2. Content of property rights and urban planning

It is traditional in Spanish urban planning for plans not only to prefigure the future of the territory being planned but also to determine the content of land-ownership rights. This determination is effected by enacting the law, given the impossibility of this content being fixed on a plot-by-plot basis via any general legislation. Unfortunately, these two functions of planning have seriously interfered with each other, to the extent that urban planning is sometimes seen not so much as planning for the future as a system for distributing monetary land values in a supposedly rational way (although in many cases, this depends on the pressure brought to bear by the different interested groups involved). Local authorities thus find themselves under considerable pressure, because they are believed to be able to multiply the values of certain pieces of land while leaving others at the price of farm land. This capacity would seem to be mediated by the tutelage of the corresponding autonomous region, but usually such tutelage is regulated and unlikely to oppose most of the determinations included in the plan head on. Although it is true that there is a minimal equal distribution between small areas and that historically the transfer of urban use were an attempt to distribute burdens and benefits equally —an attempt that ultimately failed when the Constitutional Court repealed much of the Land Act 1992, and the autonomous regions failed to include that instrument in their own legislation. When local authorities set themselves up as dispensers of handouts in the form of increased land values, the difficulties resisting malpractice and corruption are easy enough to imagine. This is probably one of the main problems currently being faced in the management of the plan. It is essential for new systems to be invented to enable land value (determined in the last instance by the plan) to be disconnected from urban planning. This is no easy task, although the most recent Land Act has made significant headway, by eliminating the traditional classification of land, for example, and replacing it with the status of land. However, it will probably be necessary to make further progress along this road, coming up with solutions for the problem with varying degrees of complexity, such as granting minimal developability for any land, developability that will only come to fruition if the plan permits, but which can be bought or sold. Other alternatives include the obligation to return to the community any capital gains obtained (or at least a significant portion of them) from the assignation of land uses that involve an increase in the value of the land. To date the capital gains returned to the community have been merely token gestures compared with the actual benefits obtained by landowners, who only had to be such in order to obtain them. This was so because it was assumed that the rest of he capital gains would be invested in developing the land. However, what most landowners did was either sell the land to a developer or transfer the price of urban development to the sale of the end product. In any case it is essential for this problem to be tackled if we are to achieve more sustainable and fairer urban development, to deactivate the voraciousness of development and the reclassification of land for capital gains and so reduce the chance of falling into corrupt practices.