For an Iberian network of Linear Parks

Abstract

The paper begins with the author arguing that any centenary, such as that of the Revista de la Ciudad Lineal, can be either a cause for nostalgia or a spur for fresh effort. He then goes onto remark that as others have made the historical aspect of the event theirs, he is the more willing to make suggestions in the line of the original impulse and, specifically, to write here in favour of an iberian network of linear parks. The suggestion having been made, the question of why these parks should be linear and go to make up a network that arises from it must be met. The author attempts to do so by seeing a network of such parks as an instance of that generalized 19th and 20th Century phenomenon which is the shift from the point to the line and then on to the network, the point being here once a House in the sense that Arturo Soria y Mata understood it in 1882, that is a point as within urban geometry whose extension, by the same logic, would be the linear city indefinitely extended, or, in keeping with the same definition yet for our own times, also a park or computer. The author sees in this double somersault from point to line then network, which he has observed in a host of fields, the explanation for the nature of change in people, things and information. Having once established the context of his arguments, the author then moves on to explain the nature of change taking place, especially in the U.S.A. along the patterns of linear parks in the making to then round of the paper proper with his promised proposal for an iberian network of linear parks.