Images as institution builders: Metropolitan planning in Madrid

Abstract This article chronicles recent changes in planning practice. It documents the rise of strategic planning and the move toward proactive planning centered on strategy, marketing, publicity and images. The author studies two cases. One is sub‐regional, of the ‘Great South’ of metropolitan Madrid. The other is regional, of the program ‘Madrid Metropolitan Region’. Planners created physical designs and rhetoric that encapsulated new images for the south and the entire metro area. The planners used the evoking image to craft the strategy, implement it, and build the institutions of regional planning and government. These cases suggest that external images (plans, photos) and internal images (in the mind's eye) are key to understanding how planning processes worked. It reveals the role images played in planning and political discourse, and how discourse was based on the image.