Realismo social, gentrificación y renovaciones urbanas en La otra ciudad de Pablo Aranda (2003)

Abstract

Pablo Aranda’s novel La otra ciudad (2003) narrates the story of a young couple who grew up in Malaga’s centre-city neighborhood. The urban and social evolution of the city are the backdrop to the depiction of the experiences of the numerous characters that populate the novel. In this article I analyze the formal renovations that La otra ciudad contributes to social realism in order to criticize the process of gentrification in Malaga’s downtown and how they affect the urban experience of its residents. This area of the city is represented as impoverished and in decay as a consequence of the uncontrolled real estate speculation that started during the 1960s and continue for decades as Malaga embraced the economic model based on tourism promoted by Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. The omniscient narrator denounces the effect of speculation and deficient urban planning as the cause of the decadence of the city centre. The fact that the narrator explicitly points to these factors renovates the narrative form of social realism. Following Neil Smith and Peter Williams theories on gentrification, I contend that the novel depicts how the processes of gentrification are caused by urban speculation rather than due to the evolution of the housing market and the interest of the middle class to return to living in the downtown area.