An effort to understand Ildefons Cerdá’s connection with one of the great Social thinkers of his time Karl Marx has helped me learn a lot regarding these two great minds and the way they adapted theories and rationalities and created new forms of sciences respectively Social Sciences and Urbanism.
Giving us a whole new perspective on how we can see and acknowledge thinks on the contraire perspectives as well.
Karl Marx was one of the great thinkers of this time and one of the main and major founder of Sociology and Social Sciences and had given us his observation, vision and view on to a large extend on the matters of Capitalism, Working Class and how rights belongs to everyone and not just the wealthy. His way of seeing Communism wasn’t just an economic theory but understanding the emotions it expressed, a deep seated long that we always have a place in the world and we will not be casted out.
With not just giving us his great works such as The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx also wrote articles and sent them to the New York Daily on the matter of Spanish Revolution as his way of seeing the Spanish Revolution was a change in time laps as it could affect the disturbances happening all around Europe and made a major sense to him and caught his eye as a major subject to be looked into. He had sent 9 articles regarding the Spanish Revolution to New York Daily out of which 7 were published at that time.
Most of Karl Marx’s workers were acknowledged and adapted after his death in 1883. But as part of Ildefons Cerdá’s plan for Barcelona he looked upon Karl Marx’s theories just as The Neo-Marxism, The Communist Manifesto, 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon etc., and gave a new direction and a new perspective to Urbanism with a whole context of Sociology and Social Science aspects into his mind and picture of creating a healthy livable environment not just for the riches or himself but a community as whole. And maybe adaption of Neo-Marxism was on a political front agenda in order to make everyone understand the importance of his work.
Ildefons Cerdá saw himself as scientist whose object of observation was city and whose methods of observation and thinking came directly from natural sciences filtered through his civil engineering training and practice. For his work the ambitions of a scientist and grander still, the aim that his endeavors world, A La Comte, Marx or Darwin establish a new science Urbanism for which he added that the technological development was considered the driving mechanism of Social Transformation.
For his Ideologies, vision and works became keystones to some of the architects aspiring towards a better understanding towards the Urban Architecture, following his way and adapting them in their own way.
Hence, giving us new ways and trans formative ways of thinking and seeing.
