Constructionism, Postmodernism, and the Strategic Role of Evaluation

Evaluation, often perceived as a neutral, technical process, is in fact a politically charged and socially constructed practice that shapes the very realities it aims to assess. Rooted in the rationalist tradition of diagnosis, planning, and impact analysis, evaluation has long been deployed as a managerial tool aligned with positivist assumptions. However, Fernández-Ramírez repositions it within a postmodern and constructionist framework, emphasizing its reifying power: the capacity of evaluation criteria to define what counts as valuable, desirable, or even real within organizations. The evaluative act thus becomes inherently strategic, not only measuring performance but also reinforcing or challenging dominant interests. From this perspective, indicators are not neutral reflections of preexisting qualities—they are constructs that delimit organizational behavior, often solidifying hegemonic norms under the guise of objectivity. By proposing a shift from improvement and accountability toward strategic legitimation, Fernández-Ramírez advocates a critical rethinking of evaluation as a tool for democratic negotiation and institutional transformation. The evaluator's role is no longer that of a distant technician but of a facilitator mediating between competing stakeholder visions. In recognizing the inherently normative nature of evaluative criteria, this approach highlights the ethical responsibility of evaluators to make explicit the political implications of their work and to actively support collective aspirations for change. Ultimately, evaluation becomes a site of struggle over meaning, direction, and power—capable of shaping futures rather than merely describing pasts.

Fernández-Ramírez, B. (2009) Construccionismo, postmodernismo y teoría de la evaluación. La función estratégica de la evaluación, Athenea Digital, 15, pp. 119–134.

A Phenomenological Approach to Urban Experience

Urban space is presented as a field of meanings, where the city is not merely a built environment but a symbolic and experiential threshold. It is a place of passage and transformation—between inside and outside, self and other, the private and the public. The urban landscape mediates visibility, encounter, and interpretation: windows, thresholds, benches, plazas, and facades are not neutral objects but structures that shape perception, social behavior, and the articulation of identity. Architecture thus becomes a hermeneutic device, and the city a lived text. Every element of urban design holds ethical potential. Benches invite rest and encounter; arcades shelter movement and provoke detours; thresholds frame the act of arriving or departing. The phenomenological gaze focuses on how space is inhabited, not only used. Urban design influences not just circulation, but interpretation—how we understand others, ourselves, and the city as a shared world. This vision critiques technocratic urbanism and instead defends a poetic and existential approach, in which space is a mediator of presence and relational depth. The city is not a problem to be solved, but a question to be posed. Its structures invite reflection, offering the possibility of both intimacy and otherness.

Fernández-Ramírez, B. (2020). ‘Umbrales, ventanas, fachadas: la ciudad como experiencia y como símbolo’. Estudios de Filosofía, 61, 119–134.

Psychology in the Contemporary City

A critical exploration of the transformation of urban life—from industrial migration to globalized sprawl—reveals how city growth, economic delocalization, and suburbanization have reshaped human experience. The traditional urban dweller becomes a “territoriante,” a transient figure more aligned with consumption and spectacle than civic engagement. Social ties dissolve into anonymity, and cognitive overload becomes a coping strategy in hyperdense, overstimulated environments. Public space, once a site of democratic life and spontaneous interaction, is reduced to themed zones governed by surveillance and commercial logic. Gated communities, edge cities, and fortified suburbs exemplify a shift towards privatized, exclusionary landscapes, replicating global models and erasing local particularities. The ideal of the “garden city” mutates into sanitized enclaves promising security and elitism at the cost of diversity and public life. This vision demands a renewed urban psychology that abandons outdated paradigms and incorporates postmodern constructionism and ecological frameworks. The contemporary city is portrayed as a fragmented, multicentered, and paradoxically planned system, where identities are hyperconnected yet territorially uprooted. Utopian ideals give way to dystopian imaginaries drawn from cyberpunk culture and media, where spatial experience is increasingly shaped by speed, technology, and remote control. Geography itself is destabilized, replaced by virtual presence and interface-mediated existence.

Fernández-Ramírez, B. (2010) ‘El contexto psicológico de la ciudad contemporánea’, Psyecology, 1(2), pp. 147–154.

Urban life as civil order

Urban life is conceived as a mode of civil coexistence, not reducible to spatial extension, demographic density, or territorial limits. What defines the city is the presence of a vecindario—a community of neighbors—who, through free coordination, establish a shared social order grounded in mutual respect, tradition, and institutional subsidiarity. The municipality emerges as the legal form of this pact, tasked with serving, never governing, the lives of individuals. Urban order is thus natural before it is political: it arises from everyday interactions that weave a coherent civic fabric. The author reinterprets Simmel’s blasé attitude not as alienation, but as the discreet courtesy that allows urban liberty to flourish: a way of respecting others' autonomy by refraining from intrusive engagement. The city becomes the privileged setting for freedom lived through norms of urbanity—refined, cultivated behaviors that sustain diverse and overlapping social worlds. Against ideological distortions—both technocratic and activist—the urban condition is defended as a tradition of self-governed dignity. Urbanity, in its classical sense, is not a loss of warmth, but the apex of civilization: a space where individuals coexist without domination, protected by institutions that derive their legitimacy from the people’s will.

Ramírez Fernández, B. (2022). ‘El concepto político de la vida urbana’. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 12(1), 9–21.