This postcard collection illustrates the urban development of the Spanish coast during the country's transition to democracy. My mother received them between the summers of 1968 and 1982, from when she was a teenager to her first years as a young mother. The 1960s and 1970s were the time when mass tourism became consolidated in Spain, marking the first real building boom. The postcards show beaches crowded with holidaymakers as a souvenir. The height of the mega-towers and the tonnes of concrete, asphalt and glass were a visual scale by which you could measure the country's degree of development and civilisation. Each postcard has a corresponding picture bought in the same places in 2012, in the time of crisis following the real estate boom of the noughties, a time when pen-and-ink mail had lost all meaning and anyone could manufacture their own architectural memory, Instagram it and share it on Facebook or Flickr. The writing on the back of the postcards is banal, and could be summed up as: "I'm on holiday, I'll tell you all about it when I get back". As in their contemporary digital equivalent, the written content was less important than conveying an imaginary of modernity through the architecture of a place.
Spain's development crimes over the past 50 years have been characterised by a lack of transparency and horizontality. Control mechanisms to govern the ethics of urban development have failed