ABSTRACT

The production of community was a central goal of planning strategies during the twentieth century. European dictatorships provide a peculiar yet illuminating episode of this longer trajectory of modern planning. Under Fascist regimes community politics became an essential aspect of the totalitarian attempt to impose a new order, and planned neighbourhoods were devised as prototypes of the national community. In these social laboratories urban design was reframed to work as an expression and a means of power. Places were invested with material and performative agency—a mode of reflexive, diffused government scattered in a network of apparatuses ingrained in everyday life, which incorporated the built environment, spatial practices and their symbolic projections as active elements in the production of political subjects. This chapter uses an oral history approach to examine the power mechanisms at play in the forging of a planned community in Madrid during the early stages of Franco’s regime. The second half of the chapter then elaborates a more general theorisation of Fascist spatial governmentality, its contradictory combination of punitive, disciplinary and liberal techniques, and their role in the enclosure of popular communities — that is, the attempt to use spatial devices to creatively destroy spontaneous manifestations of urban commons.