Cities of Power by Goran Therborn

Author:Goran Therborn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Modern Military Dictatorships

Classical fascism did produce a set of themes of modern authoritarian urbanism, but hardly a blueprint. In this section I shall make a brief overview of the urbanistic exploits of some of fascism’s latter-day grandchildren: military dictatorships of one kind or another. While they have usually included explicitly neo-fascist currents, the main heirs have learnt from the pragmatic opportunism of the classical leaders as well as from their defeats. But before that, I shall take a look at a contemporary cousin of classical fascism, Franco’s Spain.

In the second half of the 1930s, Spain was the hot battlefront between fascism and anti-fascism. Workers and progressive intellectuals from all over the North Atlantic world volunteered for the International Brigades, defending the Spanish Republic, while the fascist powers sent troops, tanks, and air squadrons to the fascist side. In March 1939, Generalísimo Francisco Franco’s troops marched into Madrid, the defeated capital of a defeated republic. The victors did consider moving the capital out of ‘disloyal’ Madrid and the new leaders investigated the possibility of Seville, but discarded it. In 1938 a congress of architects assembled in Franco’s command city, Burgos, to plan the fascization of Madrid: The city should stop looking at Paris and take in the examples of El Escorial and Toledo. A new political centre should hold up a fachada imperial (imperial façade) carried by three main buildings: El Alcázar, a medieval fortress rebuilt into a royal palace in the eighteenth century; the Cathedral, a then-unfinished construction just south of the former, started in the late nineteenth century; and a new headquarters for the Falange Party. This trio was meant to represent the Fatherland, religion and modern fascist power.29

Most of this part stayed on paper. The World War II bulletins soon made it obvious that fascism proper was a losing horse, and the regime reinforced its military-conservative-clerical character. The new Party building was never built, and the royal palace remained unused. In the early 1950s even the idea of an ‘imperial façade’ was destroyed by two large private commercial buildings, supported by the appointed mayor: the Torre de Madrid and Edificio España. Private capital was asserting its part in the conservative coalition. The Puerta del Sol hub, from where the Republic had once been proclaimed and which the Franquistas denounced as a ‘plinth of corrupts where Marxism circulate[d] comfortably’, survived.

But other sides of the plan were implemented. The north-eastern entrance to Madrid still includes the Triumphal Arch built for the entering Franquista troops. Coming that way, you pass the Ministry of Aviation, a kind of military Escorial. Further east, the fascist plan of 1944 took over the 1929 idea of a major street prolongation to the north. At the time it was known as Avenida del Generalísimo; today it is the Paseo de la Castellana. Under the Republic it was meant to be mainly an avenue of state public construction, representing the republic and democracy. The new zoning made it part of the ‘special or political-representative’ zones. A big complex of new ministerial buildings was completed.

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