Enrique Pastor, councilor for Youth and Free Time in the series La que se avecina , has been warning those who enter his apartment for 12 years: “Be careful, double-height living room.” It is, however, a ridiculous and pretentious double-height living room, because as soon as you enter you are already stepping on the wrong foot.
Beautiful metaphor for Mirador de Montepinar, the urbanization in which the fiction created by the brothers Alberto and Laura Caballero takes place. “In its beginning”, writes Jorge Dioni, author of the essay The Spain of the pools (Arpa, 2021), “the series showed the economic euphoria of the turn of the century, the problems of promotions carried out in a hurry, without equipment, services or commerce”.
In other words, the advantages of the field 15 minutes from the center, a safe and quiet place in which to raise a family. “With the crisis, problems came: homelessness, precariousness, shared flats, the help of the previous generation and even an eviction, ” he writes.
It is the Spanish series of our time (of course, the most watched and the longest running), “just as Los Serrano reflected Zapatero’s optimism, cultural openness and economic orthodoxy or, earlier, Family Doctor showed that he was back it’s fashionable to be right-wing, ”says Dioni.
Pontevedra, the urban model for cities that look to childhood
“Of course, urban planning has an ideology,” said the architect Antonio Renalias in EL PAÍS in 2014 . “It is not the same as a promoter who benefits from an action to produce an invisible surplus value such as the quality of life of citizens.” Is that so? María Victoria Gómez, Professor of Urban Sociology at the Carlos III University of MadridHe thinks so, although he qualifies: “Does an X ideology correspond to such an urban form? No, let’s not get to that.
The world is always more complex, ”he says. “The reference is very old: the classic idea that existence creates consciousness. If you are all day in a certain group, or you stay in a place where people are like you, and you practice sports such as golf or horse riding, your way of seeing the world adapts to that universe. Because urban planning, when what it does is group very homogeneous people, distorts the very idea of the city. City refers to diversity and intercultural encounter, to the coexistence of different people, and what it generates is a bubble of the same people ”.
The teacher also understands that the feminist perspective of urban planning is necessary. It is, she says, an interesting idea: how urban planning can contribute to a very simple and better life for women. “What dimensions should a city have in order not to have insecurity when we go alone on the street, or to facilitate the task of care, since we are the main caregivers: pushing a wheelchair, a baby carriage … A more humane urbanism, more livable, less dependent on the use of the car ”.
The Spain of the swimming pools emerged to respond to a phenomenon, that of the color that in the electoral maps now begins to change naturally: that of Citizens orange for PP blue . Why and how most of the five million homes built in Spain during the real estate boom are green islands – because of the common areas – and blue – because of the swimming pools – located on the outskirts of the cities and where a large part of the so-called aspirational middle class of our country.
“Young families with young children. The children and grandchildren of empty Spain. A world made up of villas, housing estates, mortgages, alarms, subsidized schools, multiple cars per family unit, shopping centers, online consumption, private health insurance … A world that favors individualism and social disconnection and whose political importance is fundamental today, since the evolution of the political map depends on it, especially the conservative vote ”, the book summarizes. A key word: PAU (Urban Action Plan) and an eye on it, that of the writer Jorge Dioni.
“There is a time when all the institutions open the way to go out of the city through aid. It’s a very Spanish liberal way of life: deductions for everything, “says the author on the phone. Cite another Spanish series, the third season of Look what you’ve done , by Berto Romero. “The couple goes to a chalet and immediately begins to distrust everyone, those do not ring a bell, you have to set an alarm. Security ends up being among the first preferences, especially if the media bombard with occupation news, alarm announcements …
If you live in the center of the city, all that speech sounds like Chinese to you, but if you leave your single-family home at eight in the morning and you come back at eight in the afternoon, it doesn’t sound like Chinese to you, but rather a possibility ”, he admits. What is neoliberal urbanism? “It is urbanism that is done with its back to the street, urbanism that does not care about the street. Except to take the car. A six-lane avenue is worse than a wall. They plant that for you and you don’t pass it on, that’s it ”.
“Of course urbanism has an ideology”
The car is an expert César Mosquera, former councilor for Urban Planning of Pontevedra , the city that began to banish them from the urban center in 1999 to build a fully pedestrianized nucleuswhich has been harvesting world awards for years. “The urban process always worked like an accordion. Rome was much more urban than it was after the Middle Ages.
Because urban planning depends on the type of society and the dynamics it has, such as the productive system, ”he explains. And the nationalist politician (BNG) raises a question regarding the PAUS: “Are they designed so that people are more conservative or do more conservative people look for those solutions?”
Urban models, he argues, move according to needs. He gives the example of 19th century Paris. “There is an urbanism directly designed for security reasons: the great avenues of Paris were built because the army and the police could not work well in the revolution of 1848 (total, they were later planted by the revolution of 1871).
Pontevedra? “It was done with a lot of work and a lot of knowledge. A dense city, with social interaction. There was a current of opinion that it was to recover the cities as a center of socialization and not as a productive machine. That led to people leaving the cities, making them unlivable. And of course there is an ideology, not so much in relation to the left-right axis as if you defend a city that defends in its center small businesses or large stores, streets full of pedestrians or cars… ”.
Professor María Victoria Gómez recalls that utopia goes back a long time, and emphasizes: “ Tomás Moro imagines Utopia, Yes. And that perfect idea of how to see the world Tomás Moro materializes on an island. Something like Fourier’s phalansteries: to be happy, you have to have these certain physical characteristics and stay in an environment with certain characteristics. Anyway”.
In his essay , Jorge Dioni dissects the famous Ikea campaign: “Welcome to the independent republic of your home.” “Let’s go to the dodgy part”, says Dioni: “In a video about the genesis of the campaign, a person from the company pointed out that, after a study on the social importance of housing in Spain, they decided that the ideological base had to be the reconquest of the house as a refuge; the freedom of the home in the face of the dictatorship of the street, [publicist Toni Segarra, author of the ad] sentenced when sitting on a sofa. Pure Chicago School ”.
