The last two decades have been marked by intense and accelerated economic, political, and cultural processes that have affected urban spaces. These changes have occurred in different parts of cities (traditional centers, edges, peripheries) and at different levels of the urban system (large and medium-sized cities and in their respective areas of influence). Possibly the clearest expression of the spatial effects on cities can be perceived in their morphological transformations, their territorial dimensions, or in their social problems. Until 2008, urban–territorial processes were a reflection of the logic and inconsistencies of an expansive economic context and of a structural context that favored the development of cities through concurrent processes and actors. As a result, the built land and amount of urbanized and built surfaces increased, together with processes of the expansion and modernization of cities. Since 2008, the expansive economic cycle has ended, and there have been diverse negative consequences. Notably, the construction sector has come to an abrupt halt. Access to credit has also been reduced, and unemployment has increased. The economic recession has caused sociodemographic and socioeconomic issues exemplified by housing vulnerability, with dispossession, evictions, a shortage of social housing, and energy poverty.

Every 20 years since 1920, Madrid has undergone an urban planning cycle in which a city plan was prepared, adopted by law, and implemented by a new institution. This preparation-adoption-institutionalization sequence, along with the institution's structures and procedures, have persisted - with some exceptions - despite frequent upheavals in society. The planning institution itself played a lead role in maintaining continuity, traumatic history notwithstanding. Why and how was this the case? Madrid's planners, who had mostly trained as architects, invented new images for the city and metro region: images of urban space that were social constructs, the products of planning processes. These images were tools that coordinated planning and urban policy. In a complex, fragmented institutional milieu in which scores of organized interests competed in overlapping policy arenas, images were a cohesive force around which plans, policies, and investments were shaped. Planners in Madrid also used their images to build new institutions. Images began as city or metropolitan designs or as a metaphor capturing a new vision. New political regimes injected their principles and beliefs into the governing institution via images and metaphors. These images went a long way in constituting the new institution, and in helping realize each regime's goals. This empirically-based life cycle theory of institutional evolution suggests that the constitutional image sustaining the institution undergoes a change or is replaced by a new image, leading to a new or reformed institution. A life cycle typology of institutional transformation is formulated with four variables: type of change, stimulus for change, type of constitutional image, and outcome of the transformation. By linking the life cycle hypothesis with cognitive theories of image formation, and then situating their synthesis within a frame of cognition as a means of structuring the institution, this book arrives at a new theory