A model of urban and social integration from the fascist Spanish Falange: reconstruction in Madrid after the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

After the Spanish Civil War, in 1939, Falange (the Spanish fascist party) tried to impose an ideological approach in rebuilding large areas of the city of Madrid that had been damaged by war front. Falange wanted to promote the construction of neighbourhoods and houses where the separation of classes could be overcome, axis of tensions between bourgeoisie and maxism. Thus the Spanish Falange Fascism tried to reach the order. From the different institutions involved in the construction and reconstruction Falange erected in the 40s housing models in which to conduct their particular vision of overcoming the class struggle, including upgraded houses in new construction for families that would serve as an exemplary model for the rest. Family and religion, fervent Catholicism, became the only point of contact with the rest of the different political trends that formed the heterogeneous Franco’s regime. After the Nazi defeat (1945) Falange declined in political significance within the dictatorship, and this withdrawal resulted in the field of housing and urban development in the triumph of the planning model with the creation of segregated neighbourhoods and villages on the outskirts of Madrid far from the Falangists claims. The triumph of bourgeois city took place in the late fifties with the greater involvement of private capital in the field of construction and the withdrawal of public initiative. From an architectural point of view the Falangist model home was a regionalist image, sometimes rural, far from the modernity achieved in the thirties. However, this external image influenced by an image of Spain that looked into the past deliberately from the Franco's way of looking, contrasted with an urban approach and a quite rational interior design, out of necessity on many occasions, but recovered slightly but visibly outside some early modern criticism from official speeches. The Spanish historiography has not dealt with this first period of Spanish Falange in depth. Nor with its attempt to ideological translation of the field of housing and urban planning principles, although there are still remaining documents and some constructions.