Iberian Cities

Ed. Joan Ramon Resina
Although Spanish and Portuguese literatures are rich sources of urban knowledge, compared to studies of cities like London, Paris, Vienna, or Rome, critical literary and cultural approaches devoted to modern Iberian cities have been notably scarce. Iberian Cites locates regional patterns of urbanization articulated in or around highly symbolic centers, calling attention to the extraordinary combination of factors, personal and collective, temporal and instantaneous, planned and coincidental, logical and ideological, virtual and representative, that make up the experience of the city. In this work, Joan Ramon Resina and a group of distinguished scholars from an array of disciplines remind readers that Hispania, the ancient geographic matrix of people of Iberia, is still a system of interrelated cultures.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Joan Ramon Resina

1. Tough Beauty: Bilbao as Ruin, Architecture, and Allegory

   Joseba Zulaika

2. Santiago de Compostela or the Obsession with Identity

   Javier Gómez-Montero

3. A Walk about Lisbon

   Miguel Tamen

4. Getting to Salamanca (and Away): One Approach, Nine Vistas, and a Retrospective that Does Not Take Place

   Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

5. Madrid’s Palimpsest: Reading the Capital against the Grain

   Joan Ramon Resina

6. Madrid: From “Años de Hambre” to Years of Desire

   Michael Ugarte

7. A Sad Diagnosis of a Sad Town: Granada and the Dream of the Recumbent Woman
   Juan Carlos Rodríguez

8. Modern Spaces: Building Barcelona

   Brad Epps

9. A Walk through Identity in the Gardens of Catalonia

   Maria Jesús Buxó i Rey

10. Valencia: Cultural Spaces, Economics, and Territory

    Rafael L. Ninyoles

Afterword: Wanderings

Jenaro Talens and Angela Vallvey