Entangled maps: cultural infrastructures and the making of agricultural heritage across metropolitan Madrid

Abstract

This paper examines how certain agricultural processes are becoming legible as heritage within the metropolitan landscape of Madrid. It does so at a moment when the metropolis is being rethought through green infrastructure and new socioecological imaginaries. Rather than treating metropolitan agriculture as a unified field, the paper traces the dispersed connections through which it persists across research, production, public action, and cultural practice, and through which it acquires new heritage meanings.

Within this framework, cartography is used to make legible the renewed social, cultural, and institutional interest in agricultural spaces whose presence in the metropolis remains fragmented, ordinary, and historically layered. This approach makes visible both production itself and the initiatives, spatial relations, and forms of attention through which these spaces are being re-read and activated in the present. Mapping serves here to understand how dispersed places, practices, and actors are being connected through new forms of interpretation. In this sense, it also becomes a way of reading metropolitan history.

Organised around a commented selection of original maps, the presentation traces different entry points into the agricultural heritage ecology of metropolitan Madrid. Rather than treating these landscapes as isolated remnants to be protected, it approaches them as active components of metropolitan heritage, where productive use, ecological function, cultural memory, and public meaning remain interdependent. In this way, the paper argues that mapping can make visible the contemporary practices through which agricultural heritage is being redefined, while also opening new ways of imagining future metropolitan landscapes.