Ciudades para un Futuro más Sostenible
Búsqueda | Buenas Prácticas | Documentos | Boletín CF+S | Novedades | Convocatorias | Sobre la Biblioteca | Buzón/Mailbox
 
Documentos > http://habitat.aq.upm.es/lbl/a-lbl.en_10.html   
 
White Paper on Sustainability of Spanish Urban Planning
José Fariña Tojo, José Manuel Naredo (directors)
<<< 3. The administrative ambit of the plan |4. Links between spatial and urban planning| 5. Need to change the characteristics of the urban plan >>>

4. Links between spatial and urban planning

According to the analyses carried out, another situation that needs addressing as a priority is the link between spatial and urban planning. With the importance of spatial planning being recognised in much of the legislation (particularly in the explanations of reasons for most of the regulations passed on the topic) it is odd to find so few spatial plans approved in the autonomous regions. Although the causes are varied, there is a common denominator: the extraordinary breadth of the ambit in many cases and the highly ambitious objectives being aimed for by approving the corresponding planning instrument. The Spanish Land Act 1956 also featured a national plan that never came to fruition. Many regional spatial-planning instruments are thought of as if they were national plans corresponding to the region in question. Meanwhile, urban planning has been gradually reduced to the figure of the general plan (either under that name or other equivalents in different autonomous regions). The general plan, in essence, is concerned with delimiting urban and developable land but not with managing the entire local geographical as a scarce resource, taking into account its vocations, values and agricultural or urban-industrial rights. Furthermore, the general plan is an extremely heavy instrument that is virtually impossible to amend, particularly in major cities. As a result, most Spanish cities are limiting themselves to maintaining their general plans, most of which are far from new, operating with ad hoc planning changes that are often so major that they substantially change the image considered in the plan without considering the possible repercussions on the rest of the city and its area of influence. This situation, in both spatial and urban planning, is holding back the rational planning of our territories, which are being organised and built up in accordance more with private than collective interests. This lack of a global vision of the territory and the low level of public involvement in a process that they feel no part of, has made it impossible to address anything other than the short term. In order for the link between spatial and urban planning to work in even a vaguely consistent way, the whole system would have to be simplified, with spatial planning that is far more operational with some short-term determinations and other long term ones (the former mostly economic, related to the terms of each government and annual budgets, and the latter with limitations of an environmental nature), involving the need to review only certain parts of the plan and leaving the rest untouched, i.e. urban planning with a much more flexible review system than at present. Currently the part of urban planning that determines the content of the land-ownership rights (simply for legal safety) significantly penalises the chances of it being reviewing it any kind of streamlined way. Also, in order to achieve it there must be a greater degree of public involvement in the procedures of change and an information system that will allow the status of the city or territories affected to be analysed in real time, forecasting future trends and scenarios. In most cases the drafting of a general plan may take at least five or six years, from the data-collection stage (what is know as urbanistic information) until the plan is approved. Under these conditions, the starting data on which the plan was based will often no longer coincide with the real data. Spatial planning should have instruments that act as a bridge with urban planning, adapting local planning to determinations specified on a broader scale (covering an area of several municipal districts, an island or a region, as the case may be), since many of today's spatial issues and incidents extend beyond municipal limits and so should be more widely contextualised. Therefore, the new planning should contain short- and long-term determinations as well as urban-planning-related ones. There also appears to be a need for urban planning to disconnect the issue of determining the content of land-property rights from the question of shaping the future image of the city, with a far more flexible review system than at present (also linked to a new spatial-planning system containing some of the basic determinations of that planning).