València en la Restauraciónreformas y percepciones sociales del espacio urbano (1875-1910)

Laburpena

This PhD thesis examines the relationship between the urban reforms undergone in Valencia between 1875 and 1910 and the spatial perceptions of various social groups which lived, worked, represented and governed it. In particular, it explores how different media and literary approaches to feeling and representing space and social conflict in the city influenced Valencia's urban reform projects and, in particular, its historic centre. Similarly to other European and Spanish cities, the political and architectural elites of the city of Turia proposed the construction of major avenues and municipal infrastructures, as well as the demolition of some old quarters. In this sense, these initiatives, often justified under hygienic or circulatory epithets, can also be compared with contemporary trends or currents of social stigmatisation of certain kinds of street life. For this reason, it should not be overlooked that we are dealing with a moment in which the horizon of the "social question", the definition of its subjects and the conflicts derived from it are an issue of growing institutional and intellectual concern in the city. Likewise, these phenomena were developing alongside a complex interdependence of the city with its agrarian environment. The daily tasks and demands of small farmers in the squares and markets of Valencia, as well as their journalistic echoes, impregnated the governance of "the urban". And moreover, they were converted into the target of the literary imagination of secular balances and antagonisms that were difficult to manage. The construction of the Blasquist movement at the turn of the century as a major socio-political force in the capital of the Turia will be fuelled by some of these matters. The topics of the "invasion" and the urban "blockade" will be reinterpreted in the political and media debates about a model of city and town on the horizon that would break with a medievalised past and those socio-spatial appropriations identified with it in the heart of the city.