La relevancia de las centralidades urbanas en la construcción de la Gipuzkoa moderna

Resumen

The research work presented here deals with an approximation to the complex urban reality of the territory of Gipuzkoa from the perspective of urban centralities and their significance in the urban setup of this territory as a whole. The transformations that have been emerging in this territory since the start of the Modern Era have had specific urban consequences of varied importance and nature. The isolated interpretation of the motives of urban transformation and concentration helps to analyse and understand them, and allows the territorial distributions arising out of these motives to be built, their qualities to be extracted, and their repercussions on the configuration of current-day Gipuzkoa to be assessed. The thesis has thus been organised into two main chapters. The first deals with the individualised study of eleven episodes that are relevant in the urban configuration process of Gipuzkoa and which took place throughout the last two hundred years. Some of them, dating back a long time, form the embryo of the urban base that Gipuzkoa confronted as it moved into modernity, and have been broken down in the first, second and third interpretations. Subsequently, the two major industrialisation events, the railway and manufacturing, burst onto the scene. Simultaneously, they ushered in new forms of urban concentration, dealt with in the fourth and fifth interpretations. Alongside this process, the most far-reaching change in territorial administration became established during the second half of the 19th century (the establishment of the liberal municipality and the definitive designation of the province¿s administrative capital). This is covered in the sixth and seventh interpretations. These two episodes provide a setting and turning point to tackle more recent urban phenomena to the extent that their influence, while manifesting a different nature throughout time, can be felt right up to the present day. Among them, it is worth emphasising, firstly, processes characteristic of the contemporary reality linked to spatial transformations arising out of the passing of the Fordist to the post-Fordist economy and society, and secondly, processes linked to the progressive functional specialisation that emerges in attention to citizens, which has given rise to a progressive hierarchizing of the urban network of Gipuzkoa. Therefore, among the more recent phenomena, those linked to the increase in private mobility and the development of major transport infrastructure are dealt with, and so are the series of changes taking place in the exposure of the territories as a result of their global projection (interpretations eight, nine, ten and eleven). The eleven interpretations have been organised into four sections: firstly, the motive of centrality is identified in its specific circumstances in this territorial sphere; secondly, its urban effects are analysed through various graphic and analytical resources and the gathering of significant examples of their different urban manifestation; thirdly, the territorial scope of this centrality is explored throughout Gipuzkoa by means of various statistical and analytical sources for the purpose of building a centrality map corresponding to each episode; and, finally, the spatial and urbanistic qualities drawn from each of these centralities are analysed. A second chapter deals with a comparative study of the various motives of centrality. Here, the main traces of their spatial manifestation, their urbanistic features and the distinctive qualities of the settlement patterns arising out of them are extracted first of all. This is followed, secondly, by the map resulting from the sum of the eleven centrality episodes, which is analysed for the purposes of contrasting the starting hypothesis and extracting the main attributes displayed by the current urban configuration of Gipuzkoa.