In cosmopolitan cities, religion is an urban minefield. There is a complex negotiation of distribution in nearly percentile terms among religions that coexist in them," or so Alberto Medina, professor at Columbia University, claimed at a seminar organized by the Religion and Civil Society project of the ICS, the University of Navarra's humanities and social sciences research center.

Alberto Medina said that this negotiation responds to "a fight for symbolic space: mixtures and interference are feared and, therefore, most seek to preserve certain urban spaces that are extremely traditional." As an example, he noted that, in New York City "there has been much controversy around the building a mosque in the vicinity of the World Trade Center."

In Spain, he said, the problem does not manifest itself in the same way because, by having a majority religion, Catholicism, the urban structure is quite uniform.

The dialectic between avant-garde and historicism

In his seminar, entitled "Back to the Village: European Avant-Garde Architecture and Spanish Spirituality in the 1920s," Professor Medina tried to "problematize the concept of what we understand as modern." For this, he chose Mies van der Rohe's Pavilion in Barcelona: "It demonstrates the dialectic between avant-garde and historicism, which are supposedly opposites, and how these two positions really neutralize each other." For Alberto Medina, the apparent contradiction between the modern building and the Spanish people, "which is presented as historicist pastiche" does not exist.

Alberto Medina obtained a doctorate from New York University, specializing in eighteenth-century Spanish literature studies, contemporary film and transatlantic studies. He is the author of several books, which include Exorcismos de la memoria: Políticas y poéticas de la melancolía en la España de la Transición and Espejo de sombras: Sujeto y Multitud en la España del Siglo XVIII.