Down with the walls! The politics of place in Spanish and German urban extension planning, 1848-1914

In exploring extension planning in Spain and Germany from 1848 to 1914, this essay aims to illuminate the shifting interpretations of the urban environment that accompanied this activity. The comparison rests on the fact that during this period, engineers in both Spain and Germany readily sought to “catch up” to models of urban development seen mainly in France. The extensions in Madrid (1860) and Berlin (1862) were, for example, deeply influenced by contemporaneous rationalization projects undertaken by Georges - Eugène Haussmann in Paris. Likewise extensions in second or smaller Spanish cities such as Barcelona (1860), Valencia (1858; 1868; 1884), or Málaga (1878) were developed in comparison to French standards. It was a similar story in German cities such as Cologne (1880), Düsseldorf (1884), and Munich (1893), where Parisian or Viennese models were often expressly considered or used to critique planning. Hence in this period, ,building officials not only made comparable interventions in the built environment based on international models , they also used a similar language with which to talk about the changing identity of the city. Professionals and bourgeois residents were aware of such trends, and they too used broadly analogous terms of reference to interpret the changing identity of the city