New forms and spacial proceses in conttemporary territory: the “unique city”

Abstract

The new emerging “accumulation regime” which is being built since the mid-70’s and even more rapidly over the last decade, requires some space requirements for its deployment that can be observed –with subtle differences- in most cities and metropolitan areas of the developed countries all around the world. We call this new spatial and urban management model the «only-city», so as to stress its obedience and submission to the hegemonic social, economic, cultural and political project which has been named as “the only-way-of-thinking”.

The spatial structure of nowadays territory can only be understood by the overlapping of the “space of places” (natural landscapes and anthropic territories, in different degrees, from rural landscapes to urban territories), the “network space” (composed of flow lines and exchange nodes) an the “rhizomatic field of inmaterial flows”. 

Beyond the spectacular meteoric and photogenic transformations taking place in urban spaces which have become the «winners» or beneficiaries in this new accumulation regime, in this new spatial structure arise numerous contradictions, conflicts, inequalities and injustices that are barely unveiled by the hegemonic discourse.