Urban Spaces and the complexity of Cities

Since the Middle Ages and, over all, the Early Modern Age exists in the Crown of Castile, as in the rest of the Hispanic area, an extensive literature —first handwritten, printed soon— on history and description of cities. Choreographies and stories eminently "christianopolitans" in the context of the fight for Christian and Catholic identity against the Islam of Al-Andalus and Judaism of Sepharad secondarily. As in other parts of Europe, forges a way of seeing, feeling, yearning for a given city, parallel to the formation of the Spanish homeland pride. The Kingdom of Castile sits on their cities, represented in parliamentary meetings “Cortes”, at the expense of the nobility and clergy since 1538. The King of Castile and Leon, "crowns" and within its cities, symbolic, political and even economically. But during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, with the Habsburg dinasty, the Castilian cities got oligarchy around a socially intermediate elites, which drives many intellectual companies of urban exaltation: stories-choreographies, abstracts, landscapes and citizens views, building civic monuments (town halls, places, etc..). A whole new way of perceiving the city and urban, which overcomes the harsh reality of many crises to fetch sometimes mystical ideal. These contrasts between myths and realities in the most important cities of Castile in the Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will be the subject of this paper, of the meta-urban-historical character

2015

The Dynamics of Urban Form With a View of Sixteenth Century Lisbon 1 by Isabel Marcos "The essential is thus not to distinguish the 'real' from the 'represented', the historical from the mythical, the fact from the legend, nor to reduce the one to the other or the other to the one, these being simple exercises, the essential is to see the generation of differentiated spaces. The essential is to see that there is not only one space whether real or represented (a particular conception), but any number of spaces, imbricated ones on the others, inextricably. This is difficult to imagine, at present: the multiplicity of spaces" 2 (Michel Serres). A MONG THE MANY DIFFICULT CHALLENGES presented by reflection upon the spaces of our architectural conceptions is the search for the mechanisms underlying the generating mecanisms of the urban form, the city as such, as a spatial unfolding. Michel Serres proposes perspectives on how space is generated from a multiplicity of differentiated spaces, interrelated somehow through threads of relations:"*^ multiplicity of spaces'. He also reminds us of all the difficulties with which this way of thinking confronts us.

2008

Susanne Rau, 2014

In this contribution, I intend firstly to show at a theoretical level and then demonstrate in a practical way the advantages of viewing urban space from the perspective of the historical actors. Here we are more concerned with applying urban space dynamically, which means we no longer view the perceived and described spaces as something given nor do we set them in rigid maps. Moreover, our view is focused, firstly more upon the perception of movement in urban spaces, or changes in this area, and secondly, on the awareness of hierarchies in urban spaces (in dichotomies such as centre-periphery, old-new, inner-outer) and, if appropriate, hierarchical changes during the course of time. Finally, in this context , the following question arises: is it at all possible to map movements within urban space or to map the perceptions of urban spatial transformations including urban hierarchies together with any concomitant changes?

Res Historica, 2019

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Renaissance Quarterly LXXI, no. 4, 2018

Since the cultural turn, social and economic history has taken a backseat to more fash- ionable approaches such as entanglements, migration, and symbols. Long considered one of the hallmarks of the post-1945 historiographic shift away from big-men history, the study of conjonctures and structures (Fernand Braudel) has receded considerably in recent decades. This collection, to a certain point, stands somewhere between these two poles and is a welcome addition to the literature on pre-modern urban communities.

History Compass, 2009

The study of European cities and their inhabitants in the early modern period (approximately from the 14th through the 18th centuries) has changed in emphasis in the last few decades. Instead of focusing on the role of urbanization in the development of modern capitalism, modernity or other major epochal shifts such as the Renaissance or Reformation, scholars from various disciplines look at cities as sites of exchange and conflict where identities are created and power is exercised in specific spatial contexts. These contexts are increasingly international and sometimes global.

Res Historica, 2019

Enrique García Catalán, Una ciudad histórica frente a los retos del urbanismo moderno. Salamanca en el siglo XIX.

Willet (ed.) The Economics of Urbanism in the Roman East, 2020