Towns like Valdeluz and Sesena are such ghost town urbanisations where the occupancy is much lower than is typically associated with suburban regions. What’s more telling however is the scattered unfinished structures that lie in wait for redemption, as opposed to their currently sinful state of providing no use, despite an already heavy investment. The hot, Spanish plain of Castile - La Mancha, where Don Quixote tilted at windmills, is home to a new kind of mirage. The city of Seseña, the ‘Manhattan of Madrid’ is an entire city of empty housing blocks rising from prairie; the most famous and most ridiculous exhibit in Spain’s museum of doomed property developments. The Development of El Quinon, like many a current infrastructural / urban development, either planned, on-going or currently halted in Spain is situated in the periphery. Built on the premise of creating new homes for those wishing to leave or couldn’t afford the capitalist and consumerist metropolitan centres, the dream quickly became a nightmare. This was meant to be Europe’s largest residential complex built by a single developer, €9 billion of private money. The property developer, Francisco Hernando, was meant to profit €1.5 billion on the project. Thirteen thousand homes would be built here beyond Madrid’s outer margins, but only 5,000 were completed before the whole Spanish property gamble collapsed in 2007. The former local mayor, José Luis Martín approved plans for the site on his last day in office and explained away the €700,000 in his bank account as ‘lottery winnings.’ We have lost faith, if in fact we ever had it - in the capacity and the will of any government to resolve the disparity between rich and poor, to recognise the value of a common ground, to blur the boundaries that divide the world into us and them, have and have not (Brillembourg & Klumpner, 2012, p26).
Under a guise of progress, the architecture rising from the ground and populating the landscape sit as an idle necropolis of banality. The rapid and single minded determination to ensure timely and efficient delivery of housing on a mass scale was a questionable strategy; a perpetual repetition upon repetition of a catalogued architecture Here Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honour, cherish, and embrace manipulation (Koolhas, 2002, p177). The polemic about the right angle and the straight line (Koolhas, 2002, p181). is only exacerbated here where the ninetieth degree has become one among many It has banished the ebbing and flowing and life where social interactions are minimal. Automation is now at heart of problem of socialist domination of production and of the pre-eminence of leisure over labour time (Asger, 1957. Two opposing perspectives exists - it deprives individual of any possibility of adding anything personal to automated production and same time saves human energy by massively liberating it from reproductive and creative activities leaving little to satisfy human needs for spontaneity, play and creativity. This ruthless adherence to the grid has distilled movement and character to purely logistical means. Space has been strictly delineated. Rules have been set.
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