It is May 2000; I get out of a charter flight from London to Malaga. I get into a car and start the long four-hour journey to my hometown of Cadiz. This is a journey I always try to avoid, the roads are congested and the landscape around the Malaga-Cadiz highway takes me past the once (long ago) fishing villages of Costa del Sol. Now a very different landscape to that I knew from decades ago. An eerie assortment of golf courses, high-rise hotel chains, perfectly white villas, bright green lawns and English-speaking people. In fact, I have not seen this landscape for years and what I see I can't recognize. Just three hours ago I was standing on a platform at Kings Cross Station waiting for a train to Gatwick, and now I drive through a landscape I can?t identify as home. I drive and see something that is very familiar but most certainly out of place, the roundabout.

What I first found interesting about the roundabout was its dual functionality. The first and original to create a safe space for motorists on intersecting roads. Encountering vehicles follow pre-established rules; looking out, waiting, accelerating, turning and going around until you find your exit, then turning again and you have gone from A to B relatively without danger. Now you can continue to drive until you reach the next roundabout, then you start again. That is a convention that every motorist should follow. The second function is more interesting to me - it is interesting because is has nothing to do with the original functionality and because it is a spontaneous and almost individualistic cultural manifestation. These round empty spaces could be defined as functional black holes in the urban landscape (that is apart from the function previously stated, a function that takes place in the periphery of the circumference but never inside), spaces where nobody is meant to go to - there are no crossings for pedestrians, no buildings, no shops nor houses. Yet each little village along the highway or private business has found a way to use them. This is, I believe, because villages celebrate and emphasize the particular and the different rather than the mundane and monotonous that characterizes most of them.