Abstract
When we think of the design and built environment of the City of Madrid, many images come to mind: large parks like El Retiro, open squares like Plaza Mayor, bohemian neighborhoods like Malasaña and Chueca, museums like El Prado, and world-class transport like the Madrid Metro. A city of more than three million, and a region of more than six million, Madrid has experienced dramatic periods of growth and decline of its population, housing, and the economy. In this engaging book, Michael Neuman chronicles these periods of growth and decline through an urban planning lens. He offers a timely, stimulating, and prodigious study of the historic role that images and symbols play in the planning process and governance of a city.
Madrid offers an excellent case study of European planning. Neuman tells us that professional planning is largely dominated by architects in Spain, and as a result, planning is symbolic in nature and filled with images. Indeed, these images serve as powerful symbols that give public meaning to institutions such as government, the economy, race, and class. Neuman tells the reader that, “images are a concentrated form of knowledge and content. An image fuses content, context, and meaning into a high impact, wide-spread and widely spreadable source of power in institutions” (33). From this vantage point, Neuman argues that images are the social constructions of society and expressed periodically by planners’ visions and plans for the city.
After a preface in which the author explains that this research was the result of nearly fifteen years of work in Spain, the book opens immediately by presenting the author’s research questions. In the broadest sense, Neuman is interested in how policy is created and how urban policy is advanced in industrial nations. He sets out to examine the institution of metropolitan planning through an examination of the interactions of the key stakeholders (i.e., forums, arenas, courts) in the process of the production of a city plan. More specifically, he asks the following questions: (1) How does the institution in which public policy is made affect policy making? (2) How does urban policy in general and spatial planning in particular emerge historically from the metropolitan planning institution? (3) Conversely, how does the institution evolve in relation to policy? (4) Do plans and policies shape the institution? (5) Or, does the institution shape policies and plans?
In answering these questions, Neuman goes on to present the succinct findings of his empirical study. He convincingly argues that Spain’s city planners created images to shape urban development, which led to metropolitan planning. Key actors in planning were thus able to shape urban form, urban politics, and urban institutions. Then, Neuman presents an advanced methodological overview of his research. He notes that his study is not a history or critique of planning in Madrid but rather an analysis of “planning episodes” of how city and metropolitan plans were made and how they evolved” (10). Furthermore, scholars will appreciate the rigorous presentation of qualitative data in the book’s two appendices. The author includes a thirty-two-question guide for open-ended interviews, which were used to establish a baseline of planning episodes. Interviews and conference participation data are also included, as well as a very useful chronology of key planning events in Madrid for more than a century. Finally, the book is supplemented with copious references.
The book’s theoretical framework draws on life-cycle theory to situate the institution of planning. Noting that metropolitan Madrid has 180 municipalities as well as regional and national planning bodies, Neuman notes that planning is complex and spatially fragmented. This is remarkably similar to the political structure of local government in the United States where local governments are highly fragmented and where each local jurisdiction asserts the power to maintain control over local land use planning. We learn that Spain is no exception. Accordingly, over the course of a century of city and regional planning in greater Madrid, Neuman sets out to analyze images, individuals, organizations, institutions, processes, and political regimes of the institution of planning itself. In a qualitative analysis, the author identifies the dependent variable as institutional change and the independent variables include the degree to which images and their “imageability” change as a function of creation, stability, replacement, determination, displacement, or loss (8).
Drawing on ethnographic and deep historical description, Neuman presents his analysis in the following seven chapters after the introductory overview of the study in the first chapter. In the second and third chapters, the author critically reviews the literature on institutions. Neuman argues that two disparate bodies of literature inform the understanding of metropolitan planning institutions: the policy-making process and city planning. He considers how and why institutions form and evolve over time in the context of a policy environment, demonstrating that city planning is highly institutionalized and politicized.
The heart of the analysis is presented in chapters 4 and 5. Neuman’s analysis is divided into five planning episodes in the history of Madrid’s spatial growth. For the 1980s, Neuman examines the rise of regional planning through a critique of Madrid’s regional government, named Comunidad de Madrid, and its regional plans, Madrid Región Metropolitana and Gran Sur. Then, the author organizes the analysis of previous regional planning efforts, or episodes as he refers to them, by spatial scale: the Plan Castro of 1860, the Bigagor Plan of 1946, and the Comisión de Planificación del Area Metropolitana de Madrid (COPLACO) of 1982. In the next two chapters, Neuman interprets the meanings of the legal and administrative structures of metropolitan planning and reflects on the dialectic of institutional evolution. In the final chapter, the author presents a new theory of institutional evolution. Neuman concludes that constitutional images form ideological perceptions about the institution of city planning and that changes in these images can change the institution.
The Imaginative Institution makes an important contribution to planning scholarship. The key strengths of the book lie in the in-depth analysis of the City of Madrid. The author is intimately familiar with the urban fabric of Madrid, which enhances the historical analysis of Madrid’s urban development. Furthermore, the book is a nice addition to the comparative study of urban planning—an area that is generally understudied. Neuman systematically demonstrates that the role of images in planning shaped the process of governance for over a century in Madrid. Undoubtedly, the Spanish experience of planning in the nation’s capital offers a rich lesson in the role images played in the growth and governance of region. The book is likely to become the authoritative source on the history of urban planning in Madrid.
There are some areas throughout the book, however, where readers may find shortcomings. First, some readers may get bogged down in the depth of the history of planning in Madrid. At times, the book’s tone is highly scientific and truncated. Second, the theoretical contributions are situated at the end of the book. Neuman concludes by introducing a typology of institutional transformation to explain how planning institutions evolved over time; that is, the creation, development, change, decline, and demise of Madrid’s regional planning experiments. Some brief, but more explicit, mention earlier in the book of this typology would have further strengthened the theoretical contributions of the planning episodes. Finally, although critiques of any selection are certainly easy to cast, Neuman’s work is exclusively focused on the Madrid experience. The author does acknowledge that “these findings are specific to Madrid . . . after accounting for the unique cultural, historical, and political circumstances of Spain and Madrid . . . these findings have broader relevance for other cities and regions, and public policy domains” (16). Nonetheless, it would be nice to situate the Madrid experience in the context of other large urban areas in Spain such as Barcelona, Valencia, or Sevilla. A closer look at other cities in contrast to Madrid would establish a useful comparative dynamic within the Spanish urban experience.
In any case, The Imaginative Institution is a well-written book that both urban scholars and planners, along with scholars in numerous other disciplines, will welcome. Historians of planning will appreciate the Neuman’s treatment of the historiography of comprehensive regional planning. Political scientists will be interested in the book’s contributions about how institutions and governance processes influence the shape of the city. Sociologists will value the author’s analysis of socio-spatial inequality in urban development. It is not often that a work achieves such appeal. Neuman succeeds in the integration of multidisciplinary perspectives to inform his work on the historic and contemporary development of regional planning in Madrid.
In summary, Neuman has succeeded in explaining how the role of images helped to build new institutions in Madrid. The development of the theory of institutional evolution provides scholars with a useful framework to apply to the social and economic development conditions of the imaginative city. The Imaginative Institution is a nice addition to our understanding of the complex process of urban planning in the context of a European capital city. Planners and policy makers alike will benefit from this comprehensive review of the history of Madrid’s planning.