Madrid’s Gran Vía: An urban cultural history and digital project

A major urban project begun on 4 April 1910, the Gran Vía is a street in central Madrid, Spain, constructed in three segments that connect Calle de Alcalá with the Plaza de España. Imagined on the heels of other urban reforms of the mid-to-late nineteenth century – chief among them the Puerta del Sol, which gained more recent international notoriety as the base of protests by the Indignados – the Gran Vía sought to establish Madrid as a modern European city and by extension testify to the urban modernity of the Spanish state. This famed thoroughfare has been represented in artistic products (theatre, novels, films and paintings) throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries as an enduring symbol of the Spanish capital’s urban modernity. This short-form article explores the potential for social sciences and humanities approaches to combine in a site-focused, interdisciplinary approach to urban culture. At the same time, it also documents the potential of digital projects on cities to involve students and faculty in collaborative research within a new educational paradigm.