Reform, Reformism and the city, from Córdoba Libre to Las Comunas

Abstract

The article deals with the link between university reformism and the city, of which it attempts to suggest some significant seasons between 1918 and 1940. The presumption is that, to the extent that his restlessness exceeded university politics, the reformist tradition shaped by the experience of 1918 marked the ways of experiencing and thinking about the urban environment. More precisely, thanks to its university condition, this reformism was, from all the forces that in the decade of '10 had been producing public space as a political space, the one that most clearly transited from a territorial conception of the city, as a sphere of mobilization and sectional organization, to its problematization as a political, technical and cultural entity. If the first aspect implied the passage from an administrative notion to another policy of the municipality, the second would bring its material dimension (landscape, architecture, works, services) to the foreground, while the third - scraped at the end - would come to replace the problem of urban unity and personality. Without tracing a linear evolution, partly due to the heterogeneity of the movement, these diverse dimensions of the urban were taking shape in successive moments. Sometimes linked to collective formations, sometimes to singular figures, on more than one occasion these ways of conceiving the city are linked to programs or try to influence the legislative and executive spheres, always expressing a kind of reformist concert that, far exceeding the university space, would be unthinkable without that common experience opened up by 1918, not without its laughter.