Architecture, culture, and crisis: forms of peripheral living in spanish audiovisual media

Abstract

The article examines the representation of urban peripheries in contemporary Spanish television fiction through the study of the series XHOXB, La que se avecina, and Furia, understanding architecture and residential spaces as generators of social and narrative meaning. The objective is to explore how television shapes urban imaginaries and translates the tensions of modern living through the staging of residential typologies, modes of coexistence, and spatial structures. The methodology combines textual, visual, and spatial analysis of the three productions, considering the interplay between narrative, aesthetics, and social context. The results indicate that television architecture functions as a symbolic mediator between the urban and the social, conveying discourses on class, mobility, and exclusion. Common spaces, such as building entrances or gated communities, emerge as focal points reflecting changes in sociability and the fragmentation of collective space. The study concludes that television fiction does not merely reproduce urban and peripheral environments but interprets them critically, offering a symbolic reading of urban transformations and contributing to the construction of a collective memory of inhabited space and contemporary imaginaries of life on the periphery.