ABSTRACT
It was 1938, even before Franco’s Spanish putschists had won the civil war, when they discovered spatial planning as an effective instrument for establishing their power and changing society to suit their interests. The chapter uses two outstanding examples – Belchite and Guernica – to reconstruct how the Falange, a movement based on the fascist model, controlled the reconstruction of cities that had been destroyed by the civil war. Through programmes that covered the whole of Spain, through the construction of a complex and relatively effective system of urban production and through the use of architects loyal to the regime, the Falange knew how to use urban planning for different purposes. The “Reconstrucción” made the dictatorship’s ability to act evident, served to integrate parts of the population through welfare state and creative means and punished the underdogs. In addition, the Falange benefited from an expansion of its presence throughout the territory, the availability of relatively lavish financial and administrative resources, jobs and the opportunity to exemplarily materialise its loud right-wing populist agenda. In the course of the 1950s, the economic development strategy, which overtook propagandistic and real integration, marked the end of the Falange’s protagonism.
