Distopías de Madrid. Transformación del espacio público y representación de la violencia en Sangre a borbotones de Rafael Reig y 2020 de Javier Moreno

Sharp grills, uncomfortable public benches, hardly any shade…, these are some of the hallmarks of new tendencies in urban design that have burst into our cities: new ways to understand public space in a much less habitable mode. Moreover, pedestrian citizens increasingly find their right to use space curtailed by the proliferation of places for consumption. Parallel to the emergence of these new urban trends, certain narratives structured as urban dystopias and based on grotesque futurisms have also appeared. In this paper I discuss this urban transformation as the trigger or condition of possibility of two recent Spanish novels: Rafael Reig’s Sangre a borbotones and Javier Moreno’s 2020. I focus on the metamorphosis of contemporary Madrid, which these two authors take as the root of their paradoxically realist approach to dystopic futurism. Building upon this sublayer, Reig and Moreno have begun to imagine (or to warn of) the possible future account of our society.