‘RUPTURES’ AND INTERSTICIES FOR THE VISUAL-SYMBOLIC READING OF THE CITY'S URBAN LANDSCAPE: EXAMPLES IN BARCELONA AND BILBAO

Abstract

The objective of the reflective work reverberates urban landscapes of spatial ‘ruptures’ in Bilbao
between the XX-XXI centuries, with the previous example of Ciutat Vella in Barcelona. Contexts
affected by socio-cultural influences that accompany intense urban transformation processes,
strongly mediated recreations of images and imaginaries. Look that goes from socio-anthropological
parameters that are frequently characterized by a symbolic communication at the visual level, to
strategies to incorporate commemorative-monumental elements. Endeavors in which the art-spur,
fascination as a tourist attraction, architecture as an emblem and the concept of citizenship are
constantly appealed to for the conformation of neo-stories. Aspects in which aesthetic-landscape
problems cannot be avoided, which affect the nuclei-peripheries of the city. We focus the observation
on central or remote areas such as neighborhoods, revealing to what extent these operations of
physiognomic-symbolic replacement are assumed. Which gives rise to an approach that translates
‘urban events’ in time, rescuing accumulations of sedimentary layers as evocative and indelible

‘archive’. Thus, places to discover and interpret with methods close to the ethnographic are formed,
as a result of which the transmutation of the frameworks visualized as gaps in need of ‘suture’ is
palpable.