10. The crisis of an unsustainable property model and the need to change it

It should be openly acknowledged that the serious recession in which Spain currently finds itself also reflects the exhaustion of the property model that led to it, the collapse of which has left in its wake a number of episodes of corruption and companies in administration that further underline the need for change. The speculative nature of this model has led to a major building boom, with high consumption of land, energy and materials clashing with the interests of economic dematerialisation and ecological sustainability. Meanwhile, the resulting territorial, urban and building order has also proved to be unsustainable and barely habitable, with sprawl overlapping with the underuse of an oversized, low-quality built stock.

In view of this, we cannot expect the current model to find the path of sustainability and habitability unless it is reoriented in that direction by the sui generis institutional model and the bulk of the policies and instruments that have given shape and supported it. The very limited options available under the current legal framework for central government to coordinate and reorient urban- and spatial-planning policies in favour of sustainability and habitability show that the urban model cannot be changed without a solid national agreement behind it, supported by all government departments and all policies and instruments, as mentioned above. Also, on this issue, the cooperation of the regional governments is essential, since without their agreement and efforts any even slightly rigorous planning would be quite unthinkable. To coordinate this support it would be necessary to prepare a transition strategy and a minimum protocol to install three essential support points in order for the necessary conversion towards sustainability and habitability to be able to prosper: a responsible administrative core, an information and monitoring system, and a process of public participation and involvement interacting with the former two points. The preparation of this transition strategy, with its various plans and instruments, falls outside the scope of this report, which focuses on urban planning. But we should underline that the measures to which such a strategy should turn would include tax and budgetary policies, which should condition taxation and public funding in compliance with the minimum protocol by the authorities involved, thereby compensating for the central government's inability to fix criteria related to urban and spatial planning.