El vademécum de la ciudad. París y barcelona en las guías y descripciones urbanas. 1750 - 1920
- Autores: Carmen Rodríguez Pedret
- Directores de la Tesis: Marta Llorente Díaz (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) ( España ) en 2018
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Juan Antonio Calatrava Escobar (presid.), Cristina Jover Fontanals (secret.), Manolo Laguillo (voc.), Jorge Torres Cueco (voc.), Josep María Montaner Martorell (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Teoría e Historia de la Arquitectura por la Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya
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- Resumen
There is a city, besides the one we visit or inhabit, that arises from its description. It is a city whose appearance influences our experience and cultural heritage, preventing us from distinguishing between the real image and the one that we have inherited from so many different visions and borrowed words. As it happens in our usual routes, with the everyday monotonous travels, guidebooks show how the discovery of a city depends on very specified requirements. That is why, even today, these publications are still considered an essential instrument to acquire knowledge of a place. However, it is not in the immediacy but in terms of time perspective from where the guidebook illuminates our relationship with the city. The distance endows the narration with facts; and beyond what it explains or not, what it shows or hides, the story is transformed into a privileged lens to study the creation of values, codes and images that stick on every place. Only distance helps us understand the way guidebooks reveal how cities have been thought and described, represented and perceived, regulated and distributed.
Even more than the object of study, guidebooks talk about someone who observes the city and the way he does it. The thesis addresses this unique perspective in order to identify the creation and the persistence of certain visions and routes; to detect how the points of view have changed, and to become aware of the arbitrariness of some centralities and isolations that, nonetheless we accept as part of a common heritage. In this story, the guidebook is not a simple instrument for mediation but an image production device; a precisely timed discourse to transmit the idea of an exemplary and organized scenario, from which the strength of the power structures is expressed, while eluding any conflict. The productive nature of the discourse is attached to the rules it establishes, the areas and monuments it scatters, the trips it requires and the image every place hopes to build for itself. In the ambiguous relationship between a guidebook and a specific social environment we find plenty of reasons to claim its uniqueness and to explain "another¿ story of the modern urban culture, made of an active ideological filtration, education and conviction and an intensive teaching towards the reader.
The thesis has three parts. The first one, THE VADE MECUM OF THE CITY, analyses the hybrid nature of the genre, its complexity and fragility from a historic perspective, on the basis of the prescriptive function of an object that appeals to a controlled mobility. The second part, THE CITY SEEN AS A SPECTACLE, addresses the responsibility of the guidebook in the creation of the spectacular topography of the nineteenth-century Paris. In this instance, we assume its expansion in the context of the nineteenth-century panoramic culture, observing interferences with other descriptive genres, such as the evocations of the historic city or the social physiologies, and getting to the presence of the public that finally gives the metropolis its status of spectacularity. In the last part, THE INVENTION OF THE MODERN CITY, the research travels to the mid-nineteenth century Barcelona, keeping up with the first guidebooks, the construction of the dialectics between the old and the new city and the slow symbolic emergency of the Eixample. The final chapter of the thesis focuses on the guidebook as an instrument for concealment and distortion of the social reality, developed through the depersonalization of the population of Barcelona and their inclusion in the catalogue of stereotypes that have modelled the imaginary of the city.
