Nature, the Monumental and Urban Technological Networks in Víctor Moreno’s Edificio España (2012) and La ciudad oculta (2018)

If we affirmatively answer Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw’s invitation to think beyond the fetishization of the city as the pinnacle of human-centered achievement in order to consider the city as a process of transformed nature, as the metabolic and social transformation of nature through human labor, ‘the city turns into a ‘hybrid’ of the natural and the cultural, the environmental and the social. Thinking of the city as a flow, a flux and a movement creates opportunities to imagine possible social, material and symbolic transformations’ (121). Taking these ideas about post-monumental architecture and constantly evolving concepts of urban technological networks and the relationship of nature to the urban as points of departure, this essay argues that since the economic crisis of 2008 in particular, there are markedly different ways of imagining monumental, public spaces and the relationship between nature and the city. For the purposes of this essay I look at the documentary films o