Abstract
Urban planning, as well as the type of city in which it takes place and is promoted, has changed a lot in Spanish cities since the return to democratically elected municipal governments in 1979. This work seeks to characterise the transformation that urban planning has undergone over the last 40 years. It sets out to do this by studying the cases of two medium-sized Catalan cities, their underlying city models, and the ways in which planning has been defined and managed in Catalonia. All of this was undertaken through a bibliographic and documentary analysis of the approved planning documents, which was accompanied by a study of the population dynamics and building cycles. In Spain, urban planning has been one of the instruments used to catalyse expectations for economic growth based on land consumption through urbanisation. Within this context, planning has progressed from fulfilling an initial requirement to regulate activities and urban growth (1979–1991) to facilitating urban development through a clearly expansive and speculative form of neoliberal urbanism (1993–2007) and, finally, to assuming a form in which these previous tendencies coexist with certain new orientations.
Highlights
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We have outlined the main proposals and approaches of the urban Master Plans of two medium-sized Catalan cities—Lleida and Manresa—and analysed their development and the dynamics of their urbanisation and growth. These case studies were selected based on the following criteria: Firstly, both of the cities studied have a certain demographic size, perform the function of being local capitals, and play a significant role in the territorial articulation of their respective areas of inland Catalonia; secondly, in Catalonia, great efforts have been made to review urban planning procedures in this kind of city since the transfer of competencies relating to urban planning and its regulation from Spain’s central government to the autonomous regional government in 1978; and, thirdly, both municipalities—Lleida and Manresa—have had three different Master Plans approved since the first democratic municipal elections held in 1979
To study urban planning in Manresa and Lleida, we consulted the local urban planning archives of their respective provinces (Barcelona and Lleida), where we examined the different Master Plans and all relevant approved planning documentation since 1979
Summary
Despite the existence of certain differences in the urban planning policies carried out in different Autonomous Communities since the transfer of competences from the central government, there still exists a general Spanish framework [11,12]. The traditional regulatory role of urban planning was relegated to a secondary position, while pride of place was afforded to strategic planning and the development of large-scale urban projects This expressly implied renouncing the definition of a specific model for both the city and its territory [20,21]. The only reflexion that we would like to add here is the following paradox: The greatest urbanisation process, and the most speculative one in Spanish urban history, coincided with the moment of the greatest urbanistic and territorial regulation The legacy of this period was one of Master Plans with provisions for unconstrained growth, poorly integrated and over-scaled urban projects, and—above all—great urban voids with land that had been prepared for urban development and construction but was not consolidated. It is one that still persists today, in large areas of the interior of the Iberian Peninsula, where many landscapes reflect the bursting of the property bubble, whose consequences have lasted until today
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