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In any event, urban planning, as it is considered in most of the autonomous
regions, requires some in-depth changes. The first would be to
differentiate between short- and long-term goals. The need to include
something like strategic planning to define the major areas for building in
the city is there even before we consider the needs to make the territory
being planned more sustainable. It has even been given a name: city plan,
strategic urban plan, objectives plan or long-term urban planning.
Many sustainability targets (mostly global sustainability ones) are long-
or very-long-term ones, and many of them are intended to reverse trends.
This clashes head on with the current situation, in which urban
plans are usually drafted with time horizons of four or eight years.
However, it is also true that it often proves to be necessary to change
certain characteristics of the plan, as circumstances change, while
maintaining the final goals. That is why it would appear to be necessary
for urban plans to have a core consensus with proposals based
on horizons of 20-30 years and other determinations on a much shorter
timescale. Of course, the characteristics of the review processes for the
two parts ought to be different. This system would introduce flexibility
into general planning, because at present review processes (particularly in
major cities and metropolitan areas) are virtually impossible to undertake.
It would also allow sustainability targets to be introduced, which is not
easy to do in the short term. We should underline that these sustainability
targets should basically refer to what is called global sustainability
(such as climate change, for instance) and begin to differentiate clearly
between purely environmental targets with internal repercussions on the
actual community on the one hand, and broader sustainability ones with
wider-ranging and even planetary repercussions. Everything would be much clearer
to understand if references to global sustainability were linked to the
footprint of ecological deterioration caused by the territory being planned
and the need to reduce it. It would also mean more appropriate systems for
public participation, basically focusing on long-term targets, while the
more technical details of the short-term targets would correspond to the
political interests of each four-year legislature. It would also be
necessary for the plans themselves to include as a key part of their
content what is currently termed strategic environmental assessment
. The
environmental assessment necessary in Spain for the issue of an official
environmental-impact declaration has fallen short of the original
expectations. One of the reasons (among other important ones, as mentioned
above) is that true integration of assessment into projects and plans such
that it constitutes an integral part of them has never been brought about.
This integration into the core long-term objectives and more specific
actions of the moment is necessary in order to determine their implications
for the territory being planned.