Screenshot from Abitare’s website.
The book opens with three maps drawn at different scales, dotted with dozens of projects built in the last thirty years. You realise therefore that the city should really be understood as a vast territory, unfolding from the old city centre to the sea port on the Cantabrian Sea for more than twenty-five kilometres along the banks of the Nervión river that throughout the 20th century was dominated by the imposing presence of the steel industry. The quantity of projects demonstrates how the changes to this place, which had been nicknamed Spain’s Manchester and was perennially enveloped in a blanket of impenetrable smog, spread out like branches, creating a new urban landscape and fuelling collective pride.
The variety of points of view and contributions, assembled with the usual graphic elegance of every issue of Mas Context, offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a shifting reality, where what is most striking is the faith in an idea of planning and a vision of the future, imagined for the common good.
Thanks to Fabrizio Gallanti for the review of our issue. You can find the complete review on Abitare’s website.