Madrid is very often named la villa y corte (village and court) because paradoxically it got its status as the capital city of the Kingdom of Spain before the status of “city” according to the medieval administrative taxonomy of urban settlements. This is a significant detail of the dual processes taking place simultaneously in Madrid in the last centuries, so that we could easily speak of two cities developing in different layers: a city of great projects of global impact and a small village of daily life. Our hypothesis is that these two layers are in practice very far from each other in communicative terms, so there is a permanent conflict between a global desire and a local spirit, with a sometimes urbicide national-regional-local government trying to repress the anarchic self-regulatory popular processes, a hidden history of a successful quality of life in terms of resistance that has led to a practical refusal to spatial planning by the top-down governance and a singularity in the 21st century urbanism.