Minimal lives through the book Utopías urbanísticas by Pedro Zuazua for Altamarea

Sarah Jane, Juan Luis, Manuel, Josefina, Amparo are some of the real protagonists of the more than 200 pages that go through the historic neighborhoods of Madrid. The author of the volume edited by Altamarea, the philologist and journalist Pedro Zuazua, has collected the fruit of his conversations with neighbors, architects, historians and former mayors that, combined with the photographs of David Expósito, invite the reader to immerse himself in a parallel history of the city. A web of stories of daily life and memories of the past that transmit another way of living, like that of the neighbors who take their chairs out in the fresh air to interact with their peers, ways of interacting and watching the passing of time that are almost non-existent in the big cities.

In the 45 colonias that survive scattered around the capital, single-family dwellings created under the umbrella of the Law of Cheap Houses, Zuazua unravels a chapter of Madrid’s urban history. In the prologue by architect and urban planner José María Ezquiaga, he emphasizes the singularity of these redoubts of the past with this sentence: “their birth, crisis and transformation represent a living lesson of the promises and frustrations of the painful urban transit from modern Madrid to the contemporary metropolis”.

The journalistic reports presented in the book uncover urban oases that could well copy the city’s future urban plans, with resources and designs designed for the coexistence and well-being of its inhabitants. Although not all the story tells the goodness of this way of construction, because many of these colonies suffered in the past also the inconveniences of their idiosyncrasy such as the lack of asphalted streets, their small size, the absence of shower and toilet, or as those of Colonia Arroyo Meaques that lacked foundations.

The preservation of their particular constructions has allowed the preservation of original houses in the Nasrid style, and others in the regionalist modernist style. This is the case of the Colonia de la Prensa in Carabanchel, which opens the series, and which had green areas designed by none other than Cecilio Rodriguez, who was Madrid’s chief gardener.

Armed with his bicycle and the mask of rigor in 2020, when Pedro Zuazua begins his adventure through the colonies, the author draws a costumbrista drawing full of tender minimal stories, emotions and small anecdotes that for the inhabitants of these houses are part of their memories between nostalgic and revealing of what society was like a few decades ago.

As the writer tells the story of the Colonia Ciudad Jardín del Norte, in Tetuán, the neighbors bring their chairs to the street on the hottest nights and even a ping-pong table to hang out. Some of them have learned to ride their bikes on the little-traveled streets. It is not surprising, therefore, that some of the interviewees from Zuazua prefer these neighborhoods to remain anonymous and unknown.

It is interesting how Zuazua describes a typology of inhabitant of these housing clusters saying that “it is as if they had a map of the colony in their heads. A map on which the different stories of the neighbors, their circumstances and curiosities are located. A map with notes in the margins explaining the history of the place”. According to the author “they belong to a lineage of people who weave an invisible thread made of empathy, curiosity and time. In almost every colony there is at least one person like this”. When talking about Colonia Boetticher y Navarro, he tells something essential that runs through this book and that is that the colonies are like “a town within a town”.

Editor: Beatriz Fabián

Beatriz is a journalist specialized in offline and online editorial content about design, architecture, interior design, art, gastronomy and lifestyle.