The campus of the city of the University of Madrid at the dawn of its first centenary: Resignifying heritage to face global challenges

Abstract

From the singular support of the first centenary of the construction of the University City of Madrid, a reflection on its cultural condition is proposed. The objective is to analyze how its educational spaces influence the processes of material and immaterial resignification of new paradigms of a collective heritage. The celebration of the centenary in the year 2027, associated with a candidacy for its declaration as World Heritage, is read here, therefore, more as an opportunity than as a finalist goal.

Expressed as an inevitably paradoxical project in the face of the difficulties of its contemporary management from conventional arguments on usage, whether in the political, typological, historical, urban, landscape or symbolic context, develops an innovative relationship of concepts and methods to add innovative strategies to its directives in facing global challenges of social inequality and climate change as well as the foreseeable challenges of the current health crisis. From these new demands the task of defining a new paradigm of university heritage emerges, which contributes to a renewal of the relationship between campus and city.