ABSTRACT

The introduction of the time dimension in the trialectic approach allows identifying objects, relations, and agencies operating along the three axes of social space. It allows the analyst to approach the boundaries of an otherwise complex geometry of spaces that, like Russian dolls, encase and are contained in each other. The rural settlements developed by the Spanish Francoist regime roughly between 1945 and 1975 can provide for a particularly illustrative use of trialectics, because they are at the intersection of modernist planning and the exercise of power by an authoritarian regime. The colonisation experience illustrates the characteristic divorce, in modernist spatial planning, of representations of space and spaces of representation. Establishing a status quo involves social codes, social bodies, and the space over which they move; the practical, the performative and overarching discourses and knowledge structures. A complete social space appears when the focus is not on the farmers, but on the architects as producers.