The imaginative institution: Planning and institutions in Madrid

Madrid's modern urban planning began in 1860 with Castro's expansion plan, which guided growth into the twentieth century. Every twenty years since 1920 Madrid has undergone a planning cycle in which a plan was prepared, adopted by law, and implemented by a new institution. This preparation-adoption-institutionalization sequence, the planning institution's structures, and technical-political processes have persisted--with some exceptions--despite frequent upheavals in society. The planning institution itself played a lead role in maintaining continuity, traumatic history notwithstanding. Why?;First, Madrid's planners invented new images for the city and metro region. Images of physical space that were social constructs, the products of planning processes. Planners also created social images which posited new identities for the growing metropolis: "Great Madrid", "Madrid Metropolitan Region", and "Great South". Images became cornerstones of the preparation-adoption-institutionalization cycle.;Second, images were tools that coordinated planning and urban policy. In a complex, fragmented institutional milieu in which scores of organized interests competed in overlapping policy arenas, images were a cohesive force around which plans and policies were shaped. Policy negotiation based on images complemented procedural coordination methods. Indeed images provided the basis for coordination.;Third, Madrid's politicians used urban planning as a political strategy to build institutions of planning and governance. This strategy inaugurated a shift in the mode of city planning. Formerly, planning was a process of government acting directly on the territory through master plans and regulations. Now planning is a process of government acting on other governments, and organized interests, through image-based plan making.;Fourth, planners in Madrid used images to build new institutions. Images began as city or metro designs or as a metaphor capturing a new vision. New political regimes injected their values into the institution in images and metaphors. These images constituted the new institution and helped realize the regime's goals.;Each plan or strategy and their images of the future marked a new period of Madrid's planning institution's history. These imagined metropolises were at the heart of the dialectic of institutional evolution: images had the dual capacity to sustain the institution across time and space and to provoke changes to it. In the dynamics of institutional change, images shaped individuals' cognition and the institution's structuration.;Our empirically-based life cycle theory of institutional evolution suggests that the constitutional image sustaining the institution undergoes a change or is replaced by a new image, leading to a new or reformed institution. A life cycle typology of institutional transformation is formulated with four variables: type of change, stimulus for change, type of constitutional image, and outcome of the transformation.;Linking the life cycle hypothesis with cognitive theories of image formation and situating their synthesis within a frame of cognition as a means of structuring the institution, we arrive at a new theory of institutional evolution. The constitutional image represents the institution's content that is replicated over space and time via structures and processes. Changing the constitutional image in the minds of the institution's members yields a change in the institution.