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April 26, 2022

16:00-17:30 IL time

Madrid

By Javier Ruiz Sánchez

Madrid villa y corte, the glocal city

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.

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Javier Ruiz Sánchez

Javier Ruiz Sánchez is an architect & Urban Planner. He hold a Ph.D. in Architecture (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid UPM, Spain) and he is a Professor at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, UPM and a leading Researcher at LoCUS Interdisciplinary Lab on Complex Urban&Regional Processes  https://www.locuslab.eu/

He combines academic and research with professional activity as planner and urban designer in several scales. Some of his subjects of research are: urban complexity; innovative techniques in urban planning and design; evolving aspects in urban planning; landscape as a time experience; urban regeneration; uncertainty, conflict, disaster and catastrophe management; difference and city. He has lectured in master and doctorate programs in several universities and institutions, in Spain, Latin America, Japan and Europe. He is the director and co-ordinator of some main research projects on urban planning, landscape or gender financed by public programmes in Spain and the EU.

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