Contingency, irony and solidarity for the city's prestige

City Futures 2009 International Conference. Madrid

CONTINGENCY, IRONY AND SOLIDARITY FOR THE CITY’S PRESTIGE

MatĂ­as Nieto Tolosa

PhD candidate at Urban Planning Department, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid.2-year collaborator in the urbanization of the Linear Park of Madrid's Manzanares River. matiasnietotolosa@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: this paper is a critical essay about urban psychoanalysis of Madrid City, its society and its waters, from the outlook of an architect and urban planner. In the necessary aim to understand what is happening in the contemporary culture of dissatisfaction and eagerness, it is explained a persistent confrontation of the historic and everyday facts against a conceptual model that can be understood as a theoretical framework to give sense to mass dynamics, social migrations and urban processes, based on an hypothesis about the urban essence and, in turn, the human essence: the invisible system of prestige. This is thought as a relevant term, as the politics of hope, in the way that explains facts like exclusions, spatial distribution of income, the emergent tendency towards gated communities, the standardization of masses and our degenerated interactions with ecosystems and its waters.

Keywords: civics, solidarity, waters, prestige, evolution.

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1.

A CONCEPTUAL MODEL FOR A PARADIGM SHIFTING

From the last 80’s, city’s care lives between two referential frameworks: one based on the evolution as innovation from necessity and misery and other based on innovation from the prime of society. Disenchantment and decline of cities and sustainability disarray demand pointing efforts to renew approximations towards urban reality. Due to accelerated changes, uncertainty leaves ironically obsolete any aim to give sense to reality before it is practiced and is effective. So the standardized determination of people occupied with the city’s care (city planner and architect profession), with its transmission (teaching) and its improvement (research) has an unbalanced theoretical framework of reference.

HYPOTHESIS It can be asserted that prestige, as an invisible social system, as a hidden unconscious fabric, is the driving force of the urban essence. Also prestige can become the leit motiv of a referential framework as the engine of urban and social evolution, setting a more balanced one between the liberal one based on the evolution as innovation from necessity and misery (since Malthus, 1798, and Darwin) and other socialist based on innovation from the prime of society (an unsustainable productive essence sustained since Marx). It has to be understood that exist invisible systems, hidden unconscious ideologies, underneath the social dermis, that are the raison d’être of scattered phenomena, inexplicable without this reference, and that this system has a deep and broad influence.

Underneath processes like migrations, urban sprawl, seasonable fashion aesthetics or housing market price trends, linking with our net of expectations and hopes, operates a social invisible system that connects concepts, emotions, collective imagery, values and beliefs, building a structure that originates and give sense to preferences, sensibilities and behaviors that, from a shallow point of view, seem disconnected.

ETYMOLOGY First of all, a question has to be clarified: prestige is analyzed from a sociologic perspective and has to be understood in a widened sense, paying less attention to local or everyday prejudices and connotations. For that reason, we can take a look at the etymology.

Its origin is the Latin word praestringere (bind or tie up; graze, weaken), derived from the word stringere (draw tight; draw; graze), in turn derived from the Proto-Indo-European root streig-, and the prefix prae- derived from the Latin word prae (in front of; before), in turn derived from the Proto-Indo-

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European root prai-. In French, prestige means illusion and glamour; the French meaning is considered the most popular and extended in the world and history, in the line of French intellectuals as Rimbaud, Proust, Sagan, Bataille, Bergson, Blondel, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard or Onfray (Marina, 2007) in their writings about sexuality, appetite, desire, concupiscence, luxury, etc.; Marina continues explaining that in this way French has a special talent to create trends like Chanel Nº5, Dior, Moët Chandon and the “made in France” logo as a trademark (la culture du prestige et désir). In English, prestige is a word commonly used to describe reputation or esteem, though it has three somewhat related meanings that, to some degree, may be contradictory. Which meaning it applies, depends on the historical context and the person using the word. In Spanish, prestigio has two meanings, according to Spanish Language Royal Academy: first, something to associate to because is favorable (related to urban concentration); second, something that causes fascination and astonishment (related to urban prestidigitation and collective imagery and unconscious).

The relation to prestidigitation and magic fascination is also present in a sight to the origin of Las Vegas city, born in a place without any natural prestige or privilege, but where special conditions about legal policies and business, throughout the engine of desire in the games of luck and based on tremendous hydrological infrastructures policy (Hoover dam), allowed the famous, attractive settlement known as ‘Sin City’.

So the panorama that prestige draws can be shown as follows as the term par excellence in urban sociology, as a descriptive notation of actions or motivations related to every urban fact: Influence, seduction, attraction, association, convenience, privilege, profit, status, trend, fashion, emulation, disappointment, fraud, trick, prestidigitation, fascination, astonishment, consumption, credit, standing, respect, dignity, honor, distinction, eminence, fame, glory, mark, prominence, renown, reputation, esteem, etc.

In order to build the theoretical framework, that general linguistic polarity is structured with coexisting and contradictory realities. In positive sense is a promise, with centripetal dynamics, described with dual meaning; survival promises, mental and bodily, solidarity spinning around two spheres: a) NATURAL PRESTIGE: strategic places formed with hydro-geologic

slowness where articulate productive and reproductive modes, from ecosystems’ metabolism (especially resilience parameters in ecology).

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b) HUMAN PRESTIGE: construct formed acceleratedly by collective

obsessions, imaginary, perceptive landscape, myths, ‘amor fati – faustic appetite’ tensions.

In negative sense is self-destructive excess, with centrifugal dynamics.

Self-destructions exemplified in EX-prefix cases (out, beyond, negation, privation): EXcesses of population as a self-destructive factor, as an impulse of transportation as the ecosystems illness and as an unwanted balance between MISERY-WEALTH communicating vessels. Consequences: a) EXternalizations of domestic wealth: of the production locally

(domestic economy), of the reproduction of the lifestyles, sexually and socially, and of the feminine in the socio-economic system and gender approaches. b) EXclusions: urban sprawl, migration, gentrification, (de)elitification, technocratic isolation, corporatism, compartmentalization.

ANALOGIES After making clear etymologically, in order to understand better what kind of underlying system works, we can look at Nature, through Hydrobiology. In this discipline there is something called Hyporheic1 Zone (Orghidan, 1959). This natural element is defined as a subsurface volume of sediment and porous space adjacent to a stream through which stream water readily exchanges. It has a strong influence on stream ecology, stream biogeochemical cycling, and streamwater temperatures, and there are critical interactions between the visible layers and the invisible layers (Jonsson, 2003).

In the fields of Politics of Hope (Rorty, 1998) and Architectures of Desire (Marina, 2007), it is asserted that, whether desire was a danger for the social cohesion in past societies of the occidental culture, now the task of the marketing is to produce ‘desirer subjects’. There has been a recent change: the public acceptance of desire, that dismantles the defenses built over centuries in order to protect themselves from its violence and tentation.

In the occidental culture we can find out that, in the evolution towards a resounding affirmation of the individual, exclusive prestige do not become civic 1

Term formed by combining two Greek words: hypo (below) and rheos (flow).

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disrepute. And this truth hits any social understanding of the urban condition, because individual rationality can convincingly justify egotism2. This problem, together with the uncertain and fragile human bonds, have been studied by German sociologist Ulrich Beck in his books about individualization and the society of risk, and by Spanish philosopher José Antonio Marina talking about this moral rule of individuals (“moral gives birth to conscious freedom, which in turn puts moral in a liquid state”), the metropolis of fear and the concept of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 1999). But how are these unconscious fabrics built and how does this intelligence works?

THE SOCIAL ARCHITECTURES OF PRESTIGE According to Marina’s thesis about the hidden social system based on desire and hope, it is formed a parallel thesis around urbanity and prestige in its widened sense. For that purpose basic pillars are defined as follows: (A) The

hedonistic desire to feel comfortable

(B)

The social necessity to be accepted in a group

(C)

The desire to widen the possibilities of action

In pillar (B), people have a desire of social status (common prestige), for which they spend huge efforts and resources not for a direct satisfaction, but to get the others approval. Biologically we are designed to live in society: stones coexist, humans live together. In any society (even in primates) there is a need of belonging and acceptation. As this necessity of being accepted in community generates frequently social anxiety, this feeling has probably had a big evolutive effectiveness. So this point becomes fundamental, because the wish of membership and appreciation restrict and controls in high level the other desires, pillars (A) and (C), which left at its own drift would dismantle the social cohesion. Also (B) can mend in a way the negative trends of egotism.

CONCEPTUAL MODEL This paper comprises synthetically an evolutionary analysis of the conditions settled in the urban area of Madrid along ten centuries, as a way to build a balanced framework among nature, human conditions and artifacts that inform the research and practice of the future cities. For this purpose, a conceptual model is shown balancing the three supports of the theoretical framework.

This model is formed with three vertices (seeds) from where a special construct is elevated, due to the interactions and support.

As David Hume said in 1740: “it can turn out to be rational preferring the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger”.

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Image 1: balanced conceptual model, grade 0.

In order to test the model, every vertex has been specified in three grades: NATURE - ECOSYSTEMS - WATERS HUMAN EVOLUTION - SOCIAL ENGINES - PRESTIGE ARTIFACTS - CITIES - MADRID metropolitan area.

Anyway, this is thought to be a versatile tool, so we can put in every vertex the topic we want to analyze, always relevant issues revealed from on-site knowledge, real context and main social worries, in example: Detroit Outskirts – Forest Ecosystem – Car Factories, topics in NATURE: air quality, biotope, mountains, trees, etc.

For this analysis, water is chosen because is a relevant topic in Madrid since its foundation and continues nowadays. So the methodology consists of a persistent confrontation between each seed (vertex) at the basis of the trihedron, in a synthetic narrative along the evolution of Madrid City.

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Image 2: conceptual model, grade 1: global approach.

Image 3: conceptual model, grade 2: specific approach.

At the end, it is a mental tool to help recognizing the potentiality of solidarity in the synthetic narrative of waters as a shifting point in urban sociology.

Waters3 in urban territories become the privileged eyewitness from where we can recognize, describe, measure, evaluate and correct the impacts of migrations and development on our social engines and human ecosystems.

Always written in plural, in order to remark the plurality of interactions and nuances in its features (intracellular, biotic, massive, turbulent, subterranean, diffuse, pumped, desired, etc.).

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2.

ORIGINAL CONDITIONS OF MADRID: background

Image 4: originary streams over the west ledge of Madrid (Anton Van der Wyngaerde, 1562)

2.1.

City and Prestige

When the city even didn’t have the name of Madrid, Muslims in Hispania decided to establish in a hill next to the river Manzanares to defend their territory of Marca media (which capital settlement was Toledo), at that time an uninhabited land between northern Christian kingdoms and the southern ones.

Just when this territory became gaining military and strategic value, in the middle of IX century, a hill next to the river Manzanares started being colonized as a classic ribat, becoming the main bastion of the defense of Toledo, starting point for razzias against northern Christian kingdoms. The fortress of Cordoba’s Emir Muhammad I and the group of houses formed that military and religious settlement, called Mayrit. Most of the strategic settlements in this Muslim territory were placed along a river, but Mayrit had particular conditions.

Natural conditions were of main relevance at that time, where paleotechnical communities had a strong dependence on them. For this reason of necessity, warriors and inhabitants had a subtle and clever understanding of the qualities and possibilities of the mountains, the rivers and the lands they had to deal with, in order to assure the survival of the society. There was the fact that Mayrit was placed in the crossroad among strategic places, along ancient roman paths and livestock ways. So we can say that natural features had a certain cultural prestige.

When Muslims arrived to Spain in year 177, they had already references of a remote land in Occident, called al-Andalus, from a series of Islamic traditions and legends: that is the reason why those places were loved, and they came there as going to Promised Land (impulse and seduction, prestige engine).

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2.2. City

and Waters

Due to important natural values, the settlement along Manzanares river gets the name Mayrīt (Magerit in its Castilian form). Although the meaning is not clear, the toponymy and etymology of Madrid seem to be a hybrid of two similar toponymies: one Mozarabic European, matrice, meaning «fountain», and another Arabic, majrá, meaning «womb» or river bed. Both allude to the abundance of streams and subterranean waters of the place. Another accepted evolution is: Latin: matric(em) - Romance matrič "womb” - Andalusian Romance: matrič - Andalusian Arabic ‫( مجريط‬mağrīt) - Castilian: Madrid.

So the description of the hydro-geologic territory in its toponymy, something common in every culture, represents how important the features of the place were in historic societies.

2.3. Prestige

and Waters

Throughout history, Madrid was known as the city built over the waters (legend, astonishment). After recognizing (reconnoitre) the natural prestige in the attitude of the Arabic culture, especially with the waters, several techniques from ancient civilizations started giving notoriety to the urbanization of the territory (hydraulic engineering, historic prestige), in a subtle and laborious way.

That was the case of the qanats systems, subterranean channels used both for agriculture and cities supply, which formed in Madrid a famous (prominence) network during the Muslims period. Madrid, that was up a promontory with Manzanares River flowing at its feet, was a bit far away from its waters so the city could not take advantage of them. Nevertheless, thanks to that entire subterranean irrigation network (probably ten kilometers long) allowed medieval Madrid to have a big amount of orchards around its boundaries, enriching the city until Felipe II’s time. Even along the centuries, until 1860, that ten kilometers long qanats network continued supplying Madrid, an honor (recognition) for those Hispanic-Muslims engineers (or better said ‘water architects’ as in the gardens of La Alhambra in Granada, understanding that Muslim civilization was the civilization of water in a subtle water archeology, as poet Eduardo Blanco Amor, friend of García Lorca, wrote in Poem of the Water in Generalife in 1936).

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3.

CONDITIONS OF THE EVOLUTION OF MADRID: analysis

Image 5: old landscape of Madrid from south-western hills by the river, La Pradera de San Isidro (Franciso de Goya, 1788)

Image 6: skyline of Madrid from a dam in the north-western mountains (Panoramio, 2008)

In these pictures we can see clearly the evolution: from the hegemonic global power of the couple Monarchy-Catholic Church leant out of the fluvial promontory by the Manzanares River in a social, cultural landscape in paleotechnical age (towers of faith), to the hegemonic global power of the business placed along and suffocating the channelized Castellana stream in spaces against human urbanity in young neotechnical age (towers of arrogance).

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3.1.

City and Prestige

In 1561, Felipe II decided to place the capital of a maritime empire in the center of a plateau far from important bodies of water (opposite to almost any relevant settlement in the world), giving consciously the back to the ocean and see (Thomas, 2004). It is believed that preceding monarchs transmitted some added prestige to Madrid because of the geographic, climatic and cinegetic (the courtier game of hunting) advantages they experienced. This decision forced a primitive logistic system needing huge efforts and resources to move people and goods from the periphery to the geographic center, transporting all the resources from America via Seville4. With this historic contingency, Madrid started an unstoppable development, that caused one of the strongest migration processes at that time. Royal bureaucrat staff, court members, etc. from all over the empire were all attracted to this monarchic-catholic power and prestige. They were joined by disinherited people, go-getter people, artists, craftsmen, writers and a long list of people following that seductive environment in order to survive and improve their possibilities of action. And this is the main reason, based on a world-wide rich supply extracted from colonies, for the birth of the prestigious period called Golden Century (Siglo de Oro) of the Spanish Art in XVII century, with authorities like Velázquez, Cervantes, El Greco, Quevedo or Juan de Herrera with the Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial. This is important because, despite the fact Madrid has no visual identity (lack of icon as Rome or Barcelona) it has a persistent literary prestige recorded in collective imagery during centuries.

Morphologically, all that social prestige was confined to a fence (selfcontingency), built with fiscal reasons (portazgo tax), limiting the growth of the city until XIX century where the walls were demolished and the city started a huge growth.

At the middle of the XIX century, Madrid had still the size of the Monarchic city (Felipe II’s fence). But since that time, after the walls demolition, to the human and socio-economic drama of Civil War (1936-1939), the city was affected by the early industrialization process (changing to neotechnical age) in favorable expansive conditions. This period, the second biggest growth of capital city, made Madrid four times more extended over its surroundings. The social engine for the local migrations countryside-city where the possibilities of increasing poor rural incomes through the mechanisms of industrial economy.

As it is well known by slums and unhealthy crowded settlements in London or There is a historic doubt about the reasons for not to settle the capital of a maritime empire in Lisbon, at that time the gate to America. Some sources point to the decision to stop keeping a travelling Court, some the outrageous relation that Austrias –Habsburg dynasty- had with the seas: “the more they needed, the more they moved away” (Thomas, 2004).

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Paris during this period, we can thank to literature in example of Zola, Balzac, Galdós or Barea the necessary synthetic narrative generating solidarity by describing with detail miseries and pain and others’ personality especially in novels (Rorty, 1989) plus an encouraging viragem and shifting point (Brook, 1994), and the transfer of historic memory. Madrid dealed with rapid population movements in different manners, and a special example was developed in the southern part of Madrid: the Lavapiés neighborhood.

Lavapiés, as a urban mechanism, dealed these affections through a specific social morphology, speaking in terms of French social thinking started from Durkheim and Halbwachs to the ‘urban essence’ obsession in Lefebvre. Placed ‘downstairs’ the geologic south-western ledge, this neighborhood was one the main diffuse gate to Madrid in the continuous up and down dynamics, acting as a social filter between the prestigious heart of the upper center and the almost inhuman settlements of the lower outskirts. Its dense urban structure, keeping the Arabic fabric, functioned as Barea explained in the novel “The forging of a rebel”: Lavapiés was a reflux of the cooking of Madrid from the center to the outskirts and a reflux of the cooking of Spain, from the periphery to the center. Both waves met and formed a ring embracing the city. In that alive barrier, anyone who arrived from above had walked down the last step before sinking at all. Who arrived from the lower part had walked up the first step to get everything… In this tremendous, absurdly cruel impact of forces life would not be posible. But both waves never collide. Between them a compact, calm beach is inserted, absorbing the collision and transforming them into streams that flow and reflow. All the neighborhood is a working block. (Barea, 1951).

Until now, this social morphology stays in some aspects. Just the circumstances change: past national diversity becomes international diversity with a precarious crucible of immigrants from China, India, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Europe and South America. From 32.811 official inhabitants, there are 22.973 Spanish (just half from Madrid), 3.309 Ecuadorian, 1.044 Moroccan, 567 Colombian, 435 Chinese, 386 Bangladeshi, and much others from all over the world not in the census (Municipal census, 2007). It seems to be waiting for a hard renovation via gentrification based on ‘legitimizations’ about removing unhealthy dwellings5, towards an imminent classification and homogenization of its urban essence with high income inhabitants (status).

The beginning of strong centripetal dynamics of contemporary prestige with the spread conurbation of Madrid started in Franco’s dictatorship with the ‘Great Madrid’ project. At that time strong migrations countryside-city occurred during 5

Minimal housing units that conforms more than the third part of the existing dwellings.

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the 1960’s and 1970’s, attracted to a premeditated prestige of industrial economy and dwelling properties, hard developmentalism inherited nowadays.

This social engine was at that time the only solution to ensure employment in order to avoid Madrid becoming a misery land or a social battlefield (Naredo, 2002). So this development was based on housing property promoting policies, construction business and huge infrastructures.

With a enormous annual growth medium ratio of 6.5% (doubling the land occupation every eleven years), the conurbation sprawl was oriented to the main communication axes and to the territory with natural prestige placed in the north-west part where most valuable landscapes are, starting to occupy key ecosystemic areas that feed the city with clean air and water and nobel materials, mostly granite against gypsum and debris in the south (Naredo, 2002). To this quality gradient of the physical environment, other gradients are added, showing a growing social polarity that gathers in the north and north-west the highest income and cultural qualification areas, and in the south and south-east the lowest income areas and biggest unemployment and social marginalization.

Today, Madrid keeps the strategical position as an important logistic node in global trade and business. This importance is exemplified in four contemporary doubtful privileges, concerning to the social and environmental perspective: it has the world biggest airport surface in passengers terminals and is among the first ten in passengers traffic (ACI, 2007), it has the biggest ratio in highway surface per capita in Europe (Segura, 2005), the world biggest ratio in big dams per capita -Spain has more than 1200 big dams- (WWF/Adena, 2005) and the biggest percentage of demolished buildings in Europe (real-state heritage `renovation`) of 40% between 1950 and 19916 –proportionally, this represents an amount bigger than in Second World War in Germany- (Naredo, 2002).

3.2.

Prestige and Waters

The natural prestige of Arab subtlety towards natural waters passed to the prestige of French Engineering and megalomaniac projects, from the Court (especially 1750-1845) to the Dictatorship (especially 1970-1980) and developmentalism (1980-2000). There was an evolution in the process of abstraction of the waters to its functional natural and social ecosystems, through an intensive ‘channelization’. So we can say that natural conditions were losing attraction and interest in benefit of hydraulic, energetic features of water as another product among the growing consumer goods.

This process meant the destruction of existing social and architectural heritage of villages and rural settlements (Naredo, 2002).

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3.3.

City and Waters

The ‘channelization’ of the waters in the unstoppable urbanization processes has an exemplary analysis in two attitudes around the prestige of French engineering and big infrastructures in a territory featured by its aridity: the construction of artificial channels (monarchic Channels and huge contemporary drainage systems) and the intense urbanization of rivers and riversides (Castellana, Abroñigal and Manzanares water courses and the Dictatorship’s big dams).

The artificial ‘royalties’, soon derelicted with the railway development, were the tries of solving the natural lack of plentiful rivers to move resources and goods from the center of Spain: the Channel of Castilla connecting Valladolid and Cantabric Sea (207 km built, started in 1753 by French engineer Carlos Lemaur, under Fernando VII Monarchy), the Channel of Guadarrama connecting Madrid to Atlantic Ocean along Tagus river (27 km built of 771 total km, planed in 1785 by French engineer Lemaur) and the Royal Channel of Manzanares (20 km built, under Carlos III Monarchy). The artificial drainage channels and dislocated treatment systems moved huge volume of water along huge distances in order to permit bigger densities in urbanized areas and higher impervious spaces. Linked to the tunnelization project of the M-30 motorway (finished in 2008), a parallel drainage network was built including million of m3 of rainwater storage capacity and several big water treatment plants.

The urbanization of rivers meant a complete ecological rupture and social loss, with all the environmental qualities of the river atmosphere. In this shifting prestige from natural one, Castellana stream was transformed into the main urban axe during developmentalism period becoming a wide street with intense traffic flow. The same occurred to Abroñigal stream, completely drained and occupied with M-30 ring motorway during the 60’s. The channelization of Manzanares River (8 km started to built in 1914 and rebuilt in 1943 by Juan Herrera and Carlos Mendoza; study by Mauricio Jalvo in 1906) was followed by intense urbanization of the riversides along the decades, getting highly strangled with the recent tunnelization of eight kilometers of the M-30 motorway inside the own hyporheic zone of the river.

Moreover the ecosystemic consequences, socio-economic costs of dislocating water management, through distant treatment with enormous energetic consumptions, result a considerable impact on local municipalities’ resources that avoid solving other urgent social problems.

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4.

FUTURE CONDITIONS FOR MADRID: CONCLUSIONS

4.1.

City and Prestige

After the synthetic description of the evolution of Madrid City (from paleotechnical society to the beginning of neotechnical one) about its social engine as a generator of urbanity, where waters and prestige have a critical role affecting and affected by inner dynamics, migrations and developments, we can assure that urbanity started to be built both in a controlled process and with autonomous, uncertain, organic dynamics, where natural prestige and its social benefits were transformed into increasing artificial dynamics with accelerated changes, a loss of environmental and ecological processes and depreciation of public interactive spaces for the inhabitants.

Image 7: conceptual model, last grade: acting sketch.

The initial framework based on three basic vertexes has the need to shift the social engine of prestige by redescripting it in the way that Richard Rorty exposed his theories about neopragmatism, especially about contingency, irony and solidarity. Having briefly described the relevance of that invisible social system and how operates in urban processes, it becomes the support of a shift of the existing Spanish urban culture, where social agents and urban trends drives unfortunately towards a real-state hegemony and urbanity loss (Roch, 2002).

The increasing distance to the social balances and a healthy relation to the natural environment represent a panorama where the growing urban dimension has a negative role. Against this evolution, limited and inefficient time after time, far from any kind of reasonable scenario using the resources, it is clarified the necessity to rebuild the contemporary urbanism over a civic culture, quality of life, complexity, ecologic physiology and sustainability. And this cannot be 15 / 20

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built by the real-state/financial hegemony, neither by a local impulse where social agents and citizens were long time ago erased. Exclusive prestige represents a civic disrepute in a scenario for conviventiality.

Contingency means to recognize historic conditions and a better definition of the limitations of language, thresholds and resilience of environment.

Everything is a product of time and chance.

Irony relies on the recognition of the contingency of our language in order to build conceptual frameworks within our own limits. Usually happens that, due to accelerated changes, uncertainty leaves ironically obsolete any aim to give sense to reality before it is practiced and is effective.

Solidarity means building the complex citizen order with a civic, vital society. It takes advantage of the last post-humanistic tools in synthetic narrative generating solidarity by describing with detail miseries and pain and others’ personalities, especially with an encouraging shifting point. Means to rebuild in a collective way the social engines of urban evolution in order to avoid segregations and income isolation by integrating mixed income realities in public spaces where waters could lead common identity and memory with high environmental qualities.

4.2. City

and Waters

The future Linear Park of Manzanares River by MRIO Associated Architects, despite the lack of participation and social debate about the needs and possibilities of the project and the paradoxical subterranean context in terms of environmental quality, represents one of the biggest public landscape regeneration of Europe linked to an urban river, an important opportunity to test innovative (hard and soft) water quality techniques, ecologic devices and high quality public spaces in a continuous system crossing mixed income neighborhoods.

Existing examples we can find towards a more social, ecosystemic sight (hydrobiology, sociology, participation, urbanism and architecture), from the heterotopic research of Argentinean artist Gyula Košice7 about social spaces and hydrospatial cities, to the holistic outlook of Patrick Geddes from ‘social basins’ (with the regional scale of the view and the social frame of the action) and to Founder of the Madí Art Movement in 1946, Madí term comes from the popular saying “Madrí, Madrí, no pasarán” by Spanish republicans in the trench of Madrid during Civil War. 7

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theatrical projects about environmental education, art and participation through the concept of Hidrocidadania (‘Hydrocitizenship’) developed twenty years ago

by Chico Canindé, an indigenous Nordestino Potiguar, brazilian dramatist using education and culture towards biodiversity through the platform of water and arts, surviving in São Paulo through the confuse, loving utopia Po-Ética Teatro das Aguas (Canindè, 2005).

4.3. Prestige

and Waters

At present, Madrid City Council policy does not assume the problem of rivers in economic constraints, soft techniques, quality management and supply in long-term planning. The reformation of the M-30 motorway, an infrastructural project with opposite ecologic results and contradictory in scopes to the parallel plans for a river biologic restoration, have condemned local municipality to be in debt during a long period of time. The present of the main rivers and streams in Madrid, constrained and hidden by heavy, hardly adaptative infrastructures and intense urbanization, leaves few hopes of acting in the restoration and rehabilitation of them: by integrating high quality public space with water dynamics and its technologically best biology and with mixed income housing developments.

Nevertheless, waters in an increasingly urban world have to recover the biological and social importance they have. For that, the unhealthy prestige has to be rehabilitated and a new prestige has to be habilitated, through the tools and engines of the prime of intellectual thought and action strategies, studying human interaction with aquatic ecosystems, with hydrobiology, hydroecology/ecohydrology, human ecology, environmental education, civics as applied sociology and urbanism as a way of life. For this there is a need to organize and give social sense to the emerging body of disciplines with a relevant proliferation of terms in a growing scientific jungle. As it is evidenced about hydroecology and ecohydrology confusion (Hannah et al., 2004), using similar words as in that disciplinar discussion, hydrosociology can be described as a ‘new paradigm’ and an ‘emerging discipline’ at the interface of hydrological and sociological sciences.

At the core of the ‘hydrosociology paradigm’ is the need for sustainable (coupled) water resource and social cohesion. However, the ability of hydrosociology to emphasize the interdependence of hydrological and social processes while yielding an overarching paradigm for sustainable water resource management has been fundamentally questioned, by believing that it cannot 17 / 20

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provide a dual role. This definition, as a shared sub discipline, may sit more easily with many inherently skeptical or cautious scientists, as it respects traditional subject boundaries, but it offers nothing ‘new’ or ‘revolutionary’.

Anyway, it seems clear that a collective, inclusive definition identifying a theoretical core is needed before hydrosociology becomes an established paradigm or discipline. A definition that includes the discipline’s aim and subject scope would serve as a focal point to help unite the research community.

In this regard, a definition of hydrosociology should include explicitly: (1) the bidirectional nature of hydrological–sociological interactions and importance of feedback mechanisms; (2) the requirement for fundamental process understanding, rather than simply establishment of functional (statistical) links without a probable chain of causality; (3) the subject scope to encompass (a) the full range of (natural and human-impacted) water-dependent habitats/environments and (b) flora, fauna and whole ecosystems (natural or artificial); (4) the need to consider process interactions operating at a range of spatial and temporal scales; (5) the interdisciplinary nature of the research philosophy (cf. the multidisciplinary approach used by the vast majority of studies).

Like hydrosociology, other ‘new’ scientific paradigms have begun life as ‘hot topics’, but they have faded away due to a problem of identity (definition). If hydrosociology is to avoid a similar fate, it must also be ensured it is an identifiable and constructive discipline, not a deconstructed version of existing paradigms or academic disciplines.

So it would be not simply the integration of hydrology and sociology per se (i.e. subject matter) that will herald and sustain the ‘new paradigm’ of hydrosociology, but the way in which integrative science is conducted. Thus, sociologists and ecologists appear to be looking at research questions from one perspective and hydrologists (mainly geographers and engineers) from another.

Scientists may seek to address the same issue or solve the same problem without converging on the most perceptive or robust hydrosociological answers due to a lack of theoretical underpinning in the ‘other’ discipline (perhaps because they are asking inappropriate questions within the ‘other’ discipline).

If a true paradigm shift is to occur and hydrosociology is to flourish, then sociologists and hydrologists need to bridge the gap between traditional subject boundaries to build real interdisciplinary teams and so reap benefit from the synergies of working at the cutting edge of research in both hydrology and sociology.

Whether urbanism has to shift towards a new urban culture: How can Hydrosociology, as an emerging field, play a relevant dual role enhancing coherent social diversity in the context of a sustainable growing urbanity?

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