La vivienda obrera en la Comarca de Cartagena y de la Unión

Abstract

This doctoral thesis aims to revalue a part of the Industrial Heritage, such as the workers' houses built in the cities of Cartagena - La Unión from the 19th century until the 80s of the following century. They are two very close cities, but with different chronological and formal behavior, which allows us to analyze two models of workers' settlements as a consequence of the so-called Industrial Revolution, as a phenomenon that had been reproducing for decades in other Spanish and European territories. In the case of La Unión, a population recently created through the grouping of various hamlets at the foot of the Sierra Minera, it became the fourth city in the Region of Murcia until the arrival of the mining crisis in the mid-thirties of the century. XX. While in Cartagena the social agents that promoted the constructions for the workers' housing and the solutions used for it, sheltered from the legislation and the needs, were changing throughout the 20th century. Initiatives were instructed to rethink the extramural routes at the same time that new neighborhoods were created, aimed at decongesting the urban area. This work is based, after an exhaustive search in the different national and regional archives, on the location and analysis of projects, images and administrative documentation related to both promoters, type of property, profile of the workers or the personnel to whom the projects were intended. housing, regulations and finally to be able to transfer that documentation to the current city. With this we managed to provide unpublished information, which on the one hand enriches the global vision of the current cities of La Unión and Cartagena and, on the other, would protect from the disappearance and transformation that this type of construction has been undergoing since the different real estate processes of the last quarter of the twentieth century. And finally, we have been able to verify that compared to the administrative and legal information that has been preserved from many of the groups of houses built, there are very few complete architectural projects. But above all there has been the abandonment, the formal and property changes, together with the loss of many of them, which have contributed to the loss of an important part of the historical past of both cities.