As if dealing with a culinary recipe, Cedric Price compared the evolution of cities to the multiple ways of cooking an egg, showing how the relationship between the yolk and the white (inherent to each preparation) resembled the configuration of different urban models that have emerged over the last couple of millennia. This evolutionary description moves from the almost perfect hard-boiled egg embodied by ancient cities (the result of walled settlements) to scrambled eggs, comparable to modern cities (sprawling shapelessly across the vast territory). It is a metaphor that exemplifies how, so often, the elements that make up the city resemble one another (like the yolk and the white) and yet, the way these ingredients intermingle is key to the final recipe—that which characterizes and explains them.
With this same perspective, we wanted to describe the city of Madrid in the five cartographies exhibited at CentroCentro for the exhibition Madrid Diversa: focusing not only on what makes up the city (elements that remain practically unchanged over time) but on how these pieces intermingle. We emphasize the ability to describe this mixture (thanks to the growing datafication of the world through large structured and unstructured datasets and their algorithmic representation), so often referred to as "mixture" but which we have chosen here to call diversity.
