The City That Never Was
Introduction to the Symposium
Rosalie Genevro; Christopher Marcinkoski and Javier Arpa
Recorded: February 22, 2013
In the twenty years after its accession to the European Union in 1986, Spain underwent unprecedented physical development that radically reshaped its major cities and metropolitan areas. From new housing to commercial and cultural facilities to infrastructure, Spain experienced a building boom of such remarkable proportions that by 2005 20% of the country’s GDP was attributable to construction-related activities. A year later, The New York Times celebrated Spain as “one of the great architectural success stories in modern history” in reviewing the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition On Site: New Architecture in Spain.
Today, as Spain teeters on the brink of bankruptcy with rising deficits and unemployment, the country is littered with unfinished, partially completed, or abandoned developments. In Madrid, where the situation is at its most severe, over 25% of the urbanized land in and around the city is comprised of these partly vacant or incomplete developments. The City That Never Was, a symposium organized by Christopher Marcinkoski and Javier Arpa, in cooperation with the Architectural League of New York, was held on February 22, 2013, to reflect on Spain’s situation and to share possibilities for how future patterns of urbanization might be conceived, financed, planned, and inhabited.
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