‘¡La Vaguada es nuestra!’: The Cultural Politics of Madrid’s First Shopping Mall

Abstract This article adopts an urban cultural studies method to elaborate the historical-geographical formation of Madrid’s first American-style shopping mall, La Vaguada, in relation to important socio-spatial transformations unfolding in the Spanish capital from the 1950s to the early democratic period. Using insights developed in the field of critical geography, it construes the production of space in and around La Vaguada as a historically contingent process that offers remarkably unique insights into wider socio-cultural shifts occurring at a variety of geographical scales. With an eye toward urban planning in Spain during the twentieth century, the article first traces the origins of La Vaguada back to the capitalist speculators that built El Pilar and shows how this neighborhood was closely bound up with the urbanization of capital under dictator Francisco Franco. It then goes on to examine the grassroots campaign organized by the La Vaguada es nuestra neighborhood association in defense of El Pilar in order to map the constellation of contested discourses that ultimately coalesced around the proposed shopping center against the backdrop of Madrid’s historic 1979 municipal elections. The article concludes by performing a close reading of the mall’s architectural form to draw out its unique relationship to (post)modernity.