Tenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

There is consensus among scholars that culture and its commodification play a seminal role in the urban process around the world. Spain’s capital city, Madrid, is no exception. Over the last two decades food culture (restaurants, bars, cafes, public markets and chain food stores) has been both a cause and effect of significant changes in the transformations Madrid has undergone. The current project explores the transformation of food culture on Santa Isabel and Argumosa streets. Both are located precisely in the middle of where the cultural transformation of the city began in the last two decades of the 20th century with the reconstruction of the Atocha railway hub and the establishment of the Reina Sofía art museum. This paper uses the story map function in the ARC GIS platform to demonstrate how this transformation evolved in this area. Story mapping enables the analyst to provide a compelling visual narrative of how the food trade evolves in space and time and to visually contextualize these changes against the major transformations in Madrid’s urban process over several decades. Story maps allow one to understand the nature of these transformations both textually and visually. Pedagogically, for both students and scholars alike, the story map helps humanists to see the importance of marshalling data, empowers them to construct their own interpretations of that information and offers a way to construct powerful arguments in support of their own points of view.