The Urban Scale of Science and the
Enlargement of Madrid (1851-1936)
Antonio Lafuente and Tiago Saraiva
Instituto de Historia, CSIC
"Tout récit est un récit de voyage, - une pratique de l’espace”
M. de Certeau, L'invention du quotidien, (1990, I: 171)
ABSTRACT
During the Enlightenment Madrid scientific institutions such as the Botanical Garden
or the Natural History Museum served the demands of court ornament as well as colonial
efficiency. They were landmarks of new urbanism and new science. In the XIX th Century
engineers and hygienists shifted from empire to the city. The relevance of their know-how
was now certified by their capacity to solve the city problems. They had to bring water,
design urban expansion and fight epidemics. Once again the sites from which these new
actors reformed the city were heterotopias, symbols of the promised metropolis: new
monuments both by their architecture and their noble function as scientific institutions.
All these local concerns were to be set aside by a new scientific community emerging
in Madrid in the first decade of the XXth century. A group of physicists, chemists and
biologists in search of international recognition, formed a new scientific campus on the
outskirts of the city. The rationalism of their buildings was the best symbol of the new
scientific culture of precision. A change of architectures which also meant a change of
cultures. Our aim is to recover a lost sense of the city by placing ourselves at the beginning
of the process of urban production. We hope that such a focus will reveal the fundamental
role of scientific activity in the definition of the urban spaces.
Keywords: Urban expansion, science and the city, heterotopias, hygienism, civil
engineers

Spaces are produced and cities are built as artefacts needing the
invisible combination of a innumerable human and non-human actors,
configuring the network which connects the local to that which has no
location: places with flows, or buildings with symbols (Latour, 1998; Lefevre,
1974). For the object of this paper is to show the city as the subject and the
object of a great experiment, its transformation into the capital of a modern
state, leaving behind its former condition as the seat of the court.
Madrid, we argue, became an experimental laboratory where
machines and experts objectivised problems, gathered data and drew up
plans of action. It was not however just a work place, but also a patient
prostrated on the operating table, on whom the engineers wielded their

relentless scalpels. We talk here about “Big Science” in nineteenth-century
Madrid. Both the scale of the operations and the number of people involved,
as well as the public repercussions or the variety of technologies used, call
into question the theory that this phenomenon is exclusive to the twentieth
century1.
Naturally, to reach such a conclusion we stop regarding scientific
activities as a combination of individual contributions made in separate
specialities. We are interested here in the practices of science and in
following the steps of the actors to show the simultaneity of two
movements: firstly, that which links thoughts to a specific place,
transforming abstract ideas into spatial experiences; and secondly, that
which breaks objects down into tiny fragments suitable for the laboratory2.
In our case, the city was the object to be dominated as well as the sentient
subject, for every mark on its body engendered a body of analysts who
argued about the extent of the change. It was a public debate, affecting all
aspects of city life, from drains to transport and from public and private
hygiene to the layout and naming of streets. Never before had public affairs
–res publica-, both as justificatory rhetoric and as a professional practice,
been so important.3
1 On Big Science see Capshew & Rader (1992) and Galison (1992). For a discussion on the
application of the concept for several contexts see Westfall (2003) and Lafuente & Saraiva
(2001)
2 After Owen Hannaway published his seminal essay on chemistry laboratories in early
modern Europe (Hannaway, 1986), the place of knowledge production became a privileged
subject for Science Studies. There is now a wide international literature dedicated to the
located character of science. The works of Shapin (1988), Golinski (1998) Gooday (1998),
Galison & Thompson (1999) or Kohler (2002) are of particular relevance. However, the way of
treating space in that literature is, we think, quite different from ours: they show a great
concern for the place of science, but on the other hand they are not much interested in the
production of space itself. Shapin (1988) for example explains very well how the ideas about
space distribution (private/public) in seventeenth century London were essential to the way
Boyle and Hooke produced and communicated experiments. But we have no information, and
that is not Shapin´s aim, on the way science itself contributed to the Londoners experience of
space. Thus space is perceived as something preexistent, something that is already there
and which influences or reveals the nature of science production. Our paper instead has more
to do with science production as production of space experience, or to be more concrete, as
production of urban experience. Not even the volume dedicated to “The Place of
Knowledge”, edited by Ophir, Shapin and Shaffer (1991) was able to bring together both
movements to which we refer to in the text. For example, the contribution by Bill Hillier and
Alan Penn devoted to the importance of the organization of the laboratory space, is in sharp
contrast with the article by Jacques Revel dedicated to the knowledge of the territory. For a
similar concern for putting science on the city map see Inkster (1977) and Forgan & Gooday
(1996).
3 For general discussion on the topic of science as public culture and the import of the
Habermasian Public Sphere to Science Studies see Cooter & Pumfrey (1994). A more recent
perspective connecting with the literature on civil society in Broman (2002). Bensaude-
Vincent (2000) offers a provocative French version of the history of the complicated
relationship between science and the public. An overview of the same theme for the Spanish
context in Lafuente & Saraiva (2002).
2