From Greater London to Greater Valencia: a case of British influence on regional planning and neighbourhood units in Spain (1939–1952)

Abstract

ABSTRACTStarting in 1945, Pedro Bidagor, the National Chief of Urban Planning in Spain, attempted to replicate the British regional urban model based on Abercrombie’s proposals of the County of London Plan and the Greater London Plan. The Greater Valencia Administrative Corporation, with its supramunicipal approach, was the principal representative of this urbanistic transposition. This article analyses the transmission of British planning ideas and practices in the years following the Spanish post-war period, and the important role that the architect Pedro Muguruza – key figure in early Francoism – played in it. The study also demonstrates the influence that the contemporary British urban models based on neighbourhood units had for the satellite town centres projected in Valencia (Burjasot and Manises, 1952).