Chapter 2. The City, the Middle Class and the Women

This chapter contains background facts on the city of Madrid and on its new middle class. The purpose is to enable the reader unfamiliar with Spanish reality to contextualize the data and the interpretations in the rest of the book. Where did the protagonists live and why, what did they do for a living and in their leisure, what was their economic situation and what were the most important differences in opinion among them?

The reader should bear in mind that the description refers mostly to the 1990s.

City space

During the 1940s Madrid was still a small city, and recovering from the demographic effects of the civil war. In the late 1950s immigrants from rural areas started to arrive, and during the 1960s they flooded the city, building huge shanty towns all around it. There were jobs for all.

The 1970s was the decade when most of these shanty towns disappeared, because some of their inhabitants could now afford to buy apartments on the open market and because cheap dwellings were built for most of the rest of them. During this decade, especially towards the end of it, the flow of immigrants to the cities diminished, since there were fewer job opportunities. In the eighties there was little in-migration and some out-migration, as unemployment soared.18

The result was that downtown Madrid was under-sized for its population. This became ever more noticeable as the former shanty town paupers bought cars and could afford to come downtown for recreation and as they also demanded access to city facilities such as schools, universities and hospitals.

It also meant that most of the outlying residential areas were relatively recent, of low quality and inhabited by people of rural origin. And it meant that public transportation was inadequate there at the same time as private transportation clogged the streets that were built for a population for whom the dream of a car seemed light-years away. Other public facilities also lagged far behind private consumption: schools, health care, post offices and parks were scarce and low quality, and libraries and facilities for recreational activities hardly existed at all. The brutal unemployment of the 1980s concentrated here.

All of this in turn meant that these areas were infested with social problems, especially drug addiction and small-time but tenacious criminality.

From the point of view of the Madrilenian middle class, this used to mean that one had to live in the downtown area; anything else was unthinkable. But the downtown area was much too small and the middle class had exploded in size. The consequence was that middle class apartments in downtown Madrid had reached impossible price levels. The middle class had to find other places to live. As the downtown area during the eighties was invaded by the general social ills of the city, they also wanted to move out.

Starting on a small scale during the 1970s and gathering speed during the 1980s, middle class residential areas were built on the outskirts of Madrid. But these areas were clearly segregated according to income levels.19

The outlying middle class areas were better quality and offered larger apartments than the working class areas. In accordance with capitalist logic, they offered more local services for pay to the residents. They also featured such symbolic markings as entrances outfitted with wooden panels, potted green plants and always a counter for the door watchman, whether one was actually in residence or not, and perhaps a narrow lawn outside.

The environment outside the buildings was not beautiful; the price level of land permitted neither one family dwellings nor creative town planning for middle-middle class areas. Typically, streets were straight, parking space scarce and buildings high and built close together. However, the further out you went, the lower the land prices and therefore the more"green space" (as the advertisements called it). Thus there was a tension in middle c