Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish

Waterscape, 1890-1930
Author(s): Erik Swyngedouw
Source: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 89, No. 3 (Sep., 1999), pp.
443-465
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of American Geographers
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 Modernity and Hybridity:
Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the
Production of the Spanish Waterscape,
1890-1930
Erik Swyngedouw

School of Geography, Oxford University

Spain is arguably the European country where the water crisis has become most acute in recent
years. The political and ecological importance of water is not, however, only a recent development
in Spain. Throughout this century, water politics, economics, culture, and engineering have infused
and embodied the myriad tensions and conflicts that drove and still drive Spanish society. And
although the significance of water on the Iberian peninsula has attracted considerable scholarly and
other attention, the central role of water politics, water culture, and water engineering in shaping
Spanish society on the one hand, and the contemporary water geography and ecology of Spain as
the product of centuries of socioecological interaction on the other, have remained largely unex-
plored. The hybrid character of the water landscape, or "waterscape," comes to the fore in Spain in
a clear and unambiguous manner. The socionatural production of Spanish society can be illustrated
by excavating the central role of water politics and engineering in Spain's modernization process.
In the first part of the paper, I develop a theoretical and methodological perspective that is explicitly
critical of traditional approaches in water-resources studies, which tend to separate various aspects
of the hydrological cycle into discrete and independent objects of study. My perspective, broadly
situated within the political ecology tradition, draws critically from recent work by ecological
historians, cultural critics, sociologists of science, critical social theorists, and political economists.
My main objective is to bring together what has been severed for too long by insisting that nature
and society are deeply intertwined. In the second part of the paper, I excavate the origins of Spain's
early-twentieth-century modernization process (1890-1930) as expressed in debates and actions
around the hydrological condition. The conceptual framework presented in the first part helps
structure a narrative that weaves water through the network of socionatural relations in ways that
permit the recasting of modernity as a deeply geographical, although by no means coherent,
homogeneous, total, or uncontested project. In sum, I seek to document how the socionatural is
historically produced to generate a particular, but inherently dynamic, geographical configuration.
Key Words: modernity, nature and society, political ecology, Spain, water resources.

I am planning something geographical. (Klaus Kinski,
the film Fitzcarraldo, directed by Werner Herzog)
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand not lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water
(From: T S. Eliot, The Waste Land)
The Hydraulic ordering of the territory constitutes
a structural necessity of Spanish society as an indus-
trial society (Ortif 1984:1 1) .1
Spain is arguably the European country
where the water crisis has become most
IL acute in recent years. Since 1975, demand

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 89(3), 1999, pp. 443-465

(C 1999 by Association of American Geographers
Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

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 444 Swyngedouw
for water has systematically outstripped supply
and, despite major and unsustainable attempts to
increase pumping of ground water and to develop
a more intensive use of surface water, the problem
has intensified significantly. The recent
1991-1995 drought, which affected most of Cen-
tral and Southern Spain, spearheaded intense
political debate, particularly as the cyclical resur-
gence of diminished water supply from rainwater
coincided with the preparation (since 1985) of
the Second National Hydrological Plan (MOPT
1993; Ruiz 1993; Gomez Mendoza and del Moral
Ituarte 1995; del Moral Ituarte 1996).
The political and ecological importance of
water is not, however, only a recent development
in Spain. Throughout this century, water politics,
economics, culture, and engineering have infused
and embodied the myriad tensions and conflicts
that drove and still drive Spanish society. And
although the significance of water on the Iberian
peninsula (see Figure 1) has attracted consider-
able scholarly and other attention, the central
role of water politics, water culture, and water
engineering in shaping Spanish society on the one
Atlantic Ocean 0 50 100 150km
ST'IAS Santander
ASU RlA .~''PAlS R F I?
Santiago deOviedo *:-CANTABRIA: VAC ANC
Compostela P n... a.l: Pam.EN,
* ~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~Vitoria,
GALICIA NAVARRA
Logrono.'st.....
RIOJA'..
t _ . t - *. R I O J.~~~~~~ A A L . .N
r ; - ; CASTILLA Y LEON *-. CATALUN
Valladolid
J I ,MADRID
Madnid
Toledo
CASTILLA
( %.*EXTREMADURA*....' LAMANCHA -.1
) \ . ~~~~~A N D A L U S I A *-
Sevilla
Figure 1. The Iberian Peninsula, Spain, and its Autonomous Regions.
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hand, and the contemporary water geography
and ecology of Spain as the product of centuries
of socioecological interaction on the other, have
remained largely unexplored. Yet very little, if
anything, in today's Spanish social, economic,
and ecological landscape can be understood with-
out explicit reference to the changing position of
water in the unfolding of Spanish society. The
hybrid character of the water landscape, or
"waterscape," comes to the fore in Spain in a clear
and unambiguous manner. Hardly any river basin,
hydrological cycle, or water flow has not been
subjected to some form of human intervention or
use; not a single form of social change can be
understood without simultaneously addressing
and understanding the transformations of and in
the hydrological process. The socionatural pro-
duction of Spanish society, I maintain, can be
illustrated by excavating the central role of water
politics and engineering in Spain's modernization
process.
I intend to situate the political-ecological proc-
esses around water in Spain in the context of what
Neil Smith (1984) defined as "the production of
~ *
* ' . .._**:3
* Zaragoza:
ARAGON arcelona
Palma de
Valencia Mallorca
Mediterranean
murci&- ~ Sea
......... Boundary of autonomous
region
* Capital city
 Modernity and Hybridity 445
nature." In particular, I shall argue that the tu-
multuous process of modernization in Spain and
its contemporary condition, both in environ-
mental and political-economic terms, are
wrought from historical spatial-ecological trans-
formations. Modernization in Spain was a decid-
edly geographical project that became expressed
in and through the intense spatial transformation
of Spain in this century. This transformation is
one in which water and the waterscape play a
pivotal role. The contradictions and tensions in-
herent in the process that is commonly referred
to as "modernization" are, I maintain, expressed
by and worked through the transformation of
nature and society. The "modern" environment
and waterscape in Spain is what Latour (1993)
would refer to as a "hybrid," a thing-like appear-
ance (a "permanence" as Harvey [1996] would
call it) that is part natural and part social, and
that embodies a multiplicity of historical-geo-
graphical relations and processes.
The main portion of the paper is divided into
two parts. In the first, I develop a theoretical and
methodological perspective that is explicitly criti-
cal of traditional approaches in water-resources
studies, which tend to separate various aspects of
the hydrological cycle into discrete and inde-
pendent objects of study. The traditional hydro-
logical, engineering, geographical, political,
sociological, economic, and cultural perspectives
on water have produced a piecemeal perspective
that maintains a particular water ideology, one
that is increasingly less able to contribute in crea-
tive and innovative ways to the mitigation of
growing problems associated with contemporary
water practices (Ward 1997).2 My perspective,
broadly situated within the political ecology tra-
dition, draws critically from recent work by eco-
logical historians, cultural critics, sociologists of
science, critical social theorists, and political
economists. Although researchers working
within mainstream perspectives pay lip service to
considering the hydrological cycle as a complex,
multifaceted, and global network, one that in-
cludes physical as well as human elements, they
rarely overcome the dualisms of the nature/society
divide, and they continue to isolate parts from the
totality (see, for a review, Castree 1995; Demeritt
1994; Gerber 1997). My main objective is to bring
together what has been severed for too long by
insisting that nature and society are deeply
intertwined.
In the second part of the paper, I excavate the
origins of Spain's early-twentieth-century mod-
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ernization process (1890-1930) as expressed in
debates and actions around the hydrological con-
dition. The conceptual framework presented in
the first part helps structure a narrative that
weaves water through the network of socionatu-
ral relations in ways that permit the recasting of
modernity as a deeply geographical, although by
no means coherent, homogeneous, total, or un-
contested, project. If the social and the natural
cannot be severed, but are intertwined in per-
petually changing ways in the production proc-
esses of both society and the physical
environment, then the rather opaque idea of "the
production of nature" may become clearer. In
sum, I seek to document how the socionatural is
historically produced to generate a particular, but
inherently dynamic, geographical configuration.
On Hybrids and Socionature:
Flow, Process, and Dialectics
Contemporary scholars increasingly recognize
that natural or ecological conditions and proc-
esses do not operate separately from social proc-
esses, and that the actually existing socionatural
conditions are always the result of intricate trans-
formations of preexisting configurations that are
themselves inherently natural and social. For ex-
ample, David Harvey (1996) insists that there is
nothing particularly unnatural about New York
City. Urban areas, regions, or any other outcome
of sociospatial processes or conditions exist in a
network of interwoven processes that are simul-
taneously human, natural, material, cultural, me-
chanical, and organic. The myriad processes that
support and maintain social life, such as, for ex-
ample, water, energy, food, or computers, always
combine society and nature in infinite ways; yet
simultaneously, these hybrid socionatural
"things" are full of contradictions, tensions, and
conflicts. They are proliferating objects that
Donna Haraway calls "cyborgs" (Haraway 1991)
or that Bruno Latour refers to as "quasi-objects"
(Latour 1993); these hybrid, part social/part
natural-yet deeply historical and thus
produced-objects/subjects are intermediaries
that embody and express nature and society and
weave networks of infinite liminal spaces. For
example, if I were to capture some water in a cup
and excavate the networks that brought it there,
"I would pass with continuity from the local to the
global, from the human to the nonhuman" (La-
tour 1993:121). These flows would narrate many
 446 Swyngedouw
interrelated tales, or stories, of social groups and
classes and the powerful socioecological proc-
esses that produce social spaces of privilege and
exclusion, of participation and marginality;
chemical, physical, and biological reactions and
transformations, the global hydrological cycle,
and global warming; capital, machinations, and
the strategies and knowledges of dam builders,
urban land developers, and engineers; the pas-
sage from river to urban reservoir, and the geo-
political struggles between regions and nations.
In sum, water embodies multiple tales of socio-
nature as hybrid. The rhizome of underground
and surface water flows and the streams, pipes,
and canals that come together in water gushing
from fountains, taps, and irrigation channels is
a powerful metaphor for a deeply intercon-
nected socionature.3
The excavation of the production of these
hybrid networks and their proliferation with the
intensification of the modernization process en-
tails a constructionist view in both a material and
discursive sense. In both the Grundrisse and Capi-
tal, Marx insisted on the natural foundations of
social development. Any materialist approach
necessarily adheres to a perspective that insists
that nature is an integral part of the metabolism
of social life. Social relations operate in and
through metabolizing the natural environment
which, in turn, transforms both society and na-
ture and produces altered or new socionatural
forms (see Grundman 1991; Benton 1996).
While "Nature" (as a historical product) provides
the foundation, social relations produce nature's
and society's history. Of course, the ambition of
classical Marxism was wider than reconstructing
the dialectics of historical socionatural transfor-
mations and their contradictions. It also insisted
on the ideological notion of "nature" in bourgeois
science and society, just as it claimed to uncover
"Truth" through the excavation of underlying
socioecological processes (Schmidt 1971; Benton
1989). By concentrating on the labor process per
se, however, many Marxist analysts tended to
replicate the very problem they meant to criticize.
In particular, by rendering nature as the substra-
tum for the unfolding of social relations, espe-
cially labor relations, they maintained the
material basis for social life, while relegating natu-
ral processes to a realm outside of social life and,
hence, outside history.
Out of this theorization arises an interesting
paradox. Insisting on the "social production of
nature" suggests that social relations "determine
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in the last instance" (Althusser 1965) the produc-
tion process. This might easily lead to the illusion
that all processes-in-nature are subsumed under
social control and, consequently, to the view of a
manageable and subordinated primordial and ex-
ternal nature whose metabolism remains outside
social and discursive formations. In this view,
nature itself belongs to the pure domain of the
natural and becomes tainted and transformed by
the social. The social and the natural may have
been brought together and made historical and
geographical by Marx, but he did so in ways that
kept both as a priori separate domains. The net-
works that constitute and the processes that
produce socionatural hybrids are left unrecon-
structed when the social and the natural are seen
as two contradictory, yet complementary, poles
that construct a reality.
I would argue, with Latour (1993), that the
process of separating and purifying things natural
and social resides in the conceptual and discur-
sive construction of the world into two separate,
but profoundly interrelated realms-nature and
society-between which a dialectical relation-
ship unfolds. The debate, then, becomes a dispute
about the nature of this dialectical relationship,
its implications, and the absence or presence of
an ontological foundation from which nature and
the social are distinguished and distinguishable.
This form of dialectical argumentation runs as
follows. Humans encounter nature, with its inter-
nal dynamics, principles, and laws, embedded in
a society with its own organizing principles. This
encounter inflicts consequences on both. The
dialectic between nature and society becomes an
external one, that is, a recursive relationship be-
tween two separate fields, nature and society,
which is mediated by material, ideological, and
representational practices. The product, then, is
the thing (object or subject) that is produced out
of this dynamic encounter.
Neil Smith (1984, 1996), in contrast, insists
that nature is an integral part of the process of
production or, in other words, that society and
nature are integral to each other and produce
permanencies (or thing-like moments) in their
unity. The notion of "the production of nature,"
borrowed and reinterpreted from Lefebvre
(1991), suggests that socionature itself is a
historical-geographical process (and therefore
time/place-specific). It insists on the inseparabil-
ity of society and nature and maintains the unity
of socionature as a process. In brief, both society
and nature are produced, and are hence malleable,
 Modernity and Hybridity 447
transformable, and potentially transgressive.
Smith does not suggest that all nonhuman proc-
esses are socially produced, although he insists
that all nature, including social nature, is a
historical-geographical process (see also Levins
and Lewontin 1985; Lewontin 1993). He argues
instead that the idea of some sort of pristine
nature ("First Nature" in Lefebvre's account) be-
comes increasingly problematic as new "nature"
(in the sense of different forms of "nature") is
produced over space and time. It is this historical-
geographical process that led Haraway and La-
tour to argue that the number of hybrids and
quasi-objects proliferates and multiplies. Indeed,
from the very beginning of human history, but
accelerating as the modernization process inten-
sified, the objects and subjects of daily life became
increasingly more socionatural.
Consider, as examples of this intensification,
the socioecological transformations of entire eco-
logical systems (through agriculture, for exam-
ple), the sand and clay metabolized into concrete
buildings through the labor process, the accelera-
tion and ever- expanding socioecological foot-
print of the urbanization process, or the contested
production of new genomes (such as Onco-
mousetm [Haraway 1997]). Of course, the pro-
duction process of socionature embodies both
material processes and the proliferating discur-
sive and symbolic representations of nature. As
Lefebvre (1991) insisted, the production of na-
ture transcends material conditions and proc-
esses; it is also related to the production of
discourses of nature (by scientists, engineers, and
the like) on the one hand, and to powerful images,
symbols, and discourses on nature (virginity, a
moral code, originality, survival of the fittest,
wilderness, etc.) through which Nature becomes
represented, on the other.
If we maintain a view of dialectics as internal
relations (Olman 1993; Balibar 1995; Harvey
1996) as opposed to external recursive relation-
ships, then we must insist on the need to tran-
scend the binary formations of nature and society
and develop a new language that maintains the
dialectical unity of the process of change as em-
bodied in the thing itself. "Things" are hybrids or
quasi-objects (subjects and objects, material and
discursive, natural and social) from the very be-
ginning. By this, I mean that the "world" is a
process of perpetual metabolism in which social
and natural processes combine in a historical-
geographical production process of socionature,
whose outcome (historical nature) embodies
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chemical, physical, social, economic, political,
and cultural processes in highly contradictory but
inseparable manners. Every body and thing is a
mediator, part social, part natural (but without
discrete boundaries), which internalizes the mul-
tiple contradictory relations that redefine and
rework every body and thing.
For Lefebvre, capturing space or socionature
from a dialectical and emancipatory perspective
implies constructing multiple narratives that re-
late material, representational, and symbolic
practices, each of which has a series of particular
characteristics that internalizes the dialectical re-
lations defined by the other domains, but none of
which can be reduced to the other (Lefebvre
1991). In short, Lefebvre's triad opens up an
avenue for inquiry that insists on the materiality
of each of the component elements, but whose
content can be approached only through the
excavation of the metabolism of their becomings,
in which the internal relations are the signifying
and producing mechanisms. Put simply, Lefebvre
insists on the ontological priority of process and
flux that become interiorized in each of the mo-
ments (lived, perceived, conceived) of the pro-
duction process, but always in a fleeting, dynamic,
and transgressive manner. Whether we discuss
the global hydrological cycle or the symbolic
meanings of nature to city folks, it is the stories of
the process of their perpetual reworking that
broach their being part of a process of continuous
transformation in which the stories themselves
will subsequently take part. Following the maze
of socionature's networks-as Latour (1993) sug-
gests we do-is not good enough if stripped from
the process of their historical-geographical pro-
duction (see Escobar 1999). Hybridization is a
process of production, of becoming, of perpetual
transgression. Lefebvre's insistence on temporal-
ity(ies), combined with Latour's networked
(re)construction of quasi-objects, provides a
glimpse of how such a research program might be
practiced.
Figure 2 summarizes this argument. None of
the component parts is reducible to the other, yet
their constitution arises from the multiple dialec-
tical relations that swirl out from the production
process itself. Consequently, the parts are always
implicated in the constitution of the "thing" and
are never outside the process of its making. In
sum, then, the above perspective is a process-
based episteme in which nothing is ever fixed or,
at best, fixity is the transient moment; nothing can
be captured in its entirety as the flows perpetually
 448 Swyngedouw

THE PRODUCTION OF SOCIONATURE

REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES

DISCURSIVE .
CONSTRUCTIONS: LANGUAGE

IDEOLOGICAL .*: * . SOCIAL

PRACTICES . )QUASI-OBJECTS RELATIONS

BIO CHEMICAL~? ~ CULTURAL PRACTICES

PHYSICAL PROCESSES

r 2MATERIAL PRACTICES

Figure 2. Hybridization: the production of socionature.

destroy and create, combine and separate. This
particular dialectical perspective also insists on
the nonneutrality of relations in terms of both
their operation and their outcome, thereby poli-
ticizing both processes and fluxes. It also sees
distinct categories (nature, society, city, species,
water, etc.) as the outcome of the infusion of
materially discursive practices that are, each
time, creatively destroyed in the very production
of socionature.
It is, of course, this perspective that Harvey
(1996) insists on as the epistemological entry into
the excavation of the political ecology of capital-
ism. A number of analytical tools arising from this
formulation are useful for the political- ecological
study of water.
* First, although we cannot escape the "thing,"
transformative knowledges about water and
the waterscape can only be gauged from recon-
structing their processes of production.
* Second, there is no "thing-like" ontological or
essential foundation (society, nature, or text),
as the process of becoming and of hybridization
has ontological and epistemological priority.
* Third, as every quasi-object/cyborg/hybrid in-
ternalizes the multiple relations of its produc-
tion, "any-thing" can be entered as the starting
point for undertaking the archaeology of
her/his/its socionatural metabolism (the pro-
duction of her/his/its socionature).
* Fourth, this archaeology has always already
begun and is never-ending (cf., Althusser's
infamous "history as a process without a sub-
ject"), and is therefore always open, contested,
and contestable.
* Fifth, given the nonneutrality and intensely pow-
erful forces through which socionature is pro-
duced, this perspective does not necessarily lead
to a relativist position. Every archaeology and
associated narratives and practices are always
implicated in and consequential to this very pro-
duction process. Knowledge and practice are
always situated in the web of social power rela-
tions that defines and produces socionature.

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 Modernity and Hybridity 449
* Sixth, the notion of a socionatural production
transcends the binary distinctions between
society/nature, material/ideological, and
real/discursive.
While it is difficult to reconstruct the produc-
tion processes of socionatural networks along the
lines presented above, I would maintain that such
a perspective has profound implications for un-
derstanding the relationship between capitalism,
modernity, environment, space, and contempo-
rary social life. It also has implications for trans-
formative and emancipatory ecological politics.
Modernization is defined here as the still continu-
ing process of perpetual change and transforma-
tion that is characterized by a series of social
power relations and mechanisms that are, among
others, structured through contested notions of
progress, emancipation, and "betterment." This
process of change and transformation unleashes
mechanisms of creative destruction and destruc-
tive creation in which "all that is solid melts into
air" (Marx and Engels 1985:3). Modernity as a
process is internally deeply heterogeneous, con-
tested and contestable, and riddled with tension
and conflict that operates through and alters
society and environment in ever more complex
and mediated ways (see Berman 1982; Harvey
1989, 1996; Giddens 1990; Lefebvre 1995). The
tumultuous and contested process of historical-
geographical transformations becomes etched
into the production of new socionatural land-
scapes. The flow of water, in its material, symbolic,
political, and discursive constructions, embodies
and expresses exactly how the "production of
nature" is both arena for and outcome of the
tumultuous reordering of socionature in ever-
changing and intricate manners. The present
Spanish waterscape and its historical-geographical
production process will be used as an entry point
to excavate this process of modernization.
The above perspective will guide my narrative
on the production of the modern Spanish
waterscape at the turn of the century, when a
distinct discourse and rhetoric of modernization
emerged. This modernization drive, which per-
meated the whole of Spanish society, would gen-
erate the anchoring framework for key social,
political, cultural, and technical debates and
practices until the present day. The modernizing
desires of broad strata of Spanish society at-
tempted to construct hegemonic, and apparently
socially and politically progressive, visions
through the social production of nature. The
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dialectics of modernization, as expressed in
Spain's hydropolitics, will be documented with an
eye toward identifying the relationship between
the process of producing a "new" nature and the
ebb and flows of dominant political-economic
relations. Multiple narratives that move around
the spiral presented in Figure 2 will be woven
together to reconstruct the relations of power
inscribed in the discursive, ideological, cultural,
material, and scientific practices through which
the Spanish waterscape became constructed and
reconstructed as a socionatural space that reflects
Spain's contested modernization process and the
relations of power inscribed therein.
The Production of Nature: Water
and Modernization in Spain
I shall not begin by analyzing the Spanish
water map from the available hydrological data
and the physical characteristics of the water ba-
sins. Such an entre would surely be important, but
prioritizing these things would miss the central
tenet of the argument outlined above. Indeed,
these very physical conditions and characteristics
are not absolute, stable, and God-given charac-
teristics. On the contrary, the history of Spain's
modernization has been a history of altering, re-
defining, and transforming these very physical
characteristics. What is more, Spain's hydrologi-
cal characteristics have been infused with social
practices, cultural meanings, political and eco-
nomic ideologies, and engineering principles for
a very long time. A stroll through Granada's
Alhambra gardens, built by the Islamic rulers who
controlled that part of Spain until the fifteenth
century, provides a particularly attractive and
material vision of how water, culture, and social
construction combine in and are expressed by the
transformation and metabolization of the flow of
water.
It was not until the late nineteenth century
that the socionatural production process of con-
temporary Spain accelerated. From that moment
onwards, Spain-belatedly, somewhat reluc-
tantly, and almost desperately-launched itself
on a path of accelerating modernization. Of
course, modernization through socionatural
changes always takes place within already con-
structed historical socionatural conditions. On
occasion, I shall refer to and highlight these con-
ditions. For the present purposes, which are to
document and substantiate the notion of the
 450 Swyngedouw

production of nature and to elaborate how
Spain's modernization process became, and re-
mains, a deeply geographical project, it will suffice
to chart the tumultuous, contradictory, and often
very complex historical-geography of Spain's
modernization through water engineering. Today
the country has almost nine hundred dams, more
than eight hundred of which have been con-
structed in this century alone (see Figure 3). Not
a single river basin has not been altered, managed,
engineered, and transformed. Water has been an
obsessive theme in Spain's national life during
this century, and the quest for water continues
unabated (del Moral Ituarte 1998). From the turn
of the century onwards, water rapidly became a
prime consideration in national political, socio-
economic, and cultural debates. Under Franco,
the great expansion of hydraulic infrastructures
reshaped the hydraulic geography of Spain in
fundamental ways. Present discussions in Spain
over the need for a new National Hydrological
Plan, the debates over the introduction of a new
water law, and the relentless demands of cities,
regions, and industries for ever more water are
testimony to a continuing and ever-intensifying
conflict and struggle over the trajectory of Spain's
modernization process.
Spain's Postcolonial Shock
While other European imperialist countries
were consolidating their geographical expansion
overseas at the end of the nineteenth century, the
traditional Spanish elites found themselves in a
highly traumatic condition with the loss in 1898
of their last colonial possessions of Cuba, Puerto
Rico, and the Philippines after a disastrous "War
of Independence" (Carr 1983; Figuero and Santa
Cecilia 1998; Fusi and Palafox 1998; Perez 1999).
Faced with a mounting economic crisis, growing
social tensions, a rising bourgeoisie in the North,

NORTE
100 0 50 100 150kmn
50 i ~
0-NORTE III R N

TTA .......J.
NORTE / k ic? BRO

/0 -0 RIN
~~ / ORIENTALOR

Duero 1 2 3 4 5123 4 5

C ~~~~~ ~~~~ .~~~~~" ~~~~~\ ' ~~~~~Main rivers

1d TAO 0- Hydrographic
-K----E--]/ 100 JCRConfederation
50 50-boundary
1 2 3 4 5 0-- 2 4
100 GUADIANA-
50 ~

1- 2 /'SEGURA

J ~~GUADALQUIVIR /KYT HRS

(100 0KYTCHRS
GUADL4N4I 50- Nubro
dams constructed
100

I ~~ '~- SUR 1 = Before 1900

100o- -------------i 2 =1900 -1935 50 U j
j j ~~~~~~~~~3 =1936 -1970 0
50T-7 4 =1971 -1986 12 3 4 5
0 -l--------~----1 5 = After 1986 Time period in history
1 2 '3 4 5

Figure 3. Evolution of dam construction in Spain for each of the Hydrographic Confederations (river basin
authorities). Data excludes Islas Canarias and Pirineo Oriental. Source: Ministerio de Obras Pulblicas y Urbanismo
(1990) Plan Hidro'logico-Sintesis de la Documentacio'n Bdsica, Direccio'n General de Obras Hidraulicas, Madrid, pp.
32-33.

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 Modernity and Hybridity 451

and, in the South, an antiquated and still largely admirals and generals.4 (cited in Gomez Mendoza
feudal social order that was lamenting the military 1992:233) (my emphasis)
defeat, Spanish progressive cultural, professional,
In the absence of an external geographical
political, and intellectual elites were desperately
project as the foundation to modernization,
searching for a way to revive or to "regenerate"
therefore, the Spanish modernizing elites con-
the nation's social and economic base (Ortega
centrated on a national program that would be
Cantero 1995). This drive to revive the nation's
equally geographical but founded on the radical
"spirit" became known as el regeneracionismo (Fusi
transformation of Spain's geography, and in par-
and Palafox 1998). Emerging from growing dis-
ticular, its water resources (G0mez Mendoza and
content from the 1870s onwards, regeneracion-
Ortega Cantero 1987). Thus, while imperial
ism became associated with the "Generation of
countries pursued strategies of external spatial
'98," a loose group of intellectuals that were par-
solutions, Spain was forced to revolutionize its
ticularly concerned with reviving and modern-
internal geography and to produce new geo-
izing Spain in the context of the twin dramas of
graphical configurations if it was to keep up with
internal disintegration and external imperial
its expansionist northern European rivals. As
power loss (Figuero and Santa Cecilia 1998). This
Costa argues in 1880: " [I]f in other countries it is
regeneracionism quickly became an "obsessive
sufficient for man to help Nature, here it is nec-
theme in national life" (Fernandez Almagro
essary to do more; it is necessary to create her"
1970:239), producing a rich, albeit ambiguous,
(Costa, cited in Driever 1998a:40; my emphasis).
and heterogeneous ferment from which Spain
This concern is voiced by a series of Costa's
would launch itself onto a path of modernization.
contemporaries. In particular, Lucas Mallada
The traditional elites, through their parasitic de-
(1841-1921), an engineer and geologist, had al-
pendence on colonial exploitation, had largely
ready lamented the fate of Spain and the "causes
successfully prevented or at least stalled this pro-
of the poverty of Spain's soil" (Mallada 1882; see
cess. The various regeneracionist tendencies at
also Ayala-Carcedo and Driever 1998) and advo-
the time shared a number of views: a concern with
cated a program of reworking Spain's natural-
the "decadence" of Spain, a desire to regenerate
resource base. This program of producing new
the national "spirit," and a search for a foundation
space embodied physical, social, cultural, moral,
from which to launch a national revival (see
and aesthetic elements, fusing them around the
Mallada 1890; Maclas Picavea 1899; Isern 1899;
dominant and almost hegemonic ideology of na-
Costa 1900; Ayala-Carcedo and Driever 1998).
tional development, revival, and progress.
While many of the participants centered this
revival around the mobilization of the "natural
riches and resources" of the country (Gomez
Modernization as a Geographical Project:
Mendoza 1992:233), the regeneracionism also
the Production of Space/Nature
emphasized the intellectual and moral revitaliza-
tion of the people and the associated need for
The dominant form of socioeconomic devel-
educational and scientific "progress." This pro-
opment in Spain until the late nineteenth century
gram became formulated as a military-geographic
had combined colonial trade with domestic farm-
project, which Joaquin Costa (1900), a turn-of-
ing. The latter was based on primarily southern
the-century public intellectual, summarizes as
large-estate dryland-culture by latifundistas
follows:
whose economic position depended on a protec-
The disgrace of Spain originated principally because tionist stance. The effects of increasingly liberal-
of the absence in national consciousness of the ized international trade after 1880 (Carr 1983),
vision that the internal war against drought, against combined with the loss of the last Spanish colo-
the rugged character of the soil, the rigidity of the nies in 1898, led to disastrous socioeconomic
coasts, the intellectual backwardness of the people, conditions and rapidly rising social conflicts that
the isolation from the European Centre, the absence intensified already sharp social tensions in the
of capital, was of greater importance than the war
countryside (Fontana 1975; Garrabou 1975).5
against Cuban or Filipino separatism; and because of
The traditional agricultural elites were faced with
not having been as alarmed by the former as by the
latter, and because of not having made the same the emergence of modernizing elites, both agri-
sacrifices that were made for the latter, and of not cultural and industrial, who began to challenge
having committed-sad suicide-the same stream the political-economic and ideological domi-
of gold to the engineers and scientists as to the nance of the latifundistas. The proletarianization

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 452 Swyngedouw
process, combined with sharpening crisis condi-
tions, intensified class struggle in both the city
and countryside.
Industrialization, mainly focused in Catalonia
and in the Basque Country (Angoustures 1995),
intensified the city/countryside divide, accentu-
ated already long-standing interregional con-
flicts, and fed demands for greater regional
autonomy. Containing and working through
these tensions without revolutionary transforma-
tion necessitated a vision around which the mod-
ernizing social groups could ally through a project
of national regeneration. This revitalization,
which became formulated as a project of geo-
graphical restructuring, combined major environ-
mental change, socioeconomic restructuring, and
moral revival, all of which were linked in a regen-
eracionist ideological discourse. Driever
(1998a:37) summarizes: "Spain was portrayed as
part of a new world order in which Spaniards had
to interpenetrate with their natural environment
and geographical space in order not to perish as
the international marketplace reordered the
world through economic competition."
This national geographical project would re-
volve around the hydrological/agricultural nexus.
Spain's "geographical problem" became the axis
around which the sociocultural and economic
malaise was explained, and where the course of
action resided. One of the key protagonists ar-
ticulating this revival-through-modernization
was Joaquin Costa (1846-1911),6 the most
prominent and visible figure of the radical regen-
eracionism promoted by the intellectuals. Born
the son of a poor peasant from Aragon, he was a
self-educated intellectual whose influential and
prolific writings covered politics, social reform,
education, and agricultural and hydraulic poli-
cies, among many other themes. His relentless
struggle against poverty and the socioeconomic
and political disintegration of Spain propelled
him to the forefront of the public debates at the
time (see Ortega 1975; Carr 1983; Perez 1999).
In 1892, he wrote that state-organized hydraulic
politics should be a national objective "capable of
reworking the geography of the Fatherland and of
solving the complex agricultural and social
problems" (Costa 1892:88). For Costa, fusing
the production of a new geography with a revo-
lutionization of the internal operation of the state
would help mitigate social tensions and provide
the basis for a promodernist and popular petty-
production-based development process (Orti
1994). This focus on a geographical project as the
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foundation for modernization permitted prog-
ressive elites to raise social problems (class strug-
gle, economic decline, mass unemployment) as
important issues without formulating them in
class terms. This, in turn, enabled the formation
of an initially weak, but gradually growing, coali-
tion of reformist socialists, populists, industrial-
ists, and enlightened agricultural elites into a
hegemonic block with a modernist vision of
Spain's future-an alliance aimed to defeat the
traditionalists and keep revolutionary socialists
and anarchists at bay. Although coalitions, objec-
tives, and means would change over time, the
geographical basis for modernization would re-
main the guiding principle for this hegemonic
vision that would become the pivot of Spain's
development until the end of the Franco regime.
The realization of such an ambitious project of
mobilizing resources and educating the people
demanded thorough geographical knowledge,
though of a particular kind. As Gomez Mendoza
and Ortega Cantero (1987:80) argue, "the real
patriotism is the bedrock of the regeneracionist
project and this patriotism flows from the exact
knowledge of the geographical reality of the
country" (my translation). In 1918, Rafael Al-
tamira (1923:168-69), another leading intellec-
tual, wrote that the description of Spain's
geography offers a great lesson in patriotism,
while Azorifn dose Martinez Ruiz), a member of
the Generation of '98, concluded in 1916 that
"the basis of patriotism is geography" (Azorifn
1982:512). In this view, the only means by which
to solve the national problem was through the
problem of the land-the physical nature of the
territory. Ricardo Macias Picavea (1895:346)
summarized the relationship between the need
for a scientific geography and the regeneracionist
project:
To rehabilitate us, it is imperative to start with the
rehabilitation of our land: this is an essential and
absolute condition. And in order to restore this
geographical environment that is our fatherland,
who would deny that the first thing to be done is to
know it well and accurately? From this is the verita-
ble patriotic character with which the cultivation of
Iberian geography has to present itself to the eyes of
all the Spaniards.7
Even by 1930, this vision was still the primary
leitmotiv for the regeneracionist agenda, which,
in fact, would only materialize on a grand scale
after the end of the Civil War in 1938. A new
journal in 1930 recapitulated the great geographi-
cal mission of the modernizing agenda with the
 Modernity and Hybridity 453
same vigor and passion: "There is nothing more
urgent for our national reconstitution than a
profound study of our geography and our soil.
This will be the seed for the great political rebirth
of Spain"8 (N 1930:29-30).
This project to remake Spanish geography as
a part of modernization combined a decidedly
political strategy, a particular ideological vision,
a call for a scientific-positivist understanding of
the natural world, a scientific-technocratic engi-
neering mission, and a popular base rooted in a
traditional peasant rural culture. Plenty of evi-
dence can be found for this in Costa's work and
in that of his contemporaries (for a review, see
Perez De La Dehesa 1966; Tufion De Lara 1971;
Orti 1976). The revolution in the state-but
certainly not of the state-was effected through
a politics of spatial and environmental transfor-
mation that would center around the defense of
the small peasant producer-cum-landowner,
communal (state) control of water, educational
enhancement, technical-scientific knowledge,
and the leap to power of an alliance of small
holders and the new bourgeoisie that hitherto had
been largely marginalized by the aristocratic lan-
downing elite and their associated administrators
in the state apparatus.9 At the same time, the
focus on restoring or, in fact, expanding land-
ownership through "internal colonization" fos-
tered growth in and concentrated the efforts of
an "organically" organized state that brought re-
formist intellectuals, some worker movements,
and the nascent industrial bourgeoisie together in
a more or less coherent vision of reform against
the traditionalists (Ortega 1975). The geographi-
cal project became, as such, the glue around
which often unlikely partners could coalesce,
while excluding both the more radical, left-wing
revolutionaries and the "radical" conservatives.
Surely, the sublimation of the many tensions and
conflicts within this loose alliance of reformists,
when accomplished through a focus on reorgan-
izing Spain's hydraulic geography, served the pur-
pose of providing a discursive vehicle to ally
hitherto excluded social groups without defining
the problem purely in class or other conflictual
social terms (see Nadal Reimat 1981). As Orti
(1976:179) maintains:
Hydraulic politics, understood in a broad and sym-
bolic sense as a process of accelerated transforma-
tion of agriculture from extensive and traditional
into modern and intense, must constitute the fun-
damental vector of national politics. This must cata-
lyze an agrarian reform, which would permit a
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balanced economic development and prevent the
ongoing process of proletarianization of the peasant
masses, moderating social polarization and class
struggle.
This organic and antirevolutionary (in social-
class terms) reformism in which the state would
take center stage to organize the sociospatial
transformation would, after the failed attempts to
initiate reform during the first few decades of the
twentieth century, provide a substratum on
which the later falangist, organicist, and fascist
ideology would thrive.
Water as the Linchpin to Spain's
Modernization Drive
Los Pantanos o la Muerte! [Dams or Death!] (Perez
1999:504).
If the "remaking" of Spain's geography became
the great modernizing adagio, then water and
hydrological engineering were its master tools.
The study of geography centered on problems of
fertility-both the lack of water and the infertility
of the soil. In 1903, Costa wrote that "the greatest
obstacle which prevents our country to improve
production is the absence of humidity in the soil
because of insufficient or absent rainfall" (cited
in Ortega 1975:37). "Rain rushing to the sea and
taking part of the soil with it" was to be avoided
at all cost, a parliamentary document of 1912
stated, repeating the already century-old claim
(which would be heard again during the
1992-1995 drought) that "not a single drop of
water should reach the Ocean without paying its
obligatory tribute to the earth" (Gomez Mendoza
and Ortega Cantero 1987, 1992:174). Indeed,
the dominant view at the time was that "Spain
would never be rich as long as its rivers flowed
into the sea" (Maluquer de Motes 1983:96). The
regeneracionist rhetoric assigned great symbolic
value to the often repeated image of the "muti-
lating loss of the soil of the Fatherland as a con-
sequence of the 'nature' of the pluvio-fluvial
regime" (Gomez Mendoza 1992:240). In addi-
tion, both the modernization and urbanization of
industry and the mechanization of agriculture
generated "water fever" (Vilar 1968; Maluquer de
Motes 1983:84).
Joaquin Costa became one of the prime advo-
cates and potent symbols of this broad social
movement for modernization through geographi-
cal restructuring. His "hydrological solution"
 454 Swyngedouw
would be the substratum for fostering growth by
permitting social and land reforms and encourag-
ing cultural emancipation (Ortega 1975). His
writings would be invoked time and time again by
a wide variety of social groups to defend and
legitimize national hydraulic programs and the
policy of land reform through "internal colonial"
settlements. The regeneracionist project became
formulated as a "hydrological correction of the
national geographical problem" (Gomez Men-
doza 1992:236). For Costa, hydraulic politics sub-
limated the totality of the nation's economic
program, not only for agriculture, but for the
whole of Spanish socioeconomic life. Hydraulic
constructions for irrigation purposes were re-
garded as a progressive alternative to the tradi-
tional policy of tariffs and import restrictions,
which were supported by dryland latifundistas
(Torres Campos 1907). At base, the hydraulic
foundation necessitating el regeneracionismo re-
sided in the uneven distribution of rainfall and
the torrential and intermittent nature of Spain's
fluvial system, which was said to make the coun-
try "the antechamber of Africa" (de Reparez
1906). The great modernizing drive of the reviv-
alists therefore demanded not only an imitation
and use of nature, but its creation: "[increasing]
the amount of fertile soil by making a hydraulic
artery system cross the whole country-a na-
tional network of dams and irrigation channels"
(Gomez Mendoza and Ortega Cantero 1992:174) 11
In "El Problema Nacional," Ricardo Macias Picavea
(1899:318-20), a leading regeneracionist essayist
and intellectual, summarizes the hydraulic mission
as a necessary strategy for national development:
There are countries which. . . can solely and exclu-
sively become civilised with such a hydraulic policy,
planned and developed by means of designated
grand works. Spain is among them... And the truth
is that Spanish civilized agriculture finds itself
strongly subjected to this inexorable dilemma: to
have water or to die . . . Therefore, a hydraulic
politics imposes itself; this requires changing all the
national forces in the direction of this gigantic en-
terprise.... We have to dare to restore great lakes,
create real interior seas of sweet water, multiply vast
marshes, erect many great dams, and mine, exploit
and withhold the drops of water that fall over the
peninsula without returning, if possible, a single drop
to the sea.12
This patriotic mission, requiring the conver-
gence of all national forces, fused around the
hydraulic program, which then became the em-
bodiment and representation of a collective myth
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of national development. This project was sus-
tained and inspired by a reformist geographical
optimism, which substituted for the social and
political pessimism of Spain's turn-of-the-century
condition (Orti 1984:18). The hydraulic utopia
of abundant waters for all would not only produce
an "ecological harmony," but also contribute to
the formation of a socially harmonious order. The
production of a new hydraulic geography would
reconcile the ever-growing social tensions in the
Spanish countryside, tensions that were taking
acute class forms and that resulted from the ad-
verse and conflictual conditions of scarcity and
inequality. According to Alfonso Ortif (1984:12),
the symbolic power of this material intervention
to achieve "hydraulic regeneration" constituted
"a mythical power, a collective illusion, and the
imagined reconciliation of diverse ideologies."
This specific form of regeneration served the pro-
ductionist logic of the new liberal bourgeoisie that
aspired to transform society and space according
to the principles of capitalist profitability. It was
aimed at facilitating Spain's integration into
Europe's modernization process.
Humming to Nature's Tune: The Generation
of '98
This hydraulic regeneracionism coincided
with an intellectual and professional critical re-
generacionism, symbolized by the literary gener-
acion de 98, which rediscovered, both
aesthetically and sociologically, the underdevel-
oped regions of arid Spain. While symbolic repre-
sentations of Spain by the traditional elites still
reveled in perpetuating the "Leyenda de oro" (see
Driever 1998a), which portrayed Spain as a pros-
perous, thriving, and successful country, a new
generation of essayists, poets, novelists, and play-
wrights emerged by the turn of the century. Al-
though they were by no means a homogeneous
group in intellectual and philosophical terms,
they shared a desire for a positivist-scientific rep-
resentation of the fate of Spain's arid or semiarid
regions and a soul-searching quest to transform
and regenerate both "the soul and body" (Perez
1999:500) of the people (Figuero and Santa
Cecilia 1998). Although the label was normally
associated with a small group of intellectuals like
Ramiro de Maeztu, Pfo Barojo, Miguel de Una-
muno, Azorfn dose Martinez Ruiz) and Antonio
Machado, the influence of the Generation of '98
was felt much more widely and was an integral
 Modernity and Hybridity 455
part of the regeneracionist debate and modern-
izing desires that brewed around the turn of the
century (Angoustures 1995; Figuero 1998).
These intellectuals lamented the decadence of
the political elites, and their only perspective for
future emancipation resided in a spiritual and
political rebirth of the nation through an embrace
of hydraulic politics (Mainer 1972).
The fate of the drylands became a symbol of
the decline of Spain and its failure to modernize.
The "hydraulic desire" of the arid lands became
the leitmotiv of much of the regeneracionist lit-
erature at the time. In the novel La Tierra de
Campos (1896:15 1), Ricardo Macias Picavea de-
scribes the hydraulic fate of the drylands:
Autumn had passed without a drop of water, to the
point that the seeds had dried out. The winter rains
did not come either. The north-eastern winds, dry
and icy, haven't stayed away a single day. And what
a period of frost! Black, scorching, without a drop of
water in the atmosphere, with temneratures of
twelve and fifteen degrees below zero.
As the hero of the novel attested, only a
hydraulic quest could revive the land: "Without
the prior solution of the vital problem of irriga-
tion, no significant reforms will be possible in this
country" 14 (Macias Picavea 1896:151). The Gen-
eration of '98 often invoked the writings of
Joaquin Costa or Lucas Mallada to express and
represent both the landscape and the sociocultu-
ral conditions of dryland Spain. Unamuno, for
example, refers to "the cruelty of the climate,"
"the sombreness of the landscape," and "the
biting and dry soul" to evoke Spain's rural re-
gions and the characteristics of its people.
Ramiro de Maetzu describes his native Castil-
lian landscape as "provinces depopulated like
Russian steppes," "a horrible wasteland inhab-
ited by people whose characteristic quality is
their hate of water and trees."'5 Although su-
perficially similar to a crude environmental de-
terminism, their views were more inspired by a
desire to lift Spain from the doldrums of endur-
ing political malaise and persistent poverty of
the masses and to recapture its lost position as
a great modernizing nation among the other
European states.
For these authors, the symbolic and mytho-
logical powers of water were mobilized as the basis
for the hydraulic and spiritual revival of the coun-
try. Contact with water held the promise of re-
generation, of a new birth, while immersion in
water fertilized and strengthened the powers of
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life (Ortif 1984:17). Against the dryness of the
land-freezing, barren, grey, and uncivilized in
Picavea's, Unamuno's, Barojo's, or Maetzu's nov-
els and essays-and the misery and frustration of
underdevelopment stood the abundance of water,
which put the hydraulic utopia of the regenera-
tionist discourse at the center of the promise of
an abundant paradise and a revival of the vital
energies of the country (del Moral Ituarte 1998).
The hydraulic heroes of the 1890s novelists were
apostolic figures whose voluntarist vision fought
against the desperation and ignorance of the rural
masses and the persistent dominance of the tra-
ditional rural elites, imposing on their modern-
izing program a hydraulic revival meant to resolve
the contradictions emerging from the "Social
Question" that seemed to plague Spain after its
imperial downfall (Ortif 1984:19). The romantic
and autocratic water missionary became a literary
hero exemplified by Cesar Moncado, in the novel
of failed revivalism Cesar o nada, written by PNo
Baroja in 1909-1910. The hero is determined to
create a municipal democracy in the Castillian
village of "Castro Duro" by using his personal
power to redistribute land and promote a plan for
irrigation and reforestation (Baroja 1909-1910).
This requires, in the words of the hero, "the
destruction of los caciques [local traditional political
elites], the termination of the power of the rich, the
submission of the bourgeoisie ... it will redistribute
the land to the peasants . . . and my dictatorship will
break the network of ownership and of theocracy"'16
(Baroja 1909-1910:24) (my emphasis).
The figure of the strong, personal, voluntarist,
and quasi-fascist leader as the pivotal actor in
transforming the social order is staged here as a
key actor in breaking the control and power of the
traditional elites. The hero fails, however, in his
aspirations to defeat the landed aristocracy and
its allies, and the novelist narrates the final vic-
tory of arid, conservative, and counterrevolution-
ary rural Spain:
Today, Castro Duro [the village of the hero] has now
definitively abandoned its pretensions to live....
The springs have dried up, the school has closed, the
trees . . . were pulled up. The people emigrate, but
Castro Duro will continue living with its venerated
traditions and its sacrosanct principles . .. sleeping
under the sun, in the middle of its fields without
irrigation17 (Baroja 1909-1910:379).
The hydraulic missionary in Macias Picavea's La
Tierra de Campos, Manolo Bermejo, whom the
novelist (p. 227) calls the "Christ of Valdecastro
 456 Swyngedouw
[the village of the hero]," has to fight a similar
and equally desperate struggle against tradition:
"Castillian agriculture does not need the politics
of the lousy advocates and the opportunists [re-
ferring to traditional elites], but it needs a hydrau-
lic policy ... irrigation ... intensive agriculture"'8
(Macias Picavea 1896:221, 224). After a brief
period during which the hero tries to mobilize the
village against the power of the large landowners
of the drylands and against their protectionism
and conservatism, the village ends up returning
to the old habits and immobility. The hero is
left behind-isolated, humiliated and ruined-
embracing "the dead soul of this poor fatherland"
(Macias Picavea 1896:325).
These novels contemplate the fate of the land
if the revivalist mission does not succeed, while
already foreshadowing the formidable obstacles
and the almost unavoidable failure of the pro-
ject.19 The desperation, the emphasis on the role
of the enlightened male leader who pursues his
mission, and the stubborn resistance of tradi-
tional forces already hint at the later emergence
of the falangist ideology and fascist victory. The
hydraulic project was seen as a fundamental tool
in preventing the escalation of the political-
economic and social turmoil, tensions, and con-
flicts. Its failure during the early years of the
twentieth century resulted exactly in what the
regeneracionists tried to prevent: sharpening cri-
sis, culminating in civil war and the installation
of a dictatorship.20 The latter, ironically, mirrors
the qualities and characteristics of heroes that
appear in the novels of Macias Picavea and
Baroja. Franco would indeed push through some
of the reforms-and, in particular, internal colo-
nization and hydraulic plans-the regeneracion-
ists had advocated (see Ortega 1975; Reguerra
Rodriguez 1986; Rodriguez de la Rua 1993).
The State as Master
Socioenvironmental Engineer
"To irrigate is to govern" (Costa [1892] 1975)
Surely such an ambitious perspective to regen-
erate Spain through a geographical project neces-
sitated concerted action and collective control.
The regeneracionists welcomed the liberation
of international markets and the demise of
nineteenth-century protectionism under which
the dryland latifundistas of (mainly southern and
central) Spain flourished. By 1880, trade liberali-
zation had plunged them into a deep crisis in the
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aftermath of the expansion of the U.S. wheat
export boom. The traditional landed bourgeoisie
was economically weakened as a result, but their
political commitment to maintain their power at
both national and local scales did not abate. This
control permitted the continuation, if not the reen-
forcement, of a strong protectionist economic-
policy framework.
The central-state intervened nevertheless to
produce a nature amenable to the requirements
of a modernized, competitive, and irrigated agri-
culture (Ortega 1975). This was considered es-
sential to the implementation of hydraulic works
that would "remake the geography of the father-
land" (Costa 1892, cited in del Moral Ituarte
1998:121), revive the national economy, and "re-
generate the people" [la raza] (del Moral Ituarte
1998:121). The hydraulic politics were, for Costa
(1975), a way to place Spain within a European
sociospatial framework, after its loss of influence
in the Americas, on the basis of a rural develop-
ment vision that combined a Rousseauan ideal
with a small-scaled, independent, and demo-
cratic peasant society. The promotion of the rural
ideal on the basis of a petty-bourgeois ideology
would become the spinal cord of the liberal state
and the route to the Europeanization of the na-
tion (Nadal Reimat 1981:139; Fernandez Cle-
mente 1990).
The growing demand for water and the re-
quirements for a more efficient and equitable
distribution of irrigation waters necessitated a
fundamental change in the legal status and ap-
propriation rights of water. The liberal revolution
in Spain (approximately 1811-1873), which had
attempted an institutional (anti)feudal restruc-
turing to promote capitalist forms of ownership
and the circulation of goods as commodities, ex-
tended also to what Maluquer de Motes
(1983:76) called the "depatrimonialization of
water." Indeed, as with land, water did not have
the characteristic of a privately owned and trade-
able good. The existence of seignorial rights over
water prevented or blocked the development of
productive activities that necessitated ever-larger
quantities of water. Although the depatrimoniali-
zation of land and water reinforced their private
character, the growing political and economic
crisis of liberalism towards the end of the century
prevented the state from embarking on a produc-
tivist and privately run program to maximize pro-
duction "to the last drop of water" (Gomez
Mendoza and Ortega Cantero 1992:174). The
regeneracionist vision, then, faced with the failure
 Modernity and Hybridity 457
of privatized and commodified water to operate
as an efficient allocative and productive instru-
ment, promoted the emergence of a collective
spirit ("illusion" in the words of Alfonso Orti
[1984:14]). The latter implied that the supply of
the necessary quantities of water was only possi-
ble under a public and socialized form of coordi-
nation managed through the state. This
collective and state-led but productivist and
modernizing vision, would eventually also in-
clude the state-led production of "great hydraulic
works" (Ortega 1975; Villaneuva Larraya 1991).
In sum, the regeneracionists turned to the
state-after the failure of the Liberal project to
defeat the feudal elites-as the agent that could
generate a sufficiently large volume of capital to
mobilize the nation's natural resources. More-
over, for Costa, the productivist modernization by
means of the hydraulic motor would in fact con-
solidate the liberal state in Spain. In short, a
free -market-based, intensive, and productive na-
tional economy, whose accumulation process
would accelerate on a par with other northern
European states, necessitated a transformation in
the state in a double and deeply contradictory
sense. Power relations within the state apparatus
needed to change in favor of, first, a more mod-
ernist alliance of petty-owners, industrialists, and
modernizing engineers, and second, revolution-
ary social reform supported by the state such that
the grand hydraulic works could lay the founda-
tions for a modernizing Spain. These two tasks
were of course mutually dependent, and yet irrec-
oncilable. Strong traditional forces fought to
maintain control over key state functions and
prevented the rise to political power of the nas-
cent petty-owners and middle classes. This firm
hold of the traditional conservative elites blocked
most attempts at modernizing the social econ-
omy. The mosaic of contradictory forces and the
resistance of the traditionalists would stall state-
led modernizing efforts, resulting in more acute
and openly fought social antagonisms throughout
the first two decades of the century. These would
eventually pave the way for dictatorial regimes
from the 1920s onwards.
Despite the collectivist discourse of much of
the regeneracionist literature, it remained deeply
committed to a project of insertion into an inter-
national capitalist market. Although the state
needed to take central control over water and
forests, it should do so on the basis of a land-
ownership structure that was essentially private
and market-led (see also Fernandez Clemente
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1990). The hydraulic agenda of Costa and his
colleagues was clouded with revolutionary claims
but defended as a reformist route for development
against the stronghold of an antireformist, eco-
nomically and culturally conservative and protec-
tionist elite. In sum, two models of capitalist
accumulation, with evidently different support-
ing social groups and allies, crystallized around
the hydraulic debates at the time. The social,
political, and ecological consequences and impli-
cations of these two models would differ funda-
mentally even while sharing an organicist vision
of the world. On the one hand, the traditionalists
defended a protectionist economic stance and the
continuation of existing political and social power
relations. On the other, the regeneracionists ad-
vocated a more liberal perspective, a rapid mod-
ernization of the economy, and a transformation
of sociopolitical power relations. The issue of land
ownership and the role of water therein revolved
around the question of who would own and con-
trol what part of the land and its waters. For the
regeneracionists, for whom petty ownership con-
stituted the way ahead, the hydraulic route was
an essential precondition, while the limited pos-
sibilities for accumulation pointed to the state as
the only body that could generate the required
investment funds on the one hand and push
through the necessary reforms in the face of
strong and sustained opposition from the landed
aristocracy on the other (Ortega 1975, 1992). At
the same time, the very support of at least some
sections of the old elites could be secured via this
reformist route, since it did not threaten their
fundamental rights as landowners but defended
rural power against the rising tide of the urban
industrial elites and the proletariat. This was
indeed quite central to forging the support of the
dominant Catholic groups that defended a soli-
daristic and organic model of social cohesion.
Purification and the Transformation
of Nature: Hydraulic Engineers as
Producers of Socionature
The hydraulic intervention to create a
waterscape supportive of the modernizing desires
of the revivalists, without questioning the social
and political foundations of the existing class
structure and social order, was very much based
on a respect for "natural" laws and conditions.
The latter were assumed to be or thought of as
intrinsically stable, balanced, equitable, and
 458 Swyngedouw
harmonious. The hydraulic engineering mission
consisted primarily in "restoring" the "perturbed"
equilibrium of the erratic hydrological cycles in
Spain. This endeavor required a significant scien-
tific and engineering enterprise, first in terms of
understanding and analyzing nature's "laws,"
and, second, in using these insights to work to-
ward a restoration of the "innate" harmonious
development of nature. The moral, economic,
and cultural "disorder" and "imbalances" of the
country at the time paralleled the "disorder" in
Spain's erratic hydraulic geography, both of
which needed to be restored and rebalanced (as
nature's innate laws suggested) to produce a so-
cially harmonious development. Two threads
have to be woven together in this context: the
pivotal position of a particular group of scientists
in the hydraulic arena, the Corps of Engineers
(Villaneuva Larraya 1991), and the changing vi-
sions concerning the scientific management of
the terrestrial part of the hydrological cycle. Both,
in turn, were linked to the rising prominence of
hydraulic issues on the sociopolitical agenda at
the turn of the century.
The Corps of Engineers, founded in 1799, was
(and remains) the professional collective respon-
sible for the development and implementation of
public works. It is a highly elitist, intellectualist,
"high-cultured," male-dominated, socially ho-
mogeneous, and exclusive corporatist organiza-
tion that has, over the centuries, taken a leading
role in Spanish politics and development (Mateu
Belles 1995). The decision-making structure is
hierarchical and all key managerial and institu-
tional bodies, such as the "Junta Consultiva de las
Obras Publicas," the hydrological divisions, the
provincial headquarters, and various ad hoc study
commissions are exclusively "manned" by engi-
neers. In line with the emergent scientific dis-
course on orography and river-basin structure
and dynamics, the engineering community ar-
gued for the foundation of engineering and mana-
gerial intervention on the basis of the "natural"
integrated water flow of a basin, rather than on
the basis of historically and socially formed ad-
ministrative regions (see Figure 4). The emergent
geographical regionalization overlaid the tradi-
tional political-administrative divisions of the
country, forcing a reordering of the territory on
the basis of the country's orographical structure.
The latter, in turn, was portrayed by the engineers
as the crucial planning unit for hydraulic inter-
ventions. Cano Garcia (1992:312) succinctly
summarizes this scientific perspective: "To re-
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vert to the great orographical delimitation for
organizing the division of the land represents a
contribution made from within the strict field of
our discipline [engineering] and at the same time,
at least initially, it shows the abandoning of tra-
ditional political divisions and the importance of
other perspectives and concepts."2'
This scientific and natural division provided
an apparently enduring and universal scale for
territorial organization in lieu of the more recent
political and historical scales associated with
politico-administrative boundaries. As Smith
(1969:20) argues, "the identity of the drainage
basin seemed to offer a concrete and 'natural' unit
which could profitably replace political units as
the areal context for geographical study." Brun-
hes (1920:93) insisted on the water basin as the
foundation for the organization of the land since
"water is the sovereign wealth of the state and its
people" (see also Chorley 1969). Such a view was
widely recounted in Spain, and its arguments
were rallied in defense of a new orographic-
administrative organization of the territory.
The history of the delimitation of hydrological
divisions is infused with the influence of the re-
generacionist discourse on the one hand and the
scientific insights gained from hydrology and
orography on the other. The attempt to "natural-
ize" political territorial organization was part and
parcel of a strategy of the modernizers to chal-
lenge existing social and political power geome-
tries. The construction of and command over a
new territorial scale might permit them to imple-
ment their vision and by pass more traditional and
reactionary power configurations. The complex
history of the formation of river-basin authorities
and their articulation with other political forms
of territorial organization, in particular the na-
tional state, is a long, complicated, and tortuous
one. "Nature" would become inextricably con-
nected to the choreography of power, while the
scientific discourse on nature was strategically
marshalled to serve power struggles for the con-
trol over and management of water. The river
basins would become the scale par excellence
through which the modernizers tried to under-
mine or erode the powers of the more traditional
provincial or national state bodies. Therefore, the
struggle over the territorial organization of inter-
vention expresses the political power struggles
between traditionalists and reformers. While the
river-basin defenders would become the founding
"fathers" of the regeneracionist agenda, the tra-
ditional elites held to the existing administrative
 Modernity and Hybridity 459
I.I
a v7t
0 150m G s__Hydrographic l
Figure 4. Boundaries of the Autonomous Regions and the Hydrographic Confederations.
territorial structure of power. The regeneracionist
engineers thereby incorporated the naturalized
river basins into their political project. Capturing
the scale of the river basin as the geographical
basis for exercising control and power over the
organization, planning, and reconstruction of the
hydraulic landscape was one of the central arenas
through which the power of the traditionalists
(and the scales over which they exercised
hegemonic control) was challenged. In fact, this
rescaling of the state and the articulation of dif-
ferent scales of governance became one of the
great arenas of struggle for control and power. For
the engineering community and the modernizers,
the scale of the river basin became the battle-
ground over which political and social conflict
was fought. The modernizers attempted to take
hold of the hydrological divisions and develop
them as pivotal institutions for instigating the
hydrological revolution, while the national scale
remained more firmly in the hands of the tradi-
tional elites. The bumpy history of the hydrologi-
cal divisions records this struggle. The instability
of their administrative and political organization
reflects the relative power of the traditional power
brokers. It would await Franco's dictatorship before
this issue was resolved, at which time the hydrologi-
cal dream and its intellectual bearers, the engineers,
were aligned with and incorporated into a new
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; S e A ;
fascist-organicist state structure (Gomez Mendoza
and Ortega Cantero 1992).
This negotiation of scale and the science/
politics debate around the scaling of hydraulic
intervention and planning raged for almost a
century before the current structure was put into
place (Cano Carcfa 1992; Mateu Belles 1995).
The Water Act of 1879 established that all surface
water was common property, managed by the
state. This also implied the need to create admin-
strative structures to perform these managerial
tasks (Giansante 1999). The first ten hydrological
divisions were established by Royal Decree in
1865 and, from the very beginning, were consid-
ered to be major instruments for the economic
modernization process. Some of these divisions
more or less coincided with major river basins
(Ebro, Tajo, Duero); others (as in the South) had
a much closer correspondence to provincial
boundaries. All were named after the provincial
capital city in which the head office was located
(Mateu Belles 1994). Their basic purpose was to
serve as an institutional basis for the collection of
statistical data to assist the study and research of
the water cycle. These surveys could then be used
by the real power-holders (provincial offices for
public works, special ad hoc commissions, or pri-
vate industry) (del Moral Ituarte 1995). These
 460 Swyngedouw
first hydrological divisions were abolished in
1870, reorganized in seven divisions the same
year, and abolished again in 1899. In the wake of
the regeneracionist spirit, the seven hydraulic
divisions were reestablished the next year and
their tasks extended to include the detailed study
and planning of, and the formulation of proposals
for, hydraulic interventions. The ultimate decision-
making power would remain at the traditional
provincial level, which supervised and executed
the hydraulic works, and with the central state for
financing and controlling the infrastructure pro-
grams (Mateus Belles 1994).
It was only from 1926 onwards, during the
dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, that the current
Confederaciones Sindicales Hidrograficas were
gradually established as quasi-autonomous or-
ganizations in charge of managing water as stipu-
lated by the Water Act of 1879 (Giansante 1999).
The last of these ten Confederaciones was only
established in 1961 (see Figure 4). What had
proven impossible to achieve during the first dec-
ades of the century was finally implemented dur-
ing the dictatorship. It is also from that moment
on that their names reflected the river basins for
which they were responsible rather than the pre-
vious political-territorial naming. In addition, they
acquired a certain political status with participation
from the state, banks, chambers of commerce, pro-
vincial authorities, etc. At each stage, the engineers
took the lead roles and became the activists of the
regeneracionist project through the combination of
their legitimization as the holders of scientific
knowledge and their privileged position as a politi-
cally elite corps within the state apparatus. The
complex and perpetually changing administrative
organization and power structures associated with
the successive attempts to establish river-basin
authorities, and their relative lack of power until the
1930s, reflect the failure of the early modernizers to
fundamentally challenge existing power lineages
and scales (Mateu Belles 1994,1995). It is only from
the later 1920s, and in particular during the Franco
era, that the regeneracionist project was gradually
implemented.
Conclusions
In sum, the regeneracionist agenda(s) first
maintained that the restoration of wealth in
Spain should be based on the knowledge of the
laws and balances of nature; second, this restora-
tion required the correction of defects imposed by
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the geography of the country and, particularly, its
"imbalances in its climatic and hydraulic regimes"
(Gomez Mendoza and Ortega Cantero
1992:173); and third, this enterprise of geo-
graphical rectification could, because of its range
and importance, only be carried out by the central
public authorities. The hydraulic mission was
seen as the solution to the social problems facing
Spain at the turn of the century. Failing this,
social tensions were bound to intensify, and strug-
gle, if not civil war, would be the likely outcome.
Ironically, of course, the voluntarist, powerful,
and autocratic hydraulic engineer pursuing a vol-
untarist program of imposed reform foreshad-
owed the fascist (falangist) ideology. The latter
would gain momentum from the early 1920s on-
ward, first with the dictatorship of Primo de
Rivera and later, with Franco. The failure of the
hydraulic politics in the early decades of the twen-
tieth century announced what Costa and his
literary allies had feared and desperately tried to
prevent. Although the debates at the turn of the
century indicated a desire to regenerate Spain,
conservative forces prevented its actual imple-
mentation, and social tension intensified, further
destabilizing an already highly fragmented and
divisive society. The centralizing fascist regimes
that emerged from this turmoil could finally push
through the production of a new geography, a
new nature, and a new waterscape, something the
regeneracionists of the turn of the century had so
desperately advocated but failed to accomplish.
This quasi-object and hybrid thing that, until
this very day, embodies Spain's modernization
process, expresses how modernity is deeply and
inevitably a geographical project in which the
intertwined transformations of nature and society
are both medium and expression of shifting power
positions that become materialized in the produc-
tion of new water flows and the construction of
new waterscapes. It is the maelstrom of tensions
and contradictions that weave the material, dis-
cursive, ideological, and representational, to-
gether in often-perplexing, always deeply
heterogeneous, collages of changing and shifting
positions of power and struggle that decisively
shaped the production of the Spanish waterscape
over the next century.
I have attempted to reconstruct multiple and
often contradictory narratives that span a broad
range of apparently separate instances such as
engineering, politics, economics, culture, science,
nature, ideology, and discourse through which
the tumultuous reordering of sociophysical space
 Modernity and Hybridity 461
is shaped and transformed, and out of which a
new socioenvironmental landscape emerges;
landscapes that are simultaneously physical and
social, they reflect historical-geographical
struggles and social power geometries, and they
interiorize the flux and dynamics of sociospatial
change. Geographical conditions, this paper has
argued, are reconstructed as the outcome of a
process of production in which both nature and
society are fused together in a way that renders
them inseparable, producing a restless "hybrid"
quasi-object in which material, representational,
and symbolic practices are welded together. Do-
ing geography then implies the excavation and
reconstruction of the contested process of the
"production of nature." Of course, this perspec-
tive also asks serious questions about who con-
trols, who acts, and who has the power to produce
what kind of socionature. The intertwining of na-
ture and society in this production process has
indeed profound political implications. As Lewon-
tin (1997:137-38), a Harvard biologist, maintains:
The constructionist view of organism and environ-
ment is of some consequnce to human action....
Remaking the world is the universal property of
living organisms and is inextricably bound up with
their nature.... We must decide what kind of world
we want to live in and then try to manage the process
of change as best as we can approximate it.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the European Union's Fourth
Framework Training and Mobility Programme for the
financial assistance to carry out this research. I am
particularly grateful to the Department of Geography
of the University of Seville for hosting me as a Marie
Curie Fellow during the summer and fall of 1996; to
Leandro del Moral for sharing his expertise, archival
materials, thoughts, and friendship; and to Prof. Imacu-
lada Caravaca for her hospitality and interest. I would
like to thank Leandro del Moral, Maria Kaika, Judith
Gerber, Karen Bakker, Ben Page, Guy Baeten, and
Josep-Antoni Gari for their support and comments on
earlier versions of the paper. I am grateful to Ailsa Allen
for the cartographic work. Last but not least, the com-
ments of the referees helped in streamlining the paper,
both in content and structure. The responsibility for
the final product remains entirely mine.
Notes
1. My translation. In Spanish, "[L] a ordenacion
hidratulica del territorio constituye una necesidad
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estructural de la sociedad espafiola como sociedad
industrial."
2. Of course, in the U.S., a number of interesting and
innovative approaches on the role of water politics
in the expansion of the western frontier and in
shaping the modernization of the U. S. (and in
particular California) have been published over
the past decade or so (see, for example, Worster
1985; Starr 1990; Gottlieb and FitzSimmons
1991; Hundley 1992).
3. For further discussion, see Swyngedouw (1996)
and Swyngedouw and Kaika (1999).
4. My translation. In Spanish, "La desgracia de
Espafia ha nacido principalmente de que no llego
a entrar en la conciencia nacional la idea de que
la guerra interior contra la sequia, contra las ru-
gosidades del suelo, la rigidez de las costas, el
rezago intelectual de la raza, el apartamiento al
centro europeo, la falta de capital, tenia una im-
portancia mayor que la guerra contra el separa-
tismo cubano o filipino, y no haber sentido ante
ellas las mismas alarmas que sintio ante esta, y no
haber hecho por la una los mismos sacrificios que
no vacilo en hacer por la otra, de no haber con-
fiado a los ingenieros y los maestros el raudal de
oro que ha prodigado, triste suicida, a los almiran-
tes y generales."
5. The liberalization of international trade in the
second half of the nineteenth century, combined
with the transportation revolution, had expanded
cheap wheat imports from the U. S. and plunged
the traditional dry-land-based Spanish wheat pro-
ducers into a severe crisis.
6. For a full bibliography, see Cheyne (1972)
7. My translation. In Spanish, "Para rehabilitarnos,
imprescindible es comenzar rehabilitando la
propia tierra: condicion esencial y absoluta. Y para
restaurar ese medio geografico, que es nuestra
patria, quien negarat que lo primero ha de ser
conocerlo bien y exactamente? De aqui el caracter
verdaderamente patriotico con que el cultivo de
la geografi'a iberica ha de ofrecerse a los ojos de
todos los espafioles."
8. My translation. In Spanish, "No hay nada mas
urgente para nuestra reconstitucion nacional que
un profundo estudio de nuestra geografia y nues-
tro suelo, que sera el germen del gran ren-
acimiento politico de Espafia."
9. The dominant view among the regeneracionists is
that nothing in Spain can change as long as the
land-owning oligarchic aristocracy stayed in
power via a system of "caciquismo." This was
based on a locally organized network of clientelist,
nepotist and personalized systems of political and
social dependency through which most of political
life during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries was organized. This assured a solid hold
of traditional forces on the various levels of the
state apparatus (see Costa [1901] 1998; Martinez
Allier 1968; Perez 1999).
 462 Swyngedouw
10. My translation. In Spanish, "La Poliftica
Hidraulica entendida en un sentido amplio y sim-
bolico, como un proceso de transformacion acel-
erado de la agricultura de extensiva y tradicional
en moderna e intesiva, debe constituir el vector
fundamental de la poliftica nacional, catalizando
una reforma agraria que posibilite un desarrollo
economico equilibrado y evite el progresivo
proceso de proletarizacion de las masas campesi-
nas, moderando la polarizacion social y la lucha
de clases."
11. In the 1980s, this mission to create a national
artery system, first formulated at the turn of the
century, would become the backbone of the
highly controversial Draft Proposal of the Second
National Hydrological Plan (1994), which pro-
posed to link all of Spain's river basins together by
means of national, large-scale systems of interre-
gional water transfers (see Swyngedouw 1997).
12. My translation. In Spanish, "Hay paises que ...
solo, unicamente, exclusivamente, pueden ser
paises civilizados a costa de esa poliftica hidraulica
desarrollada en las magnas obras precisas al efecto.
Espafia entre ellos. . . . Y la verdad es que las
agricultura civilizada Espafnola . . . se halla f&r-
reamente sujeta a este dilema implacable: o tener
agua o perecer.... Se impone, pues, la politica
hidraulica, esto es, la conversion de todas las
fuerzas nacionales hacia esa gigantesca em-
presa.... Hay que atreverse a restaurar magnos
lagos, verdaderos mares interiores de agua
dulce, multiplicar vastos pantanos, producir
muchedumbre de embalses, alumbrar,
aprovechar y detener cuantas gotas caen dentro
de la peninsula sin devolver al mar, si se puede,
una gota sola."
13. My translation. In Spanish, "El otofio habiase
pasado sin una gota de agua, hasta el punto de
haberse hecho la sementera en seco. Las Iluvias
de invierno faltaron asimismo. Ni un solo dia
habian dejado de reinar los cierzos del Nordeste,
secos y helados. Y que heladas! Negras, abrasa-
doras, sin una vesicula de vapor de agua en la
atmosfera, con temperaturas de doce y quince
grados bajo cero."
14. My translation. In Spanish, "Sin la previa solucion
del problema vital de los riegos, no hay en este pais
reformas posibles de importancia."
15. The quotes from Unamuno and de Maetzu are
taken from Driever (1998b: 33).
16. My translation. In Spanish, "Destrozando a los
caciques, acabondo con el poder de los ricos,
sujetando a los burgueses.... Entragaria las tierras
a los campesinos . . . y mi dictadura romperia la
red de la propiedad, de la teocracia..."
17. My translation. In Spanish, "Hoy Castro Duro ha
abandonado ya definitivamente sus pretensiones
de vivir.... Las fuentes se han secado, la escuela
se cerro, los arbolillos ... fueron arrancados. La
gente emigra. . ., pero Castro Duro sigue viviendo
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con sus veneradas tradiciones y sus sacrosantos
principios . . . dormido al sol, en medio de sus
campos sin riego."
18. My translation. In Spanish, "La agricultura castel-
lano lo que necesita es, no la politica de los
leguleyos y de los vividores, sino la politica hy-
draulica ... los riegos . . . el cultivo intensivo."
19. For an analysis of the stability of the latifundistas
and the associated political order, see Martinez
Allier (1966), Varela Ortega (1977), and Costa
(1901-1902, in Orti 1976).
20. The first dictatorship was installed in 1923 byJose
Antonio Primo de Rivera. After the Civil War of
1936, Franco would, of course, become the arche-
typal fascist dictator.
21. My translation. In Spanish, "Recurrir a las grandes
alineaciones orograficas para efectuar una di-
vision de la superficie terrestre representa una
aportacion realizada desde el estricto campo de
nuestra disciplina y muestra al mismo tiempo, por
lo menos inicialmente, el abandono de las divisio-
nes polifticas y la importancia concedida a otros
enfoques y conceptos."
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Correspondence: School of Geography, Oxford University, Oxford OX1 3TB, U.K.; email erik. swyngedouw@geog.ox.ac.uk

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