Affordable Housing and Urban Politics in Spain, 1924-1937: Málaga’s “Garden City,” from Dictatorship to Republic

This article explores working-class housing schemes and urban planning to gain a new angle for viewing successive national political crises in Spain in the 1920s and 1930s. It focuses on the southern city of Málaga through a micro-study of the Ciudad Jardín development begun during the military dictatorship of the 1920s. Using a range of archival and newspaper sources, the article demonstrates how political struggle over affordable housing had become central to emerging modern public opinion, moving center-stage at a municipal level, just as the democratic Second Republic arrived in 1931. The basis of this contest was laid during the preceding oligarchic monarchy, an era marked by economic fragility, mass inward migration, and lack of urban planning. The model of the transnational Garden City movement subsequently served two competing political discourses about economic progress, hygiene, and social utility in Málaga: one “top-down” and for profit, the other based on social utility. Their lack of success had much to do with power and how it was publicly contested within state-municipal relations. This struggle was among the broader roots of the Republic’s descent into civil war.