Housing, Spanish National Catholicism and the agrarian utopia (1936-1959)

Abstract

Se explica el arraigo que la utopía agrarista del nacional-catolicismo, nostágica de un pasado idealizado, tuvo durante una coyuntura de retroceso económico. Una parte de los arquitectos y políticos del primer franquismo creyó que el futuro de España pasaba por entroncar con un pasado idealizado. Esto se tradujo en diversas iniciativas que fueron desde la creación de barrios de aire rural en las ciudades a pobladios de colonización en nuevas tierras de regadío.

The political forces that supported the military uprising of July 1936 viewed the city with deep distrust. For them it was like a Trojan horse that was corrupting society with values contrary to Catholicism and to being Spanish. During the civil war, the rebels encountered strong resistance in the big cities, which accentuated their urban pessimism. Thus, architects sympathetic to the new regime proposed the need to strengthen the countryside and even ruralize the cities, so that the workers would have a garden where they could grow food. The chapter deals with the initiatives adopted in the construction of social housing on the outskirts of the cities, in the villages built or rebuilt by the DGRDR and in the new towns promoted by the INC. These initiatives, which appealed to the vernacular, gave a main place to the kitchen and confined women to a domestic role, seemed feasible in the context of post-war economic decline and in the framework of a policy of autarky. But, in view of the stagnation of the country in the face of the dynamism of Europe in the 1950s, they were gradually abandoned.