5. Need to change the characteristics of the urban plan

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.