity. It would be possible to plan a more complex town upon the basis of motor transport and allowing the deliberate creation of nodal points for the various communal facilities which are fortuitously provided in the Ciudad Lineal.’ (Boileau, 1959, 237)

Although the encouragement of public transport featured strongly in the 1985 PGOUM, its uptake in practice was poor, for reasons that Boileau predicted. In response, revisions were suggested in what would become the 1997 PGOUM, as Spanish architect Alfonso Vegara writes:

The Plan General of 1985 proposed as an objective to promote public transport with a ratio of 80/20 (Private/Public). This objective represents today a complete failure. There has not been much investment in public transport during the years of the Plan […] the revision of the Plan General proposes the following Infrastructure Operations: 1- Great operations in the Railway Infrastructure. 2- Transport Interchanges. 3- Improvement and extension Madrid’s tube system. (Vegara 1991, 241)

However the reality today is different from the proposition set up in 1985, as the most recent data, noted earlier, suggests that this ratio of 80/20 (Private/Public) has now changed to 45% of people using public transport and 55% using cars in the periphery, a clear improvement from the 1985 plan data.

The PGOUM 1997 proposed more forcefully the dispersal of the historical centrality of the city centre into the periphery, not only physically but also symbolically. (Rodriguez-Avial Llardent 2006, 80) The old centre had, by this time, lost its centrality, it had ‘lost residents, ha[d] expelled the large corporations who now concentrate their work force in the “corporate cities” of the outskirts.’ (Herreros 2009, 285) It was anticipated that these new centralities, relocated from the historical core, would ‘in some way […] be absorbed by the four PAUs of the Municipal programme of planning' (Rodriguez-Avial Llardent 2006, 83).

Again, these two elements—infrastructure expansion and provision of housing—were inherent and interconnected in the revisions of the 1997 plan, and the places where this was to occur were the PAUs in the periphery of the city, linked to the expansion of the infrastructure in the

city-region, which in turn led to the construction boom.10 It is clear that what was seen in the earlier plans of the city, and some of the insights that they offer in terms of the developmental approach of the city, have actually occurred far more forcefully and extensively in recent years, revealing a certain archetypal continuity of historical and contemporary intention in the development of Madrid. While the plans initially offered a future image of the territory and the political image that the institutions wanted for the city, the current metropolitan territory is much more complex and discontinuous in dealing with its growth than, for example, the first projected expansion of the city set out in the Castro plan of 1859.

Discussion and Conclusions

As has been seen through the development of the periphery in Madrid’s urban plans over the past 150 years, and which remains legible in the current periphery model in Madrid, this consistency of approach to is based on governmental and speculative economic development. The northern periphery of Madrid now accommodates the headquarters of private companies such as Telefonica (Spanish Telecom), but mainly comprises two Urban Action Plans (PAUs): Las Tablas and San Chinarro. In the southern periphery there are also PAUs such as Carabanchel and Vallecas. These were all anticipated as early as 1929.

It is interesting, if the current extensions of the city is compared with the largest expansion plan that the city had previously—namely the Ensanche, produced by Castro in 1859—this highlights the current scale and speed of growth. As Spanish architect Ramon Lopez de Lucio writes:

The Ensanche expanded the limits of the city by 2,025 Hectares, which would allow an increase in population of 150,000 inhabitants over the century with a generous standard of 40 square metres/per inhabitant in comparison with the 26.7 square metres/per inhabitant in the old city. (Lopez de Lucio 2004, 106)

Comparing these numbers with the figures for the recent expansion that Prat gave (2,250 Hectares for 225,000 inhabitants), it is evident that even pre-crash, Madrid was building roughly the equivalent area of the original 19th century expansion of the Ensache but to accommodate nearly 50% more residents, and this is was all to be built in a period of ten to fifteen years. In comparison to the steady growth over time set out in past plans, what is seen in this new peripheral expansion is on a totally different scale, and is happening at a much greater speed. Put simply, over a decade and a half the city area has expanded more than in the whole of the previous century. As discussed earlier, even after the economic crash the peripheral population has continued to grow, and the realized and planned construction of more dwellings has continued, despite the huge numbers of new properties that remain vacant. (Marcinkoski 2015, 104: Gil-Alonso, et al, 2016)

As can be seen, after looking at the selected Plans of Madrid, the combination of infrastructure and economic model of growth have created a periphery that has grown thanks to investment in transport and motorway expansion, and partly due to the fact that the land around Madrid is flat and therefore easily allows these extensions into the countryside. But also, real estate speculation and the construction industries have fuelled this growth that was apparent in the plans of the city during the 19th, 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. The sociologist and architect Jose Maria Ezquiaga explains how normal urban processes cannot explain the growth of Madrid:

These principles can no longer be the geometrical ‘analogies’ that they were in the traditional urban thought (from the decentralised garden city to the ‘poly-nuclear’ mesh), but must instead be strategies adapted to an ever-changing game board, upon which not only are ‘what’ and ‘how much’ important (in other words the type and intensity of land usage) but also, syntax and time. (Ezquiaga 2009, 271)

Despite the emphasis that has apparently been placed on integrated public transport, the kind of city that has been emerging through the plans discussed in this article is more of an a linear corridor full of vehicular traffic, which connects these plots of land through transport infrastructure, and representing a city that is no longer so much for people. In contrast to the optimistic view contained in the various city plans, what can be seen on the ground is a mediocre city, a city that is full of car signs, petrol stations, shopping malls and corporate mini-cities such as Telefonica City, connected within a network of primary, secondary and tertiary highways and punctuated with yet-to-be-developed lots providing what passes (temporarily) for public realm. A new kind of European urban or peri-urban landscape is emerging, one that requires a critical understanding of its operation and a re-thinking of how future city extensions are designed. The study of Madrid indicates a series of lessons that could be important in the understanding of similar cities in Europe, undergoing similar processes.

Confronting an equally emergent situation on the Las Vegas Strip during 1968, Venturi and Scott-Brown (1996, 73) identified ‘three message systems’ that went some way to explaining the prevailing architectural typologies operating within Las Vegas as a Communication System. In Madrid, the automobile and highway communication rule in a new kind of space, where the motorway and the car create a new spatial order (Figure 10 for different types of linear corridors and signs found in the Northern Madrid periphery). In the fieldwork undertaken in the Madrid periphery while preparing this article, a similar reality was observed to that which struck Venturi and Scott-Brown from a symbolic point of view, where the highways and the automobile dominate a new order in which pedestrians and people are no longer visible. (Martinez Perez, 2016, 144-236)

[Figure 10. near here]

The Madrid periphery that emerged from the 1997 plan in particular is the result of economic market forces. When Venturi and Scott-Brown (1996, 77) write: 'Some Strip establishments such as casinos and wedding chapels are generators, and others such as motels and gasoline stations, benefit from the market generated', this new market-led approach to the periphery has generated a series of generic residential blocks, shopping malls, vast green spaces, with cars and highways as space generators. Some of the new malls and petrol stations benefit from this market: the buildings face or are just off the highway. Even this motorway runs in the space that separates the two PAUs of Las Tablas and San Chinarro with shopping malls, petrol station and offices coming off it (Figure 11 shows the motorway acting as a separating device). This is not dissimilar to other cities’ peripheral areas, but in the areas that were studied in Madrid this phenomenon of linear corridor development was more directly related to the infrastructural and real-estate speculation witnessed continuously in the city plans over the long period discussed.

[Figure 11. near here]

Compared to the Ciudad Lineal, the principle that generates the architectural typology is similar, with all buildings facing onto and acknowledging the logic of the linear transport infrastructure that generates and underwrites the whole. In the Ciudad Lineal, however, multiple modalities of transport could more comfortably share the same central spine, for reasons of relative speed, scale and safety. In the PAUs and corporate mini-cities of today’s periphery, however, increasing separation and sheer size is demanded for obvious reasons. One consequence of this is the reliance it places on residents or workers to move around by car. Coincidentally, for all the apparent human scale of the Ciudad Lineal, Boileau again draws attention to a similar failing, observing that ‘Little attention was paid by Soria to the systematic provision of shops… the residents of the Ciudad Lineal depend upon the shops of the three older villages near its path for their daily shopping.’ (Boileau, 1959, 236) Like the dependence on the centre of Madrid planned into the peripheral housing developments carried out by the Franco regime, and like PAUs that have recently been developed, these places remain reliant upon infrastructural provision.

The understanding of the periphery, not only around Madrid but across Europe, is a critical question today in urban design, as the Italian architect and Professor Stefano Boeri writes: 'Today 60% of the European urban population lives outside the limits of the city that was built and consolidated by the end of the second-half of the last century' (Boeri 2011, 29-30). The study of the historical plans provides a clearer understanding of the precedents for the city that is emerging on the periphery of Madrid, and the extent to which this recent development perpetuates (albeit in an amplified and accelerated form) a historical logic traceable over the

last 150 years. However, the kind of city that is emerging is dominated infrastructurally by the car, and economically by speculation. More connected to the idea and example of the Strip and the automobile corridor than traditional European urban fabric, it must understood that this is a landscape dominated by economic development and infrastructure (Ezquiaga 2009, 271). The results are appearing now before our eyes, and one must either accept the consequences of this approach or consider other approaches to planning these urban extensions that are less reliant on the car and private enterprises, and more focused on a human scale and pedestrian environments. Either way, there is work to do. As architect Christopher Marcinkonski writes in relation to this period of Spanish urban growth: 'Such a reality suggests the need for fundamental revisions to how urban design professionals conceptualize, plan, and implement extensions of settlement given unpredictable and unreliable prognostications upon which this work is based.' (Marcinkoski 2015, 97)

References

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Figure captions

1 Diagram showing the different political systems in Spain (in blue) together with the Madrid Plans for each decade (from the second half of the 19th century till today). Source: Author’s own, based on information taken from the following sources: (Neuman 2010, 98; Los planes de ordenacion urbana de Madrid 2006)

2 Diagram showing the historical developments of Madrid (from 1859 until 1985). The diagram shows that the growth during the 1980s covered the city-region. All the diagrams are at the same scale, so growth can be read from left to right. (All the plans for this diagram were taken from the accompanying CD from the following publication: (Los planes de ordenacion urbana de Madrid 2006, 19).

3 Plan Castro 1859. In red we can see the extension of the city around the old centre of Madrid. (Los planes de ordenacion urbana de Madrid 2006, 15).

4 Plan Nuñez Granes 1910. The plan shows the unregulated periphery (in green) outside the limits of the city’s 19th century extension (Ensanche) and expanding into the regional territory (Los planes de ordenacion urbana de Madrid 2006, 25).

5 Publicity brochure for Ciudad Lineal 1911 written by Arturo Soria where we can see the plan of the linear city connected by the tram infrastructure. (Soria 2006, 30).

6 (from left to right, from top to bottom) 1- House for working class, 2- Grocery store, 3- School for girls Maria Teresa, 4- Enclosed big detached state house 1911 (La ciudad lineal 2006, 29). (Author’s translation).

7 Diagram showing the different relationships between the north and the south of Madrid from the 1929 International competition document. The areas in the North are located for housing while the large areas in the South are for industrial use, and workers housing. The South is working class and poorer than the North. (Text from this diagram taken from Concurso Urbanístico Internacional, 1929)

8 General Plan 1985, showing basic zoning of the territory for its development. The Urban Action Plan Areas (PAUS), areas for residential development are shown in the plan in orange in the South as indicated in the 1929 plan and growing into the periphery all around the city. (Los planes de ordenacion urbana de Madrid 2006, 57)

9 Evolution of the Structural Region showing the development of infrastructure From left to right, from top to bottom: 1-1980’s, 2- 1990’s, 3- 2000’s.

10 (from left to right, top and bottom) Different types of Strips according to Learning from Las Vegas Studio Notes (Fig. 1) Heraldic In this case the sign dominates McDonalds at the end of PAU Las Tablas; (Fig. 2) Physiognomic; In this case the message is given by the faces of the building, is clear is a shopping centre from the motorway at the end of Las Tablas in between the motorway that divides las Tablas and PAU San Chinarro (please note that El Corte Ingles is a big Spanish shopping brand) (Fig. 3) Locational service station found at the corner of the motorway at the end of PAU Las Tablas; (Fig. 4) Combined the façade of the office becomes one big sign off the motorway next to Telefonica City HQ. All terms taken from: (Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour 1996, 4 & 10).

11 The motorway acting as a separating device between the PAUs in the Northern part of Madrid of Las Tablas and San Chinarro, indicating a new kind of urban order.

1 ‘The first formulation of the “Ciudad Lineal” is from 1882 […] In 1892 the project of the Ciudad Lineal is published showing the horseshoe shape around Madrid […] By 1911, 680 houses had been built and there were around four thousand people resident; in 1906 the first 18 kilometres of track were built for the tram line. (Bataller Enguix et al., 2004, 43-36). Boileau (1959) describes the events along this timeline in more detail, and is more critical of Soria’s conceptual as well as practical shortcomings.

2 Government data shows that in 2012 the distribution of motorised trips by zone (millions of trips/per day) shows that in the inner part area of the city (the area inside of the M30) most trips were made by public transport (0.75 million trips/ per day) instead of by private car (0.23 trips/per day). However this data changes in the peripheral areas (outside the M30) where the tendency shows that most trips were made by private car (1,08 million trips/per day) instead of public transport (0,90 million trips per day). Plan de Movilidad Urbana Sostenible de la Ciudad de Madrid Resumen Diagnostico p.14 available at the web portal of Madrid City Council http://www.madrid.es/UnidadesDescentralizadas/UDCMovilidadTransportes/MOVILIDAD/PMUS_Madrid_2/PMUS

%20Madrid/Diagn%C3%B3stico%20Ejecutivo.%20PMUS%20Madrid.%2014%20feb%202014.pdf [accessed 16/09/2017]

3 As these authors note, the detailed picture is more complex. ‘Oddly enough… Spanish citizen annual growth rates indicate that their metropolitan area figures have been increasing more rapidly after 1 January 2008 (from an annual 0.38% to a 0.60%).’ (2016, 210)

4 Note that some of the plans during the periods of 1900-1939 were never implemented. For a more comprehensive overview see Neuman (2010) and Díaz & Araujo (2017).

5 Note that the word Ensanche in Spanish means to widen, and refers to the process of the extensions of the older areas of Spanish cities normally in the second half of the 19th century. Normally the built form of these Ensanches is based on a block (called manzana in Spanish), and with radial routes crossing the grid.

6 Paseo in Spanish means promenade.

7 Neuman does not reference Marc Augé’s work on non-place, (1992) Non-Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie do la supermodernité, Paris: Editions du Seuil) (English translation (1995) Non-Places: An Introduction to Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso) so his use of the term ‘non-place’ should be taken in a broader, colloquial sense rather than in Augé’s more loaded terms.

8 ‘The 1997 general plan was conceived of as a remedy for a city believed to be in decline. It contained vast number of provisions, but most notably, the plan anticipated the construction of more than five hundred thousand housing units in the capital over twelve years-enough homes to accommodate 1.5 million residents. This included the designation of thirteen new residential districts (PAUs ) at the city’s periphery accounting for more than two hundred thousand of the anticipated new homes to be constructed. […] Phase one was initiated in 1998 and included six PAUs. Four of these were developed to the north in empty formerly industrial areas, including Las Tablas (12,272 units on 361 hectares), Sanchinarro (14,000 units on 401 hectares), Montecarmelo (8,547 units on 300 hectares) and Arroyo de Fresno (2,754 units on 149 hectares). To the south was Carabanchel (12,700 units on 350 hectares),

[and] Vallecas (28,058 units on 700 hectares).’ (Marcinkoski 2015, 94, 103).

9 As Thompson notes regarding London: 'It has long been recognised that transport services played an important part among the general influences on suburban growth […] a much more complicated

statement about the relationship between transport and development emerges from the close analysis of railway promotions and train services in outer west London, and here it is possible to see the inter-dependence of the two, with the promotion of new lines in advanced of suburban housing both by speculative land owners and the railway company' (Thompson 1999, 35-36).

10 The consequences of this boom had social effects that were seen later in what has become the biggest economic crisis that the country has ever faced. As Marcinkonski writes ‘The consequences of the bust are in many ways as dramatic and wide-ranging as the dimensions of what was built. More than two million jobs were lost after the collapse of the economy […] As of 2010, roughly one in four unemployed Spaniards had come from construction-related industries. By 2012 the unemployment rate has reached 26 per cent’ (Marcinkonski 2015, 61). Not only did the crisis have dramatic effects in the construction industry and the country’s economy but also socially with unemployment rising, and empty housing units left from the boom period.