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Rather the opposite is the case, both in Spain and in the rest of Europe, where the challenge being faced is that of urban planning which can continue to contribute towards economic growth without ignoring the requirements for sustainable urban development, i.e. by viewing land not only as an economic resource but also as one of the most valuable natural assets that we have. And regulating it calls for a combination of a whole host of diverse factors: the environment, quality of life, energy efficiency, providing services, social cohesion, etc.
The Spanish economy's growing needs for water, energy and materials and the consequences of ecological deterioration that have been observed during the latest growth period have contradicted the oft-repeated formulations of ecological sustainability or economic dematerialisation. With the major slump in building, this pressure on natural resources and territory has decreased significantly, showing that the system has shifted driven exclusively by the economic situation. This has largely been due to the considerable weight in the economic model that activities with large requirements for materials and territory have had, such as the real estate sector and the associated building of homes and infrastructures. This weight reached its maximum values with the housing boom which the Spanish economy experienced over the last decade, together with major public works funded in part by the EU. Building therefore became the principal driving force of the Spanish economy, with an importance compared with other sectors that was far higher than the European average, despite Spain already having more homes and kilometres of motorway per inhabitant than most other EU countries.
Specifically, over the decade between 1997 and 2007, a number of economic and social factors converged in Spain to favour the extraordinary growth of the house-building sector, including an increase in the formation of new households, in many cases caused by immigration, the choice of Spain as the place for secondary or retirement homes by many EU citizens, and, most of all, conditions favouring indebtedness, with low interest rates, competing credit agencies, the securitisation of mortgages, etc. This context, which was already favourable for an increase in prices, was overfed until 2004 by a number of economic-policy decisions and certain deregulating legislative initiatives on land-related matters between 1996 and 2003, which distorted the real estate market and stimulated processes that were highly speculative.
All these factors led to the frenzied of construction of buildings and infrastructures all over Spain for as long as the lengthy property cycle lasted. As a symbol of this process, the new Spanish landscape was one that was peppered with cranes stretching to the horizon. At the same time, the urban-planning model began to opt for urban sprawl, which not only requires greater indirect rights but is also very energy inefficient and costly.
The collapse of the speculation bubble, together with the end of the financing of the expanding building cycle, stretched people's savings to the limit and ended by financial strangling, when the international liquidity that it fed on, which has been so unusually cheap, finally failed, leaving and oversized and underused built stock, in many cases of dubious urban quality.
One differentiating feature of the recent building boom compared with previous ones in Spain has been the greater tendency to buy homes as investments, together with the larger number of buyers from abroad. When the investment managers began to offer, in addition to other financial products, real estate products that could be bought on paper, the Spanish property market began to compete with the financial markets when it came to attracting the savings of potential investors. Thus, the stock-market crisis at the beginning of the century (2000-2003), together with successive reductions in interest rates, had a significant effect by generating large amounts of money ready to be invested in land and real estate.
Also, a great deal of housing was developed on the free market for direct investment by households, thanks to a highly developed mortgage system.
As a result, Spain has more than covered its housing deficit with respect to its population, but not the population's housing needs, if we consider that the steep increase in prices went hand in hand with a steady decrease in the amount of social housing. Spain also moved to the forefront of the countries in its region when it came to secondary and unoccupied housing.
One of the core objectives of current housing policy therefore focuses on strengthening social housing, not so much through new developments than by reusing the large stock of unoccupied and secondary housing. At the same time, setting up land reserves for residential use, at a legally determined percentage, for the specific purpose of building homes subject to public protection of some kind is also an efficient instrument for specific goals, such as fostering housing to be used rather than housing as a mere investment, favouring social housing over free-market housing and rented housing over owner-occupation.
For many years now, the European Union has been pushing for the model of a compact European city, warning of the serious disadvantages of sprawling or disorderly urban development. These include environmental impact, social segregation, economic inefficiency derived from the high energy, building and maintenance costs of huge infrastructures and providing public services. Key documents for understanding the importance of cities in the quest for balanced, sustainable spatial development are the European Spatial Strategy, European Sustainable Development Strategy, European Urban Environment Topic Strategy, or the European Union's Spatial Agenda. More recently, the Leipzig Charter on Sustainable European Cities, approved at the Informal Meeting of Urban Development and Spatial Cohesion Ministers held in Leipzig in 2007 marked a further step forward by considering two specific objectives: the need to include integrated approaches into urban policies, and to pay special attention to underprivileged neighbourhoods, opting once more for the development of integrated, truly multi-sector policies through horizontal and vertical coordination, creating high-quality public spaces, modernising infrastructure network, improving energy efficiency, proactive innovation and educational policies, fostering efficient, affordable urban transport, etc.
In Spain, during the period of the building boom, sprawling urban development prevailed over compact development, with many cubic metres being built on former green corridors and low-density residential or service areas. Alongside these new developments we often find a peri-urban space where parts of the city are located at distant points, attracted by major roads, in operations that are often far removed from what we understand by integrated spatial planning, because this phenomenon of urban sprawl separates urban parts and functions that are linked only by motorised means of transport, playing no role in the conservation and improvement of the city or in the city as a project for truly collective living.
Building is a highly intensive activity in terms of energy and materials, with major direct and indirect effects on territory and the environment. Also, diffuse spatial, urban and building planning models, with their associated lifestyle, are much more demanding in terms of resources and more profligate in terms of waste and ecological and environmental damage.
Ecological concerns must go beyond simple issues of pollution or the protection of species and spaces, to address the actual metabolism of the economy and spatial deterioration that is being caused by the evolution of urban systems. Quality of life is, in short, what is at stake here. With regard to urban systems, nor is it enough to call for ecological urban planning or bioclimatic building. One of Spain's major problems is how to manage a built stock, in many cases of low quality, that is underused and somewhat oversized. And this is where policies and plans for the regeneration, reuse and improvement of that stock are of fundamental relevance.
In Spain, the real estate business has mainly stemmed from exploiting the rise in the value of land when it is declared to be developable. By seeking capital gains from the reclassification and requalification of land, real estate developers have opted for new building much more than for conserving the built stock.
Thus, the rehabilitation and re-adaptation of the built stocke in land and buildings takes on considerable importance, and it also explains why this objective has been one of the leading priorities of the Ministry of Housing since it was created in 2004.
The commitment towards the regeneration and renewal of the existing city compared with developing a new city is a fundamental challenge for today's societies. It is important to put institutional frameworks in place and put new policies into practice to avoid falling once again into errors of the past. Not only is it necessary to prefer regeneration over new developments, but also architecture that is more in accordance with the local environment and climate over the predominant universal style, profitability through earnings over capital gains, y and energy saving over the wasteful use of resources. It would also be essential to ensure that regeneration, when it is undertaken, does not tend to imitate the forms and patterns of the newly built city, which is usually developed by segregating neighbourhoods or turning them into single crops for certain social classes.
Making this difficult choice has continually been put off in Spain because the change of model threatened to ruin the prosperity of the system at the time of its greatest expansion, taking down real estate business and the driving force of the economy with it. Even so, to address this context, the Land Act 2007 brought about the necessary reform, explaining in its grounds section that it was essential for a new model to be adopted that considered the environmental value of rural land; for land classification, far from being indiscriminate, to correspond to a responsible choice to answer economic and social needs; and, with regard to urban land, i.e. the existing city, to preserve its «environmental value, as a collective cultural creation that is permanently being re-created», by favouring its regeneration and fostering its use.
Thus, regarding the crucial topic of spatial and urban planning, we should insist on the need to have instruments that are capable of managing the land and built stock as scarce resources, preventing their indiscriminate urbanization, which involves the destruction of pre-existing natural and building assets.
Transformation of the land for urban development and building should not only be subordinated to the existence of those unequivocal needs or demand for it, but also to the maintenance of certain qualities of the buildings or the territory itself, and achieving the type of planning considered to be desirable, as required under the national Land Act. The limitation of the land itself, with its qualities, is a reality that cannot be questioned, so it is necessary to block the path of such unbridled development, which is as impossible as it is undesirable.
Launching this process calls for new thinking about a new basis for the entire planning process, not only for the district's geographical area as a whole, but also for the region and its insertion in broader planning or strategies (national and European). There can be no room for doubt that solving problems related to global sustainability is impossible at the urban, municipal level alone, and attempting to develop planning only at that scale makes no sense.
The demographic decline that Spain is undergoing (combined with the collapse of the migratory ratio as a result of the recent recession) offers an unprecedented opportunity to overcome the dogma of growth that urban development, building and the real estate business in Spain has been based on.
The changes brought about through land legislation should serve as the basis for getting over the myth that the growth of building and urban development is natural and desirable. But such a change of viewpoint will also require housing policy and the economic and financial instruments related to it to change course too. We might point here to the path taken by the Ministry of Housing with its approval of the Housing and Regeneration Plan for the 2009-2012 period. It is no mere coincidence that, for the first time in the history of these plans, the title features the specific term rehabilitation, while the plan includes sustainability objectives for Integrated Regeneration Areas and Urban Renovation Areas.
This whole change in spatial and urban model is what this report is intended to contribute towards.