Villalba Cuenta ("Villalba (Re)Counts") Sally & Gabriela Gutiérrez Dewar 2012, Collado-Villalba is a small town about 40 km west of Madrid. A boom-town during the years when Spain’s economy was fuelled by a real-estate bubble, it was hit hard by the crisis after 2008. Villalba (Re)counts is an interactive web-documentary seeking new narrative mappings of contemporary cityscapes. The site affords a space for reflection and debate where individual and collective identities may be re-territorialized. All Villalba residents, groups and associations (and anyone interested in the project) may upload their stories to the website and place them in a map– a new kind of map that’s more alive and more human, where geographical markings are connected with lived experiences and memories. Villalba (Re)counts tells stories of development and crisis, of cross-hatched lives and cultures in the urban geographies of the 21st century.
