Urban Imaginaries and Socio-Spatial Arrangements: The Making of Romantic Seville

Abstract

This article aims at interpreting the emergence and vitality of urban imaginaries. Drawing upon theories on spatialization and local representations, it contends that urban spaces develop cultural patterns that become effective in images, narratives, institutions, practices and physical environments. Focusing on the circulating and mutually reinforcing relations between local imaginaries and socio-material configurations, the article traces a genealogy of the Sevillian imaginary and the changing contexts of its reproduction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These involve the Regionalismo movement around 1900, urban planning during the Exposición Iberoamericana (1929), the uses of folklore by the Franco Regime, as well as touristification processes and current forms of localization in a globalizing-europeanizing Spain.