Central public spaces in Spanish cities

Abstract

The aim of this piece of work is to reconstruct the contemporary transformation of the
public spaces that organize the urban centre, present or traditional, in Spanish cities. So, for that,
we use a group of thirty squares, all of them significant, with a wealthy artistic heritage and with
functional complexity, because of their evolution and continuous adaptation. The approach,
qualitative and retrospective, is based on bibliography, ground reconnaissance and graphic
material, particularly the historical series of postcards. The comparative method shows us
parallelism and bears resemblance to stratification process, the dynamics and landscape changes,
due to urban scale and the specific factors of every single city. The paper helps us to identify the
variables that take part in the evolution and knows the various stages of development in this
evolution: from the Nineteenth-century liberal reform to nowadays strategic and project town
planning. The economic, morphological, social and environmental differences during those stages
show us the sample of what happened in the city and all the changes in the geographical declaration
of the centrality (traditional methods of geographical analysis).