Ildefonso Cerdá and the Birth of Urbanistics: The First Scientific Proposition about its Deep Structure

Abstract

Ildefonso Cerdá was the unquestioned creator and systematiser of Urbanistics as that new scientific discipline (which he called Urbanization). In the short history of the discipline, Cerdá was the very first to identify its scientific basis and to initiate the long development of that modern and broad field of knowledge. He articulated from scratch its scientific identity, first, through the methodological integration of Public Law and Economics, intricately merged, into urbanism or town planning (as the applied technique for Urbanistics), as structural disciplines articulating the physical-spatial design of town project or city planning. And, secondly, in order that the new discipline should become a scientific one, Cerdá is the very first to approach a reductionistic analysis of space as socially shaped through the systematic exercise of an essential regressus or reductio esentialis. This was done by starting from what is, on the face of it, apparent, complex and intricate in the city and territory up to its very simple, deep and elementary constituent. He proposes on this way the universal nature of "home-grounds-on-ways", shaping through these unity the dual of way interway ("vía-intervía"), as constituting the deep structure of the whole. Cerdá perceived this reductionistic analysis to be necessary to the articulating and rebuilding of a global and complex scientific comprehension (by himself called "colonisation", "urbanisation" and "ruralisation") this based upon the bricks, atoms or objects which feed a disciplined body of knowledge. Thus it is possible to synthetically rebuild the whole from a global perspective and likewise through holistic integration procedure.