Estudio antropológico signitivo y simbólico del espacio urbano en los frentes de aguatres ciudades junto al mar. Bilbao, Donostia-San Sebastián y Baiona

Abstract

From an anthropological view, it was a relevant historical and cultural event when coastlines were settled by human communities. This occupation occurred wherever the location offered the appropriate natural resources allowing exploitation. We can see that the sum of the foregoing has marked the coastal area with a characteristically personality, which reverberates in multiple manifestations, shaping the scenery of the coast. The interaction of these variables has equally conditioned the visual impact of the landscape, part of a lively and changing culture, and which has been passed down to us today. These assertions lead us to pose a series of hypotheses which can be summed up by asking what type of relationships are produced and maintained so that the ideal construct of the collective imagination is possible today. Such a question conduce us to discover and analyze social and cultural relationships which produce the aesthetic and artistic elements found in urbanized coastal areas. Such examples are: monuments, public sculptures, as well as aestheticized urban equipment and cultural objects testimony of functional use in the past, which today are decontextualized, having been converted into complements of merely ornamental value. Both aforementioned points demand a deciphering, localization and study of both the tangible part of the elements cited as well as the structural bases of its existence. In order to realize the research work we propose the cities of Bilbao, Donostia-San Sebastian and Baiona, where the symbolic expression of maritime and urban cultures on water fronts are to be encountered.