Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Mapping tools can visualize data that helps scholars and students understand the relationships between transformations in the built environments of cities and their representation in the cartographic imaginaries of cultural creators. This paper offers a case study of how this process plays out in the narrative production of the Spanish novelist Juan Madrid most of whose extensive body of work deals with life in the city of Madrid. The paper traces the developmental process for the tool used to map spaces in Madrid’s novels and efforts to verify its efficacity. It then proceeds to lay the results of the mapping exercise. The maps produced during this process plot the spaces of several novels written over a period of twenty-five years. These narrative texts offer a fictional place of resistance to the abuses that characterized the urban process in Madrid in the last decades of the Franco dictatorship and on in its restoration of democracy. Moreover, the maps verify the centrality of Madrid’s Central District among the places in Madrid in which the author situates his fiction. Most importantly, they show how the places represented in Madrid’s city center change in a way that puts those spaces into alignment with significant points of conflict in the battle over spatial and political issues in Spain’s capital city. In the last analysis, the visual evidence the maps offer, helps to support hypothesis about the relationships between real spaces and their imaginary reproduction by cultural creators that undergird this exercise in mapping.