Urban Scenarios and Heritage Legacy of a City of Knowledge, Preserved, Relocated and Reorganised in Time

Abstract

Alejando Díez Torre

The text traces the secular experience of places in a city that projected its name and gave the measure of its universal reach in spaces now available in person, for tours not only in space but also in time. The time of the figures and the generations that inhabited it at different times, as well as the traces of their activity -sometimes persistent and always significant- in the urban fabric and the density of relevant events, characters and moments in physically arranged spaces, which they must be recovered for our current and future understanding.

This comprehensive and demonstrative function, which Alcalá de Henares brought together in its urban and monumental framework, especially in its golden age of the modern centuries, those of Cisneros, Cervantes or the enclaves of Humanism and the classical university campuses, not only gave a profile urban to Alcalá as a modern "city of knowledge", which can now be rescued in a proposal of Urban Itineraries that our book includes. It also fills the work of our associations and citizen entities, as in this case the Universis Association does, fulfilling a practical purpose with this work: that it collects various plots of historical knowledge and makes them useful, understandably practical and applied, to the needs and demands for information and cultural access to our city. To show its still-living legacies and spatial functionalities, which have decisively marked the name and future of our city since 1998, until this 21st century of our World Heritage City.