Abstract
Financial capitalism has driven profound changes in urban land use patterns in Majorca, at the Balearic Islands (Spain). This archipelago is a major tourist destination located in the Mediterranean basin, with 4,492 km2 of surface area, 1,113,114 inhabitants and 12,316,399 tourists (2011), of whom 29.9% came from Germany, 24% from the UK and 19% from the rest of Spain. Neoliberal state regulation has favored the elite’s financial interests in the real estate sector through transport megaproject investment and lifting regional planning restrictions which prevented urban growth. Urban sprawl is becoming increasingly significant for inland Majorca, where intensive tourist resorts had not previously been developed. Urban growth distribution patterns are studied, firstly of suburban development both for tourists and for residential purposes, and secondly of exurban sprawl distribution for isolated dwellings. Recent regional planning relaxation guided by the free market economy and roll-with-it politics aims to promote this urban sprawl as a neoliberal answer to the current crisis of capitalism. In this way, a new model of capital investment in urban spatio-temporal fix, such as countryside villas with swimming pools, is shifting the urban model of this island. The paper identifies the site-specific spatial, temporal and planning pathways through which the actions and decisions of residential tourists and developers buying property in Majorca have driven urban sprawl and vice versa.
Highlights
IntroductionThe concept of “residential tourism” has been used since the late 1970s to describe a development model based on the production of urban land for the construction of real estate property in tourist areas
Bivariate correlations analysis in IBM SPSS Statistics Software 19 package was used to compute the correlation between indicators of urban sprawl, demographic change, transformations of the built environment and residential tourism
The results indicate that swimming pools are features that are in general related with urban growth in Majorca (Table 1)
Summary
The concept of “residential tourism” has been used since the late 1970s to describe a development model based on the production of urban land for the construction of real estate property in tourist areas. This tourism-related residential development describes a complex system where different sorts of leisure mobility converge, whose nature may range from tourism, lifestyle migration to transnational citizenship and multi-residential strategies. The focus of this paper is the material transformation in tourist areas that is related to real estate development In this way, as some authors have shown, residential tourism becomes a key element of socio-economic tourist modernization, with urban and demographic growth being the most significant expressions of the process [2]
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