Madrid is constantly growing with new neighborhoods such as Los Ahijones, but female representation is not increasing. Of the 15 new personalities who will give their names to these streets, only two are women.
This is not surprising, as in 2024 the National Institute of Statistics studied the names of streets in the Community of Madridand found that less than 20% are dedicated to women. Even today, it is difficult to imagine a new street map of Madrid featuring female figures and commemorating their own stories.
This was the idea that artist and designer Lorena Madrazo had in 2017, when she launched her project for a Feminist Street Map of Madrid on the internet. She devised an application in which users could navigate a new map of Madrid, where the streets changed their names to those of key women in history.
“I was very interested in learning about women’s stories, and I also thought about how we are constantly walking around without even knowing the meaning of the names of the places we pass by,” the artist and creator explains to Madrid Secreto.
Increasing female role models
Glorieta de las Cigarreras on the feminist street map. | Editorial credit: Lorena Madrazo
The street map came about while she was studying for a master’s degree in digital products, with the aim of identifying a social need and meeting it with a new application. Lorena Madrazo realized that there was a lack of female role models in society and ,thanks to the Wiki Mujeresplatform ,she discovered the biographies of many unknown women.
So, she thought that bringing these stories to our daily journeys through the city could be a good idea: “I wantedto link the stories of these women to the streets and design an application that would allow people to read, interact, and add more data with augmented reality,” she says.
In her proposal, the new names were linked to the history of the places, as was the case when the Glorieta de Embajadores was replaced by the Glorieta de las Cigarreras. This was where the women who worked in the Madrid Tobacco Factory lived, creating their own community and even developing relationships with each other, as Mikel Herrán explained in a Madrid Secreto video.
Thinking big and leaving it small
Madrid’s feminist street map was only the first step in an even bigger project that Lorena Madrazo had in mind. The artist, convinced of the power of maps and names to tell stories, created the concept of “Ciudad Mutante” (Mutant City): a changing street map that could “be extended to different groups such as LGTBIQ+ or modified according to the time of year.”
The Madrid prototype is just a small sample of the potential this street map has, and the artist dreamed of exporting it to other cities around the world. For her, “it’s a way of imparting knowledge in an accessible way without imposing anything.” She also believes that information about local businessescould be included, collaborating with them and increasing community spirit.
The challenge of the Mutant City
Some of the women featured in the feminist street map. | Editorial credit: Lorena Madrazo
Nine years after the original idea, Lorena Madrazo continues to defend her feminist street map and believes that “now the political situation is more complicated and that is precisely why it is more necessary to make women’s stories known.”
She would love to see her map integrated into platforms we use every day, such as Google Maps, and believes that it is not a question of aesthetics, but of civic responsibility. She even wrote a fictional letter to the former director of Google proposing her idea and asking him to put his technology to work for the benefit of citizens.
“You have the power to offer knowledge and information to citizens in a positive, useful, and simple way thanks to the use of Google Maps. Imagine how many biographies we can connect, how many stories of women who did not have enough visibility at the time,” she wrote in it.
The map of Madrid continues to change with new neighborhoods, businesses, structures, and some farewells. In a way, it is the“mutant city” described by Lorena Madrazo, but it still faces the challenge of giving women more ofa voice and including them in its street map.