The Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spain

5. The Bourgeois City

ch a pter 5 The Bourgeois City E ven though, in 1900, Spain was still an agrarian country with a mostly rural population, urban life had experienced an unprecedented transformation throughout the nineteenth century. Quantitatively speaking, the results were modest. At the end of the nineteenth century, only 2 cities, Madrid and Barcelona, had more than half a million inhabitants, whereas the rest of Europe had as many as 25 such cities, of which at least 7 had more than a million inhabitants. Around 1900, 51 percent of Spaniards still lived in population centers of less than 5,000 inhabitants, and 91 percent lived in centers of less than 100,000. In a strictly technical sense, it can be said that only 9 percent of Spaniards lived in wholly urban centers.1 Even so, the growth at the end of the nineteenth century of some cities like Barcelona, Madrid, Gijón, and Valencia was at a magnitude comparable to that of developments across Europe. But, above all, there was a series of qualitative changes that indicate advances in the urbanizing process. In a context characterized by the persistence of rural life, the inhabitants of the cities exhibited such positive social indicators as sustained mortality rates, greater life expectancy, lower marriage rates, and lower birth rates.2 The urbanizing impulse is best seen in the transformation of the urban landscape of a significant number of provincial capitals, as well as that of the most economically, politically, and socially dynamic cities. Since the midnineteenth century, many Spanish urban centers followed the standard set by the great European cities and began to break the geographic limits inherited from the Old Regime. The plans for urban extension developed in the second half of the century were in response to the need to improve the living conditions of the cities, and reflect the existence of well-informed urban elites committed to European urbanizing tendencies. The extensions not only illustrate the will of 132 • The Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spain the dominant nineteenth-century groups to modernize, but also constitute the most palpable manifestation of the rise of the bourgeois city. “To modernize,” writes Joan Ramon Resina referring to the case of Barcelona, “meant the synchronization of Catalonia with the vanguard of continental societies, but that synchronization had to be expressed spatially.”3 Consequently, Barcelona’s eixample (extension) project became the comprehensive expression of the efforts of the dominant groups of the city to create images of modernity in the nineteenth century. In the same manner, Deborah Parsons interprets Carlos María Castro’s project for the extension (ensanche) of Madrid as an initiative meant to create a new city. The new Madrid expressed the ideals of rationality and social order of the new liberal elite, and presented itself as the only possible means to adapt the city to the multiple challenges of modern life.4 The extensions (ensanches) of the cities were made for various reasons.5 Since the last years of the eighteenth century, Spanish cities, to a greater or lesser degree, had grown in population, expanded their markets, and experienced administrative changes. As a result, the infrastructure had to be adapted to the new economic and social conditions. From these impulses rose new buildings to house banks, markets, commercial districts, offices, industries, and the like. The extensions were a profitable business for real estate speculators, builders, proprietors, and investors. Scientific and technical development also played a role. It is impossible to imagine the bourgeois city without train stations, organized traffic on its boulevards, or the rails for the trams. But there was also a profound cultural motivation in the new wave of urban planning that began to appear after 1830 in Barcelona and Madrid, and extended to other parts of the country. This chapter argues that the movement that launched the extension of the Spanish cities and their aesthetic, economic, and administrative transformation can be partially understood as an aspect of the development of a bourgeois culture. The concept of nineteenth-century urbanization as a cultural element has gained acceptance in recent years. There is a “spatial turn” that is evident in recently published works that look at the city from the new perspectives and concerns of different areas of investigation.6 In general, all these works use the material reality that constitutes the city itself as a source of historical interpretation. The interpretation of the material culture constituted by the buildings, streets, gardens, plazas, sewers, and so on...