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The historically agrarian and provincial city of Valencia has recently been transformed into a Spanish regional capital, a Mediterranean cultural and economic center, and a major tourism destination. Valencia’s engagement with globalization and European integration has unfolded amidst complex regional politics, marked by vigorous debates about cultural difference, political autonomy, and official bilingualism (Castilian Spanish and Valenciano/Catalan). Here we survey the city’s two millennia of historical development, explore recent urban changes through five emblematic urban landscapes, and briefly discuss major urban policy and planning challenges facing the city. Valencia is a place of contradiction and juxtaposition, where global mega-events and neighborhood festivals, avant-garde architecture and two-millennia old croplands exist side by side. If these complex dynamics are not unique, they are powerfully exemplified in this Mediterranean city navigating between global modernity and regional tradition.

In the urban sphere, discourse is fundamental to the social and political construction of urban reality. The urban landscape is, in part, a result of those discourses. It is, as Richard Schein suggests, a discourse materialized. The production of these discourses throughout urban history both represented and constructed urban reality at any given time. For much of history, the written word was central to such discursive representations, literary formulations and even biological metaphors that sought to interpret the city both for local inhabitants and outsiders. Today, the photographic image has usurped the former dominance of the word. This article uses archival research to trace historical representations of Valencia, Spain, a European Mediterranean city with a strong medieval tradition. Beginning with a focus on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century, when Valencia was economic ‘head’ of the Kingdom of Aragon, this paper will follow how the city developed in concert with evolving intellectual and political representations of it. In doing so, I highlight the important and enduring role of the organic metaphor as a device which framed intellectual and political discourse, and ultimately planning and governing strategies, into urbanism of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (as reflected in the writings of Patrick Geddes). Throughout Valencia’s history, urban discourse has availed itself of biological and medical metaphors, even metaphors drawn from the field of physics, in order to construct a generally agreed-upon image of the urban society at particular historical moment. Analysing the role of such metaphors in urban discourse is fundamental to any full understanding of development in the Mediterranean city, historical or contemporary.