An incestuous post – the link originally came from Ben Fraser and UCS. I’ve added a few words. Great topic.
Here below is a link to a new issue of the Journal of Iberian Studies on Madrid, edited by Benjamin Fraser. Looks great. Madrid is very large, and complex, but often overlooked by Anglophone writers. It shouldn’t be: it grew at a prodigious rate during from the 1980s until recently, and arguably experienced more urban change than anywhere in Western Europe in that period. It bought into culture as an agent of change more vigorously (and earlier) than anywhere I can think of, and its reconstruction of its transport networks was likewise done with with rare conviction and thoroughness. The landscapes of change we now find in contemporary China were all there in early 1990s Madrid: new suburbs and satellite towns created de novo, forests of high rises, inexorably expanding subway networks, frenzied consumerism, a new, bewildered poor. I know, because I was there. It was an unforgettable and formative…
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