Anti-urbanism and the Remaking of Madrid after the Spanish Civil War, 1939–59

The goal of the Nationalist forces under General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War was not only to defeat the Republican army but to instigate a fundamental transformation of Spanish society under the banner of National-Catholicism. It was the conviction of the leading Nationalists that only through the elimination of the social foundations of left-wing politics would a lasting peace be possible. To prevent social unrest and revolution that in their opinion had plagued Spanish history since the early 19^th century, Spanish society had to be fundamentally restructured and new forms of community established. Recent scholarship has started to pay more attention to Francoism as a social and cultural project, but so far scholars have paid only slight attention to the spacial dimensions of this project. This is unfortunate as the transformation of the urban space of former “red” cities was a core element of Francoist politics and the new regime soon faced the enormous task to house millions of Spaniards that fled the country-side for Madrid and Barcelona. The presentation looks in two steps at Francoist anti-urbanism as part of the attempts to re-model social relations in Spain after 1939. First, it situates Francoist anti-urbanism in the highly contradictory debates over urban reform in the pre-Civil War era. Second, the presentation analyzes the conflicts between important expert groups on the Nationalist side.